CentreRight

A plan to save the taxpayer billions from the state's wasteful IT budget

We shall soon see who is more powerful in this country, the elected government or the civil service.

The Network for the Post-Bureaucratic Age today publishes its first detailed report on one way we can get better-for-less. This has been put together by some of the UK’s best thinkers on the subject, led by Liam Maxwell, IT specialist and Councillor at the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead. It presents examples of where their approach has succeeded and a clear plan – a playbook – for implementation. But will government actually be able to put this into action, or will it be blocked?

The report - ‘Better for Less: How to make Government IT deliver savings’ - investigates the quagmire of government IT.

The British government currently spends somewhere between £16 billion and £23 billion on IT every year. The astonishing lack of clarity over expenditure is symptomatic of appalling failures in IT strategy, procurement, and process. This cannot be allowed to continue, especially during a time of spending cuts in frontline services. The annual cost dwarfs some government departments. It is three times the amount we spend on the army, more than the Department for Transport. Worse, it has been designed badly and, unfortunately this time, the process has been built to last. The problems come from ineffective procurement – much of which is waste.

Each year about the same amount of money is spent on the procurement process (the jumping through hoops to secure contracts) as is used to run the Foreign Office. Savings just in the procurement process - without even counting the savings from better IT -  could finance the entire Sure Start programme, they could fund 50% more school building. And even when the form-filling is done only 30% of projects work. Indeed government productivity has actually declined since IT was introduced. At a time when dynamic change is required -  to reduce cost and deliver better services – one of the principle barriers to that change has become government IT.

Liam and his co-authors are dedicated to bringing government into the information age, and have looked in detail about what should be done to deliver government IT more effectively, and at a much lower cost to taxpayers. The paper spells out exactly how government can deliver a better service for less money – a very different proposition to proposing mere ‘cuts’, where less money means poorer service.

The full report is available at http://pbage.org, directly here and as an ibook here.

We would really appreciate any comments from anybody who reads the paper: one of the central tenets of the post-bureaucratic age is that knowledge and skills exist within informal networks, not just companies and departments. We recognise this and encourage anyone to comment, regardless of their political affiliations, on http://pbage.org.

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Note: Stephan Shakespeare chairs an informal network of people who are interested in the development of policy towards a ‘post-bureaucratic age’, and has written about what this means here and here.

Today's government spending database will save money... will produce innovation... will mean ‘more-for-less’

The publication of COINS database – the Combined Online Information System - marks a monumental step towards government transparency. The significance of this event can hardly be exaggerated: how government spends our money will now be laid open for all to see.

It is one of those moments that changes things for ever. When people can’t see where their money goes, they can make no comment, they can have no influence. Governments live and die by public approval; and once you can link spending decisions to identifiable civil servants, their careers will also live or die by our approval; so this kind of openness to scrutiny is utterly revolutionary. And it’s virtually irreversible: no politician would dare to draw the curtains again.

When it comes to spending, knowledge is power. The Conservatives were elected on a promise to give power away to the people. Today we see they really meant it. (Whether this database turns out to be as helpful in scope, detail or format as we hope is almost beside the point; imagine the struggle Downing Street must have faced to get Whitehall to release something this big so fast.)

I am an extreme radical when it comes to government transparency. I can see no excuse for withholding from us any data created from taxes. We have an owner’s right over what we pay for. Ok, there are issues of security, there are rights to privacy, and these will sometimes clash with our right to free data; we do need to accept some compromises.

How the grassroots can make a coalition work

On Thursday, the electorate had its big day out. They voted. Now they are back in their armchairs watching the drama unfold.

For that one day the big players were silent, but now they are back on the stage and performing their roles. But what about the rest of us? And what about party members? Do we just stay seated until the curtain comes down, or do we still have a part to play?

One of the things the campaign demonstrated was the importance of party members. At least part of the failure of the LibDems to win any additional representation, in spite of their 'surge', was their lack of campaigning infrastructure. Even with today's wrap-around media, you still need to get leaflets out, to make the people at home feel you've come to their door, and to communicate those targeted local messages. You still need small armies to knock on doors and drive voters to the polling booth. Local activists connect the candidates with the community, they keep them in touch with the world beyond Westminster. And while it is true that recently the big donors have fattened the party accounts, the largest proportion of the money year in year out comes through smaller contributions from the members. So as Clegg has just found out, performing well on TV is not enough: if you don't have a substantial party base to carry your campaign, you can't win seats.

Party members are not just free workers, they are free thinkers too. Most of them don't want to be MPs or councillors, they are not slaves to the culture of Westminster. They are people of vast and varied experience and talent. True, most of them are old, and are often dismissed for being old-fashioned, but that has its advantages too: a recent scientific research study - "Reasoning about social conflicts improves into old age" - concluded: "It might be advisable to assign older individuals to key social roles involving legal decisions, counseling, and intergroup negotiations". Indeed, the world won't function well without their contribution.

If there is to be a coalition government then it will need more than anything else the support of Conservative Party members. Their support will matter even more than that of Nick Clegg, because one day the Mr Clegg will go his own way, but the party will still need its members. Tim Montgomerie wrote on this site yesterday, "Cameron should mind his internal as well as his external coalition".

The internal coalition has a vital role to play to get the right kind of compromises if the external coalition is to achieve anything worthwhile. There are mushy compromises and there are hard, productive compromises. The soft kind involves giving a little ground on all fronts; instead of providing a corrective dose of true Conservatism, we'll become mere onlookers to a slight temporary slowing of the statist ratchet. But in a hard compromise, each side gets something it really believes in: it prioritises what it wants to see fully achieved, and gives up entirely on some lesser goals. That way there can be real progress.

The way to get the productive compromise, a properly working coalition, is for each side to stay closely linked to, and guided by, its members. It must not cut them off, but embrace them. Most party members are not looking for jobs in the future and therefore can act as the conscience of their party; they sharpen the thinking of the political establishment because they are an authentic alternative voice. Members are often obstructive and demanding; they are not always sophisticated in their arguments; their intelligence is perhaps not so fluid; they sometimes fail to see the subtleties of government: that is why they are so important. They are in the trenches of the true battle of ideas. They are closer to the real life of the nation. They apply simpler rules of thumb for their judgments, but based on greater experience. Fans of crowd-sourcing - which certainly includes the Conservative Party leadership - will value them.

Cameron can turn this into a conclusive victory

A coalition government is likely to take this country in either of two directions, one with short-term, the other with long-term implications for our political system.

In one scenario this could simply be a temporary liaison of convenience. It allows David Cameron to get on with immediate urgent tasks. It might possibly make it easier for him to do the most important things more radically, as the responsibility will be more widely shared. There are huge issues looming within the EU, heavy pressures on the Euro that could create a crisis in which national unity will be essential, and some sort of partnership between Euro-enthusiasts  and Euro-sceptics could turn out to be invaluable.

A liaison-of-convenience will split up, perhaps in acrimony, because at some point it will be in the political interests of the minor partner to disassociate itself from some difficult decision. If up to then Cameron has handled things well, this is more likely than not to lead to a an election which would see the Conservatives returned with a sufficient majority.

Alternatively, for greater stability, Cameron may conclude that his partners be offered the prize they really desire, a change in the voting system, and we may end up with a form of proportional representation that makes coalitions a more-or-less permanent feature of British politics.

For myself, I don’t much like that, but I regard it as almost inevitable that in the medium-term future we will end up with some firm of proportional representation; it’s hard to see how our present system can satisfy the public’s desire to express itself in more varied ways than possible at the moment. Our old arrangements, which worked well when sluggish communications kept a distance between government and the public, has in the modern age become much less effective; it does not deliver decisive government but a permanent poor compromise in what has become the permanent campaign.

David Cameron is the kind of leader likely to thrive in a coalition. It could bring out the best of him: his strength is being pragmatic and persuasive. And don’t forget, the public has a rosy view of coalitions, it rather likes the idea opponents working together for the national good. Whether it turns out to be for short-term convenience or lasting reform, Cameron might yet be able to turn this messy moment into a conclusive victory.

Attacks on YouGov are just plain silly

Another election, another round of irrationality about polling. On this site there have been any amount of attacks on YouGov, including a suggestion from one commenter that Conservative activists would soon be suing us. The last time we saw this was from Ken Livingstone’s team, who said they would make a formal complaint against us to the Market Research Society. Why? Because we showed Boris Johnson comfortably winning the London Mayorality, while Mori had Livingstone ahead. Pundits said, “This time YouGov will be proved wrong. This is the Big Test.” Our final pre-election poll showed Boris 6% ahead. The others had a tie, or a Livingstone lead. Boris won by 6%. Surprise surprise, there was no complaint to the MRS.

Now it’s some Conservatives who are complaining, because YouGov shows a lower Conservative lead than the other pollsters. The critics attribute this to some tweaks we have made to our sampling and weighting (see here). But surely anyone should understand this: you have to continuously tweak these things in order to stay accurate. It’s because we adapt the methodology that we have remained so accurate over our ten years of polling. It’s because the industry failed to adjust when things were changing that they go things so wrong in the past. For example, most pollsters use some form of past vote recall in order to weight their data. Past vote recall has some bias in it, and that bias changes from a few months after the last election to a few years after. Does anyone suggest there should be no adaptation? YouGov has a panel methodology, which means that we can compare what the same people say and do over many years. This helps us to be better at adapting our methodology (see here for our full record, compared to other pollsters and actual results.) Time will tell if we’re right this time.

But consider the graphs below. They show our 2005 general election tracker, with comparisons to those of Mori, ICM, NOP and Populus, and the actual result. What do you notice? True, NOP pipped us with their final poll. But look at the movement! In their final polls, all of them trend sharply toward YouGov’s numbers!

Maybe the same will happen this time, maybe it won’t. Maybe we’ll turn out to be closest, maybe we’ll be furthest. Impossible to say. But people should base their pronouncements on evidence, not on fantasy. Can anyone really believe – as some have actually claimed on this site – that either I (a Conservative supporter) or my colleague Peter Kellner (a Labour supporter) would deliberately distort our results in order to please one side or another? And thereby knowingly damage a company that has built up its business in 12 countries on the basis of its record for accuracy? Now that’s plain silly.

Conservatives move towards a Freedom of Data Act

Stephan Shakespeare is Chairman of the Network for the Post-Bureaucratic Age.

Today at a gathering of the Network for the Post-Bureaucratic Age the Conservatives are launching their 'Tech Manifesto'. It contains a bold new commitment: a 'Right to Government Data'.

This is truly game-changing, responding to the huge opportunities offered by technology and mashable data. It's more than an opportunity, it's an imperative, as technology will be driving the development of business, democracy and culture. A government that fails to respond to the changes happening through the online/mobile-apped behaviour of its population will be failing its economy and its society. Only radical openness will make the most of this golden moment.

I won't rehearse the arguments again because I've already gone over them on here, here and (with Janan Ganesh) here. So let me briefly focus on where we (enthusiasts of the Post-Bureaucratic Age) need to press for more.

Firstly, it's not quite a "Freedom of Data Act" (as we called for at the Feb22 conference launching the Network for the Post-Bureaucratic Age) but "Right to Government Data". What's in a name? Maybe not much, and just represents caution. I’m assured they want to get on with this as quickly as possible, and not have to wait for legislation, which will inevitably take a while. But we must eventually have the principle enshrined in legislation, not just tweaks to regulation and top-down directives. Would we have got the expenses data if there hadn’t been an Act?

And in the announcement made today, I’m worried about this detail: the Conservatives say people will have the right to request and receive government data sets. But the onus should be placed on government to make these available automatically. One of the weaknesses of the Freedom of Information Act is that people have to request, and in that process hangs the tale: it allows for obfuscation and obstruction. The right should be actively, automatically pursued by government, we should not be supplicants for data that we paid for, that we supplied, that is about and for us. The principle to which I'd like to see a commitment is: "The data belongs to the citizens, any withholding not democratically sanctioned by citizens is theft".

That principle would also address my second niggle: the document from the Conservatives talks of setting free "a wide range of government data sets" but not of all. How far does the 'right' extend? The question demands careful consideration around contradictions between the demands of openness and personal privacy, openness and security, and it will take a while to work through that, so I accept a cautious approach today. But what is the principle behind it? Is it accepted that citizens own all the data and the decisions are democratic rather than administrative? In other words, who will decide what must be released, will it be for the public to decide the limits, or will it be left for government administrators to engineer them?

This new policy from the Conservatives is an exciting, important new instalment of the post-bureaucratic age which clearly provides the 'hard edge' people have been looking for, something that has direct and profound economic value, as well as social and democratic value. What we now need to see is all the parties trying to trump each other with ever bolder commitments to ever-extending openness, until we get what we need: a true Freedom of Data Act.

This election is about the economy

This election is about one thing: the economy.  Forget about fine-tuning the message, or looking for hunks of red meat; forget about the grid of daily policy announcements; forget about whacky alternative agendas like it’s all about local stuff or the nature of democracy. Politicians and journalists have to find something to say each day, but there’s just one solid issue that dominates this election, and it’s the same old one as usual: how secure do people feel about the future? How competent do the leaders seem for dealing with the hazards ahead?

As a pollster, I’m often asked who will win, as if maybe I have access to some secret numbers. There are no known numbers that predict the future, unfortunately; all we can see is that as some numbers move, others move in harmony, and we guess those are related. As confidence in the economy increased,  Labour’s perceived competence went up too, and the Conservative lead shrank. It seems reasonable to suppose one thing drove the other.

All the fuss about Brown’s bullying and Ashcroft’s millions have made no difference to the opinion polls.  This isn’t, I think - as Danny Finkelstein suggests - because people now have a different relationship to the political establishment: it has always been the case that the things which obsess politicos are barely perceived by the voters, and valued even less. Maybe people today are more cynical than before, but they’ve always been wise to the irrelevance of professional message-tweaking. It may seem an affront to those who spend every hour worrying about these things, but the political class has very little control over its world.

People feel the economy – the environment in which they daily struggle to stay ahead - got a little better but is still highly fragile. It makes them nervous; it makes them unsure whether they really do want change or not. Elections turn around stable heuristics, not complex analysis. Labour seems to have decided that the appropriate message is, “we are competent, the others are inexperienced and unreliable”. The Conservatives have plumped for, “If you do want change, we are safe, and you don’t have to hold your noses when you vote for us.” Seems sensible on both sides. There’s probably not a lot else they can do.

Well, there is one thing. While neither voters nor politicians seem too interested in having an enlightened policy debate, nevertheless the fact is that the winner will still have to have a plan for what they do after May 6th. I’m pleased by the growing evidence of behind-the-scenes deep thinking at CCHQ on the challenges ahead (readers of CH will know of my enthusiasm for the PBA stuff, for example), but don’t expect that to play much of a role in the campaign.

It is because we constantly update that we remain reliably accurate

There have been a number of misguided comments recently about supposed ‘strange new weightings’ by YouGov: Anthony Wells of UKPollingReport and YouGov has just posted this detailed account for those of you who want to dig deep into the methodology.

I do wonder at some of the comments that have been made. Why would we do anything except to improve the robustness of the methodology? It’s worth pointing out: we are accurate precisely because, as a panel-based pollster, we are able to see exactly what’s happening to our samples and to make adjustments to our methods accordingly. It is because we constantly update that we remain reliably accurate. Remember, pollsters went horribly wrong back in 1992 because they refused to improve their methods in the face of change.

Stephan Shakespeare, CEO of YouGov.

The fantasy of inner-circle-wisdom is exploded by the Greek bankruptcy

In the CityAM editorial today ("The EU has been hiding its debt for years"), the ever-brilliant Allister Heath points out that the EU has long turned a blind eye to the accounting tricks of its members so that the criteria of the Euro-zone could be ‘met’: “It was once well-known that Greece, Italy and other countries had used dodgy tricks to embellish their public finances prior to the launch of Economic and Monetary Union to meet the entry requirements”. His key point is about institutional amnesia: ”Yet now everybody is pretending to be surprised or even shocked”. I say ‘blind eye’ and ‘accounting tricks’ but what this really amounted to was condoning fraud for a higher good; and ‘amnesia’ is a nice way of saying ‘lying’. That Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan helped (respectively) Greece and Italy push debt off their balance sheets led to a row with, says Heath, “the European establishment cracking down on anybody who dared talk about this”.

Of course this all supports the transparency agenda, the call for see-through government. People inside a system usually end up believing it works best when the smarter and wiser insiders are left alone to take care of things, undisturbed by the prying eyes of outsiders who are considered unequipped to judge. This fantasy of ‘inner circle wisdom’ explodes when a part of the Euro-zone goes bankrupt. Openness would have prevented it. It would have forced populations to confront their problems while they were still fixable. If you can’t know, you can’t act responsibly. 

Secrecy creates stupidity. The deliberate obscurantism of the EU means problems don’t get fixed.  The system then multiplies small practical problems into systemic collapse. Because we cannot see, we cannot engage. Because we cannot engage, we cannot change things. Because we cannot change things, we are left with only two options: learn to love it dumbly, or leave it. By its culture of distance, the commission creates an impossible condition even for those who might otherwise support some ideal of union.

See-through government is the foundation of prosperity, freedom and justice. We should be radical and passionate about it. It’s time for a Freedom of Data Act, in the UK and the EU.

You don’t need a mandate to do the right thing

Many commentators have been calling for David Cameron to be more explicit in announcing what he intends to do if he becomes Prime Minister. Tim Montgomerie, for example, has argued that he will not be able to do the difficult things he has to do, in a time of likely unpopularity and even crisis, unless he has told the British people in advance the broad range of measures he thinks are necessary.

It’s wrong to think too mechanistically about manifesto commitments. Voters don’t swing behind a candidate mainly because of the policies enumerated in the election literature. They are not approving a five-year-plan. They are looking to elect a leader and a team that can be trusted to make good decisions on their behalf.

Obviously if the Conservatives have firm plans and particular policies they intend to enact, then it is a simple matter of honesty to share them before an election. They will have many, which will be described in the manifesto. But their future handling of the economy, especially at a complex and extreme moment, is different. They have already indicated deep concern about the deficit and warned that difficult decisions may need to be made, both on spending and taxes: nobody can expect we’ll get to the sunny uplands in a few easy hops. Osborne cannot predict whether the economy is now heading safely up, staying flat, or on a double-dip course. We are in unknown territory and nobody is quite sure what to do and how. We like our politicians to say they know what they’re up to, but they hardly ever really do. Getting them to make statements now on how much and where spending will be reduced, and where taxes will be, cannot help them make good decisions later.

What we really need to know is: how will they make decisions? What kind of people are they? Are they fully on our side? Are they competent? Do they have the strength of character to make unpopular but necessary decisions? Are they honest? Can they deliberate? Do they know the difference between trying to control everything, and taking responsibility for what matters most? Can they be firm in adversity? Do they surround themselves with smart and independently-minded people? In a nutshell: when the unexpected happens, can we trust them to do the right thing?

Here's the beef

It was Walter Mondale, when he was fighting Ronald Reagan for the Presidency, who first asked his opponent: “Where’s the beef?” Fraser Nelson makes the same demand of David Cameron in this morning’s News of the World, declaring the first campaign speech of the year as having “as much beef as a vegan sandwich”. Hmm. I can hardly be outdone in my admiration for Fraser as a brilliant analyst, but this time I think he misses the point.

It was not an occasion for spelling out how Cameron will deal with the UK’s £182b deficit. The Conservatives have long ago indicated how seriously they take that frightening heap of debt, and have shown themselves to be the more realistic about what it will take to reduce it. But to start the year saying he will cut the NHS? Fraser says “Britain wants some beef” but it would choke on such a big slice.

The Conservatives cannot talk about spending cuts in the radical terms favoured by Fraser before we have a completely different political culture, and it would be too much to expect them to change that within the period of an election campaign. They may do it in the five years that follow, if they win. And it’s not just a matter of being open and honest with the electorate, as they are morally bound to be. The solution to £182b of debt is not announcing huge cuts, nor signaling the raising taxes. The deficit cannot possibly be cleared fairly and effectively without new ideas for how we reboot innovation in the public sector.

And this is where Fraser misses the genuine offer of wholesome nourishment that sits in the heart of David Cameron’s speech: the Conservatives do seem to be committed to changing the process of government and of how we develop our public services. Commentators universally respond to talk of ‘process change’ with a roll of the eyes, as if this is nothing but hot air, imported from California. But that response is just lazy. Look at what Cameron actually said yesterday in Witney (I quote it in full, because it’s important):

“We will create incentives and use the best technology to encourage and enable people to come together, solve their problems together, make this society stronger together. As we do this we will redistribute power from the political elite to the man and woman in the street. Within months of a Conservative victory there would start the most radical decentralisation of power this country has seen for generations. Government will enter a new era of transparency. And a strong, unbroken line of democratic accountability will be restored between the people and those that make the decisions that affect their lives. It is a future barely recognisable from the present, but this party is determined to take us there.”

These should not be dismissed as empty words. The point is: why did he say them? There cannot be a single floating voter who will be won over by talk of ‘redistribution of power’ – if anything, it will put them off, diluting the message and confusing the image. So why do Cameron and Osborne continuously return to this theme, for which there is zero electoral advantage? Why do they refuse to drop references to shifting control, which doesn’t bring them an inch closer to Downing Street? The only possible explanation is that they believe in it. That this is their big idea for change. That this is the way they intend to improve how the county is run.

Look at the small but indicative risks they have already taken: against all sound campaigning advice, they accepted live televised debates with Brown and Clegg. Tim Montgomerie criticized them for it on this site, and every conventional tactician would have said the same: the front-runner is crazy to grant such an opportunity to his opponents. But if Cameron is sincere about a new transparency and openness in British politics, then this was the right thing to do.

Beware of Rogue Polls

There’s been a flurry of excitement about an Ipsos Mori poll published on Sunday: a single voting-intention figure from a sample of 449 has led to absurd speculation about a hung parliament. Fortunately this morning some people seem to be regaining their sense of proportion. The BBC’s Nick Robinson has wisely urged people not to get too excited, reminding them that polls are most fun when most surprising – and unfortunately, surprising usually means ‘rogue’. Remember Twyman’s law: “Any piece of data or evidence that looks interesting or unusual is probably wrong”.

That this particular poll should produce some outlandish figures is even less of a surprise. When pollsters talk about a margin of error of plus or minus 3% it is based on a sample of 1000 people. However, the voting intention figures in this poll weren't based on 1000 people. Firstly only 799 people gave a voting intention. On top of that MORI excluded all of those who were not 10/10 certain they would vote, leaving only 449 people - the margin of error on that is plus or minus 4.6%.

A second issue is that of weighting. Almost every political pollster in the UK these days politically weights their sample to make sure it is properly representative of Britain, not just in simple demographics like age and gender, but also in terms of people's political views. At YouGov we use party identification for this, and most other companies use how people voted at the last election. MORI do not use any political weighting at all. They've got their own reasons for this, and perhaps they’re right and we’re wrong, but the effect is that even the political make up of their samples can change from month to month, further adding to the volatility.

I’m making no negative comment here about the methodology of Ipsos Mori or any other competitor-pollster, just pointing out that which none of us would deny: ‘surprises’ such as those delivered on Sunday are an inevitable effect of the numbers quoted above.

No more milkman

Blair and Brown always used to talk of “delivering”: government laid their presents at the doors of the little houses. The Cameroons understand that this isn’t the right way to think about the world anymore. People now go to the supermarket and get stuff for themselves.

PBA (the post-bureaucratic age model) is a truly a ‘big idea’, worthy of being the controlling idea for a new government. Trouble is, to put it gently, it lacks a certain populist edge. It won’t win a single vote. It can even lose you votes, when you tell people that the milkman is no longer coming down their street. Maybe that’s no big deal, but what does matter is: how can you make it part of the mandate? This is potentially a big problem: to win a campaign, you need to show you have that fire in the belly to make things better for people, that you are a leader, that you are on the side of the people and that you will change things for them. The milkman returns. Confusion.

A possible solution is to make PBA clearly a business policy. This isn’t fair to the true breadth of the idea, because it applies just as much to Michael Gove’s education policy. But it’s as a business policy that PBA is best understood, and this has the strong advantage of separating it from the more traditional themes of a campaign, without any dishonesty. Nobody expects government to turn itself into a Google-style piece of infrastructure overnight. But relations with business should certainly change the moment Cameron enters Number 10.

Below is a piece I wrote on the subject for the booklet of the “ConservativeIntelligence” conference.

Cameron mustn't let MPs off the hook

At the end of last year, when Labour enjoyed a mini-recovery in the polls, I remained convinced that it was all over for Brown. Back in October I wrote:

“Cameron can relax. The opinion polls now showing Gordon Brown with a fighting chance of a come-back are as frothy as the ones which showed David Cameron sailing off into the sunset with a twenty-five percent lead. Overreaction in both directions. What matters is that the Conservatives remain safely over the 40 percent threshold, I suspect all the way to a general election, and Labour will continue to struggle for anything beyond 35.”

Well, maybe 'relax' wasn't the right word and since I wrote that YouGov has had Labour and the Conservatives breach those limits by a little, briefly. But I think my analysis has been borne out, in spite of the massive ruptions caused by the expenses scandal: “Throwing out a government that has failed them is what voters do best… Unless they make some dreadful blunder, the Conservatives will be the next government.”

Could Cameron still commit such a dreadful blunder, and throw it all away? It's a vital question right now. Many in his parliamentary party are urging him to change tack in his response to the expenses crisis; they say it is time he showed them more support; they say he is being too hard on them, throwing them to the wolves.

It’s an understandable, utterly human reaction. If I was in their position, I would feel exactly the same. It must be vile to be lumped together as if all politicians are crooks or buffoons. They don't deserve that.

Easy changes to save many lives in the NHS to be implemented “within a year”. Why not a week?

We’re supposed to think of the ‘caring professions’ – doctors, nurses, and teachers, for example - as somehow different from the rest of us. I used to be a teacher in a London comprehensive, and I was always sceptical about the superior humanity of my colleagues. They seemed no worse than people I knew from other walks of life, but also no better.

I recalled this when I heard an item on the Today programme, about how easy it would be to reduce deaths from botched operations. According to The Times,

“Nearly 130,000 surgical safety incidents were reported to the NHS National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA) in 2007, of which more than 1,000 resulted in “severe harm” and 271 resulted in a patient’s death. But even simple precautions such as checking the identity of the patient, taking a roll-call of the surgical team and ensuring appropriate equipment and supplies are available before surgery, could significantly reduce these risks, an international study [by the World Health Organisation] found.”

So far, so good. By following a simple two-minute procedure, just going through a basic checklist, “deaths from botched operations may be cut in half”. The study of over 7,000 operations, with half using the checklist and half not, showed that the checklist reduced deaths from 15 per one thousand operations to 8. In 2007, there were over 1,000 safety incidents in the NHS (that's counting only the ones actually reported by the profession itself) that resulted in "severe harm", and 271 that resulted in death. The checklist would therefore save more than one hundred lives a year, and five hundred cases of "severe harm", for very little effort.

Cameron should relax; he's still on course for victory

Cameron can relax. The opinion polls now showing Gordon Brown with a fighting chance of a come-back are as frothy as the ones which showed David Cameron sailing off into the sunset with a twenty-five percent lead. Overreaction in both directions. What matters is that the Conservatives remain safely over the 40 percent threshold, I suspect all the way to a general election, and Labour will continue to struggle for anything beyond 35.

It’s not that the opinion polls are wrong – obviously I wouldn’t think that as (declaring an interest) my company YouGov supplies so many of them. What we record is accurate, but what we’re recording is people’s answers to our questions, not predictions of the future. By convention, pollsters ask an essentially false question: “Who would you vote for if a general election were held tomorrow”. There isn’t going to be an election tomorrow, so the question almost invites some kind of temporary modification of views based on recent circumstances. The pollster gives people a chance to punish or praise the Prime Minister for whatever’s just happened. We elicit overreaction to current events.

When people get frightened – and the past few weeks have been frightening for everyone – there’s obviously going to be a sense of relief when it looks as if disaster has been averted. And there will be some feeling of respect for the man who took the lead. To be fair, anything less would be churlish: Brown was at his best in this crucial period. True, he himself had contributed substantially to the problem in the first place; true, his fix may yet cost us more than anyone bargained for. But we shouldn’t be surprised if swing voters, those least entrenched in their politics, are likely to give him a little extra benefit of doubt.

Labour's weapons test in Crewe

Apart from who will win, the really interesting thing about the Crewe and Nantwich by-election is the virulently anti-toff character of Labour’s campaign. One has to wonder whether Labour’s election machine has simply gone mad – or whether there is nevertheless some method here.

It is obviously a measure of desperation to use such an attack, but it is based on some elementary rules of persuasion. As it happens the current issue of New Scientist lists eight research-backed persuasive techniques and the current Labour strategy fits four of them:

1. There’s ‘framing’, turning the voting issue into something you feel comfortable with (class, instead of the government’s record).
2. There’s simplicity: giving lots of reasons for making a particular decision works less well than giving just one or two.
3. There’s a variation of mimicry, saying ‘we’re more like you, the other guys are different’.
4. And there’s anger, rousing negative feelings such as envy. The only problem is that people aren’t so well persuaded once they see that manipulative techniques are being used, and in this case they’re pretty crass.

My guess is that Labour are quite deliberately experimenting with the class issue for future use. This is a weapons-test: they think maybe they have a nuclear device with Tory Toffs. The real target, of course, is David Cameron. The Bullingdon photo in the silo for deployment in the general election, and they want to use Crewe to see if it works.

YouGov’s Mayoral Polling

(For the record, as well as being a contributor to CentreRight, I am also co-founder of YouGov)

As you can see from Harry’s post, YouGov does have significantly different numbers from the other pollsters on the mayoral race. Obviously we think we’re right, as we were last time, but there is one considerable uncertainty: turnout. Usually the sample that pollsters talk to is reasonably similar to the active voting population, but in elections such as this one, with historically low levels of participation, deciding which (if any) ‘likely-voter’ filters to apply is tricky. With any polling methodology there tends to be strong over-claiming by respondents – not because they are necessarily fibbing about their certainty to vote, they may really believe it, but can’t be bothered on the day.

With high differential levels of support at different likelihoods of voting, this can become highly consequential. The outer boroughs tend to be more pro-Boris than pro-Ken, but tend to feel less identified as Londoners and so have not in past mayoral elections voted in the number that might be expected. Boris may change that. Meanwhile people in inner-London, who tend to be more pro-Ken, may be fired-up by fear of a Tory winning London for the first time in a generation. Turnout will be the deciding factor in this race, but our poll today suggests that Ken has a mountain to climb in the three days that remain.

Please note: contrary to the implication in the graphic accompanying Harry's post, today's is NOT our final poll: one more to come!

Fortunately for London, Boris is starting to realise his potential

Saw Boris last night in the Evening Standard debate, alongside Ken Livingstone and Brian Paddick. Boris was great, managing to be witty and charming, but at the same time serious and convincingly mayoral. For the first time, I really thought it possible that – with the right team in place around him - he could be a transforming leader of London.

He seemed close to finding a real voice as both truly himself and a serious politician, without any worrying tension between the two. It wasn’t just the disciplining effect of Lynton Crosby, though that has surely helped; it was in Boris himself. It may well be that we are about to witness Boris finally realising his true potential. He is a humane and decent man with genuine conservative instincts and a true intellectual flame inside him, just right for this great city.

Boris should offer Londoners a tax cut (or at least promise a referendum on one)

Boris is in a fantastic position. He is seriously on for Mayor. He’s upped his game while Ken is self-destructing. There seems to be a new discipline that is essential for any genuine candidate. So long as Boris realises he’s only just begun, he could go all the way.

There’s been a huge shift in the mood among Londoners. The people I know who used to have a soft spot for Ken have nearly all hardened against him. There used to be a grudging acceptance that Ken was OK. Not any more. Only tribal supporters now give him credit. His disregard for the niceties of democracy have become unbearable.

Boris now needs to push that mood over the edge. The affable exterior of the celeb anti-politician will work best if we also feel some steeliness inside. Let us see a little toughness too, exercised on behalf of those millions of Londoners who don’t have cool lives. We’ve seen he is genuinely interested in law and order. He needs to get more controversial on the quality of policing, attacking the cosy ineffectiveness we see almost everywhere.

We shouldn't be surprised that MPs look after themselves

The recent kerfuffle about MPs’ expenses, incomes, and the funding of politics reminded me of a conversation I had some months ago with a leading Conservative figure about tax. I said that I thought tax could be a good issue for the Conservatives, if done right (‘done right’ meaning designed to benefit the ‘strugglers’ and the whole economy, and communicated well) because in the end people are driven by their self-interest, and they are rather good at discerning that self-interest.

He thought this rather crass. He insisted that people took a broader view. I suggested that MPs appeared to be very good at discerning their own self-interest and acting accordingly, so why shouldn’t the rest of us be the same? MPs are forever deciding to act in ways that suit their careers; they trim their own opinions about what’s best for the country to suit the furtherance of their position within the party and for the prospects of that party; whether in the content or the process of politics, they constantly adjust their principles to ease the desired outcome. I don’t blame them one bit, they are no different from journalists, business people, teachers, engineers and bus drivers. We are all just as our genes designed us. We can take a broad view where we are not personally affected, but where we are closely touched, we look to what’s best for ourselves and our families.

The 'celebrification' of politics

Last night I chaired a discussion at the London School of Economics about the ‘celebrification’ of politics. I was surprised that no-one on the panel, nor anyone from the audience, made a single plea for policy over personality. Everyone essentially accepted that we’ve always had the politics of celebrity, since the very birth of democracy, that people are today simply recreating the village culture of gossip using whatever media is available. Furthermore, no-one last night thought this was anything but natural and worthwhile.

This was a welcome relief from the self-styled statesmen of journalism who are forever bemoaning the dropping of standards. By contrast, the Polis/LSE discussion accepted that a major task for voters is to establish the true nature of those who would be our leaders and that this inevitably done through ‘celebrification’ ranging from soft human-interest stories to scandal-mongering.

I tend to agree with that. I do think policy is vital, but I’m confident that voters are pretty good at discerning their self-interest through all the babble. What voters also need to know is what kind of people are in place to take the difficult decisions when events present them with the unexpected. Politician’s behaviour as spied through the media is as close as most people are going to get to knowing that.

Polling won't show you what tax policy will win an election

A post on ToryDiary yesterday covered the ICM poll on tax and noted the usual ambiguities arising from the form of the questions. It seems that the majority think they are over-taxed, and the majority say they don't want tax cuts. The majority also think that the government does not make good use of the money raised. Hmm: you can do what you like with that.

To be fair, I don't think there's a set of polling questions yet tested that tell you exactly what the public wants, what policy would help one win an election, or indeed what would be good for the country.

It's so tricky because the issue is so important and so entangled with many aspects of our lives. I think opinion is quite straight-forward:

• people want tax cuts for themselves but not for anyone richer than themselves;
• they want no cuts in services they use but don't worry so much about saving money on the services that other people use.

They may or may not have wider views about the effect of taxes on the economy and the community, but they will be primarily driven by the things they understand best, which is their own situation.

So I don't think you will find any polling evidence which reliably tells you what tax policy is most likely to win you the next election, or whether you should even talk about tax or stay silent. Politicians will have to come to their own conclusions about what's right for the country, make the argument and hope they win; or stay quiet and hope that other issues will take them over the line. Which choice is best is a matter of instinct, not of polling.

Hares, tortoises and respectful debate

*Tim posting this for Stephan*

Tim’s piece on ConservativeHome about ‘the hare and the tortoise’ is absolutely essential to the future debate among conservatives. It provides some structure of mutual respect for our discussions. Without this, we can too easily degenerate into casting each other as enemies. I treated Danny Finkelstein this way in my post on Saturday, he did the same to me on Monday, and then Stephen Pollard trumped everything by calling me “remarkably stupid”, “too dense” and a purveyor (unwitting, because uneducated) of Goebbels-style anti-semitic insult.

Even when we don’t descend this far, we all show a preference for creating straw men of each other who we then triumphantly knock down. So those of us who want a lower-tax economy are assumed to think the mere mention of cuts will bring the voters flocking: most of us don’t think that. And anyone who starts talking about brand-modernising strategies is assumed by the other side to be unprincipled and superficial, which is also unfair.

Hares and tortoises are both successful beasts; the tortoise happens to win in the Aesop fable, so there’s an important concession there for the discussions ahead.

All change? I smell a rat, fink.

*Posted by Tim on behalf of Stephan Shakespeare*

Re: The right isn't so wrong

A number of former jobbers for the left joined the Conservative Party when it was obvious that their old parties couldn't win elections any more.  Now they say to us: 'turn left if you want to be winners'. I can't help finding that careerist.  The rationale they generally adduce for their new positions is that power cannot be won in any other way. How rarely do we hear them argue from principle, or from evidence that the world would be better with their shifting directions!  The authority for their arguments is mainly derived from polls and focus groups, and typically motivated by the idea of winning the game.

I am no purist and I realise that you can't do so much while you're out of power: but careerism makes you confuse power for a mere job. Just once I want to hear the chameleons argue as if they care about something other than the mere game. I want a party that can convincingly say to the people: we're doing this for you, not for ourselves.