Dragging Santa into Politics

By Will Jennings, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at University of Southampton (Academia.edu, Twitter). Read more posts by Will here.

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Source: @john_neptune

“An urgent message for Father Christmas: all we wish for is our country back!” was the slogan spotted emblazoned across an upside down union jack flag in Hedge End, Hampshire this week. Poor old Santa is increasingly being dragged into the mud of partisan politics — on both sides of the Atlantic. Despite the plea for Father Christmas to return the UK to some rose-tinted age, British voters are not convinced that he is a Ukip supporter. Surveyed by YouGov last December, just 13% of people thought that Father Christmas would vote Ukip. This perhaps should not be a surprise given that, as it has been pointed out, is “is effectively a foreigner doing a job at the expense of hard-working parents across the country.” The much more widespread view was that Santa was a Labour voter (the view of 27% of respondents), no doubt because of his obvious distributive politics, or a Green (23%), due to the low carbon emissions of his sleigh and his role in conservation of Reindeer. As British politics has become increasingly fragmented, and struggles to cope with a new era of multi-party politics, there is no clear consensus among the electorate on which side of the partisan divide Santa belongs.

These figures mask the underlying partisan divide in how voters view Santa. Once “don’t knows” and non-voters are excluded, 64% of Labour supporters think he votes Labour. Among Conservative supporters, 59% are of the view that Santa shares their political predilection. Meanwhile, 60% of Ukip supporters believe that Santa is a member of Nigel Farage’s purple army, despite his distinctly red suit and careless disregard for EU border controls as he delivers presents across the world. Even when it comes to Santa, most people can’t put politics aside and see him through a partisan prism.

The same pattern is observed in the US, where a Public Policy Polling survey in 2012 asked “Do you think Santa Claus is a Democrat or a Republican?” In response, 44% of the US public thought Santa was a Democrat and 28% a Republican, with 28% unsure. Again, once we break the numbers down by partisanship we see starker divisions. Some 79% of Democrats believe Santa votes just like them, compared to 61% of Republicans – suggesting that even some partisan Republicans can recognise the distributive politics involved in giving large numbers of presents to children. Indeed, the evidence suggests that Santa has been a victim of growing political polarization in the US. Strikingly, 85% of Republicans thought that Santa was more likely to leave Obama a lump of coal rather than gifts, suggesting that the festive spirit has not exactly led Americans to put aside their partisan differences. Indeed, Republicans are marginally more likely than Democrats, by 49% to 41%, to tell daddy if they see mommy kissing Santa Claus, though the jury is still out on the political implications of this. The dragging of Santa into the world of partisan politics on both sides of the Atlantic offers a nice illustration of the degree to which partisanship structures so much of our everyday lives – even when it relates to (shhhhhhh!) fictional characters…

When will UKIP implode?

By Will Jennings and Gerry Stoker. Will Jennings is Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at University of Southampton (Academia.edu, Twitter) and Gerry Stoker is Professor of Governance at University of Southampton (Twitter). You can read more posts by Will Jennings here and more posts by Gerry Stoker here.

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UKIP’s supporters show the classic signs of populism in their backing of the party. The dynamics of populism drive its beneficiaries in terms of voting support on a trajectory where surge is followed by slump. Predicting when the former will stop and the latter start is not possible as it depends on a complex set of contingent factors but that the implosion will occur for UKIP at some juncture is a racing certainty.

Populism is an embedded element in the culture of contemporary democracies. It is ready to emerge and be exploited because of a gap between widespread understanding of democracy and the rather the pragmatic reality of its everyday practice. The vision of democracy as rule by the people implies precisely that the wishes of the people will find expression in the policy and practices of government.  Citizens in the grip of populism tend to assume that the public has one voice and that it is theirs; since all reasonable people would agree with their commonsense views. Democracy in practice is messier as different interests compete to achieve compromise through backroom deals and special interests use their influence to get deals done on issues that matter a great deal to them. The gap between the visionary ideal of democracy and murky realities of its practice provide fertile ground for populism. The failures to achieve the people’s will is down to malevolent forces:  a corrupt political elite, their cosy media friends and the influence of powerful unaccountable forces. Only by ridding ourselves of “them” can “we”, the people of commonsense, get back “our” democracy.

UKIP supporters are populists in much of their outlook as a number of recent surveys tell us (see Table 1 below). More than other citizens they think politicians are out for themselves and beholden to powerful interests. They are happy to see themselves and the party they support as outsiders to the clubby and stitched-up world of Westminster politics; claiming a bias in the news coverage and the media against them more than others. In that sense many more UKIP supporters are prepared to view the current system of politics as a waste of time. In UKIP world they are the challengers or as UKIP expert Matthew Goodwin puts it Nigel Farage is “leading a modern peasant’s revolt against Westminster”.

Table 1: UKIP and populist attitudes

Opinion	%  AgreeAll  Citizens	% AgreeUKIP Voters	Source
British politicians are out merely for themselves	48	74	YouGov/ Southampton University(October 2014)
Politics is a waste of time	26	44	YouGov/Southampton University (June 2013)
Politics is dominated by self-seeking politicians protecting the interests of the already rich and powerful in our society	72	85	YouGov/Southampton University (June 2013)
News media coverage of UKIP has been biased against them	44	77	YouGov(May 2014)
There is a political class, clubbing together, using their mates in the media and doing anything to stop the UKIP charge	54	92	YouGov(May 2014)

The populist dynamic that is driving the surge of support for UKIP, garnering the support of the disillusioned rather than the disengaged voters), is capable of and likely to eventually turn in on itself. The gap between the democratic ideal in the heads of their supporters and the messy reality of modern democratic politics remains in place and it provides a trap for UKIP to fall into. So when UKIP supporters see their political heroes backing the interests of big business, or when their elected representatives appear as craven as others and when simple solutions to complex problems cannot be delivered, disillusionment will drive down the party’s support just as it drove it up. Or when self-interested internal power struggles dominate media coverage of the party the drift in support can lead quickly on to implosion. In Australia, Pauline Hanson led her populist One Nation party to remarkable success in state level elections in Queensland and secured over 9% of the vote in the 1998 federal elections. Hanson’s demise was swift, however, and in the 2010 federal election One Nation polled less than 1% of votes. The established mainstream parties are not easy to shift; not least in part as they can occupy some of the issue and policy ground claimed by populist challengers.

Some claim that UKIP are fast becoming the Teflon party of British politics immune from media exposure of scandals affecting it because its base reflects a value or cultural rejection of liberal Britain and a sense of deep distrust of mainstream political parties and their media allies. The survey evidence backs up the scale of distrust held by UKIP supporters but our argument is that the Teflon factor should not be overplayed; distrust of one group of political actors can quickly spread to others. One time beneficiaries can become a target, ask Mr Clegg. Because UKIP is a party of populism it must live and die by its rules. Those rules predict a surge followed by a slump as scandals, exposure of political self-interest and failures of delivery take their toll. The bookmakers would be well advised to offer  considered odds on that possibility as well as the number of seats that UKIP will earn in May 2015 general election.

REF 2014: Politics ranked 5th for research outputs in the UK

The University of Southampton’s department of Politics and International Relations has climbed 23 places for leading research in the country to place it 15^th, following publication of the national Research Excellence Framework 2014. This assesses the quality and impact of research.

Results of the REF show that 84% per cent of University of Southampton’s research activity is considered of internationally excellent or world-leading quality, placing the University 11^th for the volume of its high quality research in the country.

Politics has also performed well in the REF for research outputs ranking it 5^th in the UK, with the majority of research classified as either world-leading or internationally excellent.

Research quality of Politics & International Relations at Southampton recognised as world-leading

The results of the ‘Research Excellence Framework’ (REF) for 2014 were released this morning. We are delighted to say that Politics & International Relations at the University of Southampton performed extremely strongly. Overall our research quality was ranked 15th in the UK.

In terms of the assessment of research outputs, we were ranked 5th in the UK, with 77% of our outputs being recognised as world-leading or internationally excellent.

Polling Observatory #43: Stability returns with race close to dead heat

By The Polling Observatory (Robert Ford, Will Jennings, Mark Pickup and Christopher Wlezien). The homepage of The Polling Observatory can be found here, and you can read more posts by The Polling Observatory here.

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This is the forty-third in a series of posts that report on the state of the parties as measured by opinion polls. By pooling together all the available polling evidence we can reduce the impact of the random variation each individual survey inevitably produces. Most of the short term advances and setbacks in party polling fortunes are nothing more than random noise; the underlying trends – in which we are interested and which best assess the parties’ standings – are relatively stable and little influenced by day-to-day events. If there can ever be a definitive assessment of the parties’ standings, this is it. Further details of the method we use to build our estimates of public opinion can be found here.

After the storm, the calm. Last month we found one of the largest shifts in opinion we have recorded since 2010, as Labour support plunged nearly three points in a few weeks. This month things have been more settled. Labour have recovered slightly, rising 0.6 points to 32.2%. The Conservatives fell back a little in November, down 0.7 points to 30.0%. As a result, Labour’s lead, which had fallen to less than one percentage point at the end of October, has recovered to a still anaemic 2.2% as the Christmas break approaches. Labour will take solace from the fact that their autumn slump has halted, and that the Conservatives’ three year failure to recruit new support has continued for yet another month. The party seems never to have recovered from the damage done to its reputation by the omnishambles budget in the spring of 2012. However, a lead of two points remains awfully precarious, and as we saw in October all that Cameron’s party need is one strong month to pull ahead in the polls. Both parties will go into their Christmas break with reasons to hope, and plenty to worry about.

UKIP had another strong month in November, with Mark Reckless, their second defection from the Conservatives, comfortably elected in UKIP colours in a seat without a demographic pro-UKIP lean. The sustained upward trend in UKIP support continues for another month, as Farage’s insurgents rise to 16.2%, a new record, up one point on last month. The pollsters have now arrived at a clearer consensus on UKIP support, reflected in the narrower “confidence interval” in our estimate, shown by the dashed lines. Farage and his colleagues will certainly be among the nation’s most confident politicians going into Christmas break. A year ago, many doubted that the party could convert their rising support into Westminster seats. No longer. Now the questions under heated discussion at political Christmas parties will be: “how many seats? Where? From whom?” The party can take great pride in its achievements to date, but longer term challenges remain. Even if it were to win 10 seats, the top end of most expectations, that would see 15% of the vote converted to less than 2% of the elected parliamentary intake.

The national polling provides little Christmas cheer for the Lib Dems. We have them at 8.5% this month, the same as last month. Their struggles to hold off the challenge for fourth place from the Greens continue, though as yet we do not have an estimate of Green support. The main source of solace for Clegg’s party comes from the Ashcroft constituency polling, which shows many Lib Dem incumbents in a much stronger position than national polling suggests, although Clegg himself seems to be struggling to hold off a Labour challenge in his Sheffield Hallam seat.

This month we can also bring you an update on our national polling forecast figure. We didn’t publish a forecast last month, so the changes reported are on the figures from two months ago. Labour’s decline in the polls over that period also is reflected in our forecast, though we do anticipate some recovery from the current level. We forecast a share of 33.4% for Labour next May, representing a fall of 2.8 points over the past two months. The Conservatives’ forecast share has not risen, however – we have them winning 33.8%, up just 0.1% from October’s forecast. The Liberal Democrats are also expected to recover somewhat based on historical trends in the polls. Our current forecast is for 9.2%, up 0.5% on the previous estimate. As before, we do not make a direct forecast of UKIP support as our forecasting method is based on historical polling trends, and there is not sufficient data to apply this method to UKIP support. 

The current polling and the forecast both point to a near dead-heat between the top two parties. Yet neither may be particularly reliable anymore as an indicator of how the next Parliament will look. British politics has never been more fragmented, and that fragmentation means geography and constituency context  could be decisive. Surging support for the SNP, UKIP and the Greens is impossible to understand without focussing on the constituency battles where these parties will look to convert votes into seats, while the fate of the Liberal Democrats will turn on whether their legendary local campaigning skills can still deliver in a Siberian climate for the national party. We will shortly unveil our seat-level forecasting model, which attempts to capture some of this variation from seat to seat and produce a more accurate assessment of how the fragmented national political competition will play out in the hundreds of local contests which will decide next year’s outcome. In the meantime, we will continue to keep our usual close watch on the polls, as the closest political contest in a generation enters its final stages.

Robert Ford, Will Jennings, Mark Pickup and Christopher Wlezien

Health for All on Human Rights Day: A Pro-Poor Approach

By Pia Riggirozzi and Erica Penfold. Pia Riggirozzi is Senior Lecturer in Global Politics at University of Southampton (@PRiggirozzi, Academia.edu) and Erica Penfold is Research Officer at the South African Institute of International Affairs. Both are partners at the ESRC-DFID funded project ‘Poverty Reduction and Regional Integration: SADC and Unasur Health Policies’ (@PRARIRepir). You can find more posts by Pia here.

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In recent years there has been growing global awareness of the interplay between rights and the development process and a generalised recognition of social determinants of health connecting poverty, equality and health. Yet, for millions of people throughout the world, the full enjoyment of the right to health still remains a distant goal. Poverty remains one of the driving forces behind ill health, a lack of access to healthcare and medicines and consistent underdevelopment. The World Bank shows that 700 million fewer people live in conditions of extreme poverty in 2010 than in 1990 across developing regions. However, the Global South is still struggling, everyday thousands of children, women and men die silently from preventable diseases associated with poverty.

The United Nations acknowledges these issues as it continues to produce a stream of further guidance in the form of General Comments, such as the General Comment 14, while sponsoring global Declarations and Commissions on Social Determinants of Health. Human Rights Day observed by the international community on 10^th December since 1950 acts as a reminder of the importance of recognition and advancement of rights and the human right to health. But the current high-level focus on health by the international community while recognising the strong relationship between poverty and health, in practice, has been quite conservative in turning the rhetoric into practice. Translating normative principles into politics of compliance and practices for policy implementation remains uneven across the wide spectrum of human rights issues, acknowledging and affecting bearers of rights in different ways. For William Easterly this is clear, ‘which rights to health are realised is a political battle’ contingent on a political and economic reality that profits on the margins of (poor) health. He is right, we can’t downplay politics. Think of a funder – whether the Gates Foundation, Welcome Trust, private charity or government programme – their agenda may well spend a great deal of resources (financial and human) on dealing with one disease. Or programmes advanced by the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the Global Fund, or the Gates Foundation; despite having the best intentions, they may be guided by their own views, agendas and objectives. Undoubtedly, diseases like HIV, malaria and tuberculosis account for over 90 per cent of the global disease burden, yet the millions of dollars poured into programmes to tackle these diseases have done little to tackle weak healthcare systems which are in many cases unreachable or distrusted by the people they are designed to help. Equally critical, other peoples’ rights could be neglacted if diseases like dengue, leishmaniasis, Chagas and Chikungunya that also add to the increasing toll of human life and to the poverty-disease burden receive little attention. The risk is that what is visible and urgent leads over what is marginal and that actions targeted to the poor, yet ignoring the social factors that cause poverty and exclusion, discriminate positively, normalising and even reproducing inequities. The Ebola outbreak in West Africa is another reminder of these risks.

The realisation of people’s rights, entitlements, and obligations, is largely determined by the nature of the state and its capacity to respond to internal public demands, interests, and pressures. Philanthropists in rich countries and the global aid community more generally can mainstream and support national strategies. But we believe there is a role to pay by the neglected partners in development: regional organisations. Regional organisations can be key engines in the development of progressive social policies and advocacy of rights. For example, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has established a regional court of justice adjudicating on national labour rights, while the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) is now driving initiatives to expand entitlements to health care and social security within member states and it is shaping policies around disability all over the world, negotiating with one voice at the World Health Organisation. This makes sense because some social harms and epidemics are inherently cross-border, and are exacerbated or facilitated by regional developments.

Regional organisations that were built for other reasons are now becoming much more important for health and will be particularly important if we look at the Post-2015 Agenda. Organisations such as UNASUR and ECOWAS can provide donors and partners with a single point of contact for discussions and implementation of poverty reduction programmes in member countries. They are close to their populations and can develop technical cooperation, building infrastructure and strengthening capacity between the member states, rescaling practices to reduce socio-economic disparities.

Renewed focus on health, as a basic human right, is a poverty issue. It demands thinking about the deep determinants of (under)development and social exclusion and national, regional and global commitments to enhance access to health care, to medicines, to opportunities. Neglecting this will be a tragedy of aid assistance and possibly of the Sustainable Development Goals.

 

Southampton Politics Student Wins Grant for Research on Open Data for Development

Two Southampton University students, one from PAIR and one from ECS, with a colleague from India, have successfully bid for a research grant from the Open Data for Development (OD4D) Partnership to develop user centred metrics for open datasets – one of just five projects to be selected internationally for this programme.

Currently metrics for open data sets are based on “top-down” approaches – applying principles that open data experts think are appropriate to assess the quality of datasets. While these are valuable there is a danger that these metrics do not correspond to what users find most important in open data. Mark Frank from PAIR, Johanna Walker from ECS, and Nisha Thompson from the DataMeet Trust (a community that works in India on open data and data science) will be developing metrics using “bottom-up” approaches based on what users’ need from open data to solve pressing business problems. They will be working with civil society organisations (CSOs) in the housing sector in the UK and India – running workshops to identify in detail what about open data matters most to them and then developing metrics based on the results. The team will be presenting their results at the Open Data Conference in Ottawa in May 2015.

The British Crisis and the ‘End of Neoliberalism’

By Pia Riggirozzi and Jean Grugel. Pia Riggirozzi is Senior Lecturer in Global Politics at University of Southampton (@PRiggirozzi, Academia.edu) and Jean Grugel is Professor of International Development at University of Sheffield. You can find more posts by Pia here.

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There are many useful lessons to be learnt from the Latin American debate about ‘post-neoliberal’ political economy.

The crisis in British politics, from the slow, partial and uneven economic recovery to the exhaustion of the Westminster model in the wake of the Scottish referendum, is in the news. Academic commentary following the financial crisis in 2007-8 has focused on political disaffection, anti-politics and the disintegration of apparently established political allegiances and the emergence of new protest parties.  But, in order to understand fully the crisis in British politics, we need to put it into a global context.  Observers of British politics would benefit from looking outwards, and reflecting on experiences elsewhere.

Tony Payne’s recent SPERI blog sets out an argument that traditional patterns of governance in Britain are collapsing due to a combination of citizen frustration with an insulated and arrogant ruling elite and insensitive political leadership and, more profoundly, a political-economic project that not only fails most families but seems to be cutting away, wilfully and needlessly, at the welfare system and social contract that have hitherto guaranteed social peace in Britain.

Payne asks why it is so difficult for British leaders to manage the structural changes reshaping Britain and wonders whether we are in the midst of a political economy that could, as he boldly puts it, lead to ‘the unravelling of neoliberalism’: the Right is failing to impose an economic model based on rising inequality and the Left unable or unwilling to refashion a social contract of ‘caring capitalism’ or ‘capitalism with a human face’.

We agree with Tony Payne that the British political debate urgently needs to go beyond narrow discussion of partisan politics and short-term election strategies to embrace a more profound engagement with political economy.  But, as already indicated, we also suggest that there is much to be learned about the British crisis by putting it in the context of what has happened elsewhere or, put differently, by looking at it through the lens of a genuinely global political economic analysis.  What this might reveal are interesting and unexpected points of comparison with the politics and the economics of middle-income countries in the global South, where demands for better management of neoliberalism and calls for a ‘more intelligent state’, as the late President of Argentina, Nestor Kirchner, put it, are the stuff of everyday political debate.

One place to start would be the rich debate in and on Latin America about whether a ‘post-neoliberal’ political economy is possible.  The political-economic crisis in Latin America in the early 2000s led to calls for an end to neoliberal rollback, a new social contract negotiated and managed by a more active state, and the construction of a social consensus that was both respectful of economic growth and sensitive to urgent need to address the poverty legacy, invest in education and create welfare.  As we have ourselves shown, so-called ‘post-neoliberal experiments’ have combined a pragmatic attempt to refocus the direction and the purpose of the economy through state spending, increased taxation and management of exports with a project of enhancing citizenship through a new politics of cultural recognition in Bolivia and Ecuador and attempts to recreate the state-sponsored pact between business and labour in Argentina and Brazil.

Of course, post-neoliberal governance in Latin America is not problem-free.  Inadequate state capacity, the scale of inequality, personalist political leadership and a worrying lack of institutionalisation of reform – plus the threat of external discipline from creditors – all undermine some of the early gains achieved by new left governments.  But, despite their problems, and in the face of often profound criticism from international organisations, ‘post-neoliberal’ governments have proved remarkably durable at the polls, as the recent re-elections of Dilma Rousseff in Brazil and Evo Morales in Bolivia and the support for the re-election of Tabaré Vázquez in Uruguay show.

What’s more, these governments draw support not only from the rural and urban poor but also from the middle classes.  Indeed, the key to understanding calls for an end to a governance model subject entirely to the uncertainties of the global economy in Latin America has been the impact of unregulated markets on private and public sector middle-income groups.  Put simply, the absence of a proper social pact able to balance private profitability with welfare and public investments in the 1980s and 1990s led to immiseration of the middle classes, most dramatically in Argentina where the ‘new poor’ were the motor of the 2001 protest movement and factory take-overs.

There is surely much to reflect on here for analysts of the current crisis in Britain and indeed in Europe more widely.  Despite the difficulties so many people face simply in getting by, set out clearly in the recent Resolution Foundation’s recent report on Low Pay, the political parties in Britain seem unable to take their concerns and needs seriously enough.  One of the lessons from Latin America is that political leaders need to fashion an alternative to neoliberalism as part of their offer to the electorate if they want to win.

So, to go back to Payne’s question: are we in a situation of electoral rebellion, crisis and rising inequality on a scale that could lead to the unravelling of neoliberalism in Britain?  Despite the evident problems, we are sceptical as to whether the current crisis is really the prelude to collapse. Markets are deeply embedded as mechanisms of implementation (even in universities, schools and hospitals); and there are scapegoats that are, worryingly, being forced to carry the blame – immigrants most notably.  British citizens may not yet be ready to turn fully on their political leaders.  In Latin America, the challenge to neoliberalism came from electorates that refused to accept parties committed to free markets but did so in the context of a global political economy that gave Latin American citizens some hope for the future.  Whilst Latin America is part of the ‘rising rest’, Britain, however, is struggling with relative decline.

These important similarities and differences help put the British crisis in context.  Our key point is that the debate Tony Payne has opened about the future of neoliberalism is to be welcomed and we call now for genuinely comparative and global consideration of what ‘post-neoliberal’ political economies might look like, in Britain and elsewhere, and what might be needed to bring them into existence.

Polling Observatory #42: Sharp drop in Labour support adds further confusion to the most chaotic election in living memory

By The Polling Observatory (Robert Ford, Will Jennings, Mark Pickup and Christopher Wlezien). The homepage of The Polling Observatory can be found here, and you can read more posts by The Polling Observatory here.

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This is the forty-second in a series of posts that report on the state of the parties as measured by opinion polls. By pooling together all the available polling evidence we can reduce the impact of the random variation each individual survey inevitably produces. Most of the short term advances and setbacks in party polling fortunes are nothing more than random noise; the underlying trends – in which we are interested and which best assess the parties’ standings – are relatively stable and little influenced by day-to-day events. If there can ever be a definitive assessment of the parties’ standings, this is it. Further details of the method we use to build our estimates of public opinion can be found here.

In last month’s Polling Observatory we noted remarkable stability in the polls despite a hugely eventful political month. This month we find the opposite pattern. A relatively subdued political month has been accompanied by one of the largest shifts in opinion we have observed since the beginning of this parliament. Labour’s vote share, at 31.6%, is down 2.8 points in just a month, erasing nearly all of the fragile lead over the Conservatives that the party have been clinging to over the past six months. This plunge in support is among  the largest shifts in opinion we have recorded since 2010, and implies that about one in twelve Labour voters has drifted away from the party in the past few weeks. A significant part of this drop may be the result of the seismic shift in opinion north of the border, where support for the Scottish National Party has surged dramatically, threatening Labour’s long hegemony in Scottish Westminster polls and votes. The Conservatives, by contrast, have recovered some of the ground they lost last month, rising 0.6 points to 30.7%. The top two parties are now within just a single percentage point of each other, pointing to a tightening race with just six months to go to the general election.

Meanwhile UKIP have consolidated their large gain last month, and are stable on 15.2%. However, as the widening dashed lines around our latest UKIP estimate indicate, there is an unusually high degree of uncertainty about UKIP support at the moment. This reflects the substantial spread in UKIP support in the polls. Some pollsters are showing the party at 20% or higher, and indeed in the aftermath of the Clacton by-election one Survation poll reported UKIP as high as 25% (and another ComRes poll put them on 24% around the same period). In contrast, other pollsters have them stable in the mid-teens, for example with both Populus and YouGov often finding UKIP support in the 13% to 15% range.

As we have discussed previously, our method makes it possible to estimate the ‘house effect’ for each polling company for each party, relative to the vote intention figures we expect from the average pollster. That is, it tells us simply whether the reported vote intention for a given pollster is above or below the industry average. This does not indicate ‘accuracy’, since there is no election to benchmark the accuracy of the polls against. It could be, in fact, that pollsters at one end of the extreme or the other are giving a more accurate picture of voters’ intentions. In the table below we report the ‘bias’ towards or against each of the parties for all current polling companies. From this, it is quickly apparent that the largest range of house effects are found in the estimation of UKIP support, with Survation’s figures 4.3 points higher than the average pollster, followed by Opinium at 2.8 points higher and Lord Ashcroft at 2.1 points higher. In contrast, ICM put UKIP 2.6 points lower, ComRes (telephone) 2.5 points lower and Ipsos-MORI 1.8 points lower. As when we reported on this previously, the uncertainty seems to be associated with the method a pollster employs to field a survey. All the companies who poll by telephone (except Lord Ashcroft’s weekly poll) tend to give lower scores to UKIP. By contrast, three of the five companies which poll using internet panels give higher than average estimates for UKIP. The diversity of estimates indicates the continued uncertainty about the extent to which UKIP is reshaping the political landscape at the present time, where the lack of a clear precedent means that pollsters have little previous information to use to calibrate their estimates.

With the top two parties effectively tied, and the pollsters divided about the performance of the surging insurgents who may decide their fates, the outcome of the 2015 election has never been less certain.

House	Mode	Adjustment	Prompt	Con	Lab	Lib Dem	UKIP
ICM	Telephone	Past vote, likelihood to vote	UKIP prompted if ‘other’	1.3	-0.8	2.7	-2.6
Ipsos-MORI	Telephone	Likelihood (certain) to vote	Unprompted	0.5	0.3	0.5	-1.8
Lord Ashcroft	Telephone	Likelihood to vote, past vote (2010)	UKIP prompted if ‘other’	-0.9	-0.6	-1.0	2.1
ComRes (1)	Telephone	Past vote, squeeze, party identification	UKIP prompted if ‘other’	0.3	-0.1	0.1	-2.5
ComRes (2)	Internet	Past vote, squeeze, party identification	UKIP prompted if ‘other’	0.3	-0.7	-1.0	1.8
YouGov	Internet	Newspaper readership, party identification (2010)	UKIP prompted if ‘other’	1.9	2.1	-1.3	-0.4
Opinium	Internet	Likelihood to vote	UKIP prompted if ‘other’	-0.8	-0.8	-2.2	2.8
Survation	Internet	Likelihood to vote, past vote (2010)	UKIP prompted	-1.7	-1.4	-0.3	4.3
Populus	Internet	Likelihood to vote, party identification (2010)	UKIP prompted if ‘other’	2.4	1.7	0.1	-2.1

Another polling sub-plot which emerged this past month has been the emergence of the Greens as yet another potent force in the fragmenting political landscape. A number of polls have put their support at 6% or 7%, a massive increase on their 2010 showing of less than 1% (though this is artificially deflated as the party stood candidates in less than 50% of constituencies), and close to or even above the struggling Liberal Democrats. We do not currently estimate support for the Greens, but will investigate adding them to our model if the current surge in support is sustained. Currently, we have the Lib Dems at 8.5%, up 0.3 points on last month. Although falling behind the Greens is symbolically bad for the party, and provides seasoned poll watchers with an exciting new story, the substantive impact of this new twist is likely to be limited. The Lib Dems’ fate still depends on how well they can hold on to votes in their traditional constituency strongholds.

Despite the sharp fall in their support this month, Labour still hold important structural advantages thanks to the biases in the electoral system, which mean their votes translate more effectively into seats. Lord Ashcroft has been doing the psephological community a huge service by systematically polling the individual marginal seats which will decide the result next year. Using this method, he has already identified enough prospective Labour gains to put the party ahead on seats next year, and he still has many more strong prospects to poll. However, as Lord Ashcroft’s himself wisely reminds us, polls are a snapshot not a prediction, and Labour’s leads in many key marginals look awfully fragile. The opposition remains, slightly, in front for one more month. But there are six more to go, and if just one of these looks like October, the contest will be thrown wide open.

Robert Ford, Will Jennings, Mark Pickup and Christopher Wlezien

In Defence of Revolution

By Meg Sherman, a student of Modern History and Politics at University of Southampton. Meg also has a personal blog.

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(Cross-posted from http://ms3g11.tumblr.com/)

Revolution, Russell Brand’s new book, is devoted to asking how we build an egalitarian society and awaken our higher skills, a trunk full of hot thoughts about spirituality, spectacle and cultural politics in late capitalist modernity – the age of made-up FTSE symbols as he inimitably puts it. Traversing an ocean of anecdotal evidence spanning the democratic proto-panacea of Occupy to the kangaroo court of Newsnight, the clown-cum-inquisitor gives short shrift to dominant political orthodoxies. It’s not a typical manifesto, although, like in Marx, the cadences matter. Revolution sings to our minds, Brand playing on his lexical flute and telling a true story of how human lives were entombed in bad rule and a deadly consumer culture sacralising destruction. It is the ultimate fantasy of mindlessness. All in all he gives us a bright light for seeing with in gloomy times.

There’s the urge to spring to attack like Murdoch’s rotweiler and do a hatchet job. Of late, the self-styled comic philanderer has turned heads trying to carve out a new reputation for seriousness, undercutting old privilege networks in his spare time with eloquent whimsy and panache, all stylish and rumbustious in conch calls for change in The Trews. It’s precisely because he’s been accused of being a demagogue that his ideas ought to be contested, but a tranche of abusive rebuttals seem only to reiterate an astute claim made throughout his prose and performance comedy: modern media ceremonies of iconoclasm are hurtful, a fruitless spectacle distracting us from collective issues the whole Earth faces as industrial civilization surges humanity to a doom-laden precipice. Is now time to expend energy on hatred? Only if you’ve lost course. It’s time to attain understanding, quickly.

It should seem conspicuous how by focusing attention negatively on a singular comic persona, press machinery conveniently relieves itself of acknowledging or meaningfully contemplating the many and varied ideas on politics and IR, self and the world, derived from solid research and joyfully drenched in iridescent prose in the wave-making books and videos. Their value is the range of their sympathy; forget celebrity.

Hardly anyone in the reviews is calling Revolution’s argument profound, despite the fact the main argument spiralling through the text, although not all Brand’s own, is genius still: if we began thinking and living as communities in harmony with one another’s fundamental needs, the amount of energy necessary to transform the governance of our society would be of an order of magnitude smaller than that which we put in to keeping up a rotten orthodoxy, predicated on corporate power, materialism and possessive individualism, which makes more people dead and depressed quicker, meanwhile emancipating corporations and the exponentially rich from social obligation, and – the apocalyptic icing on the anthropogenic cake – senselessly accelerates ecocide.

On Earth the collective daily lot is human and ecological disaster fixed by an elaborate system of hoarded wealth and power, as concurrently people born in to low-paid lives, ever more restricted by government policy, are in want of facilities to feed, house and take care of themselves. Cruel world that Brand accuses “the bejewelled fun-bus”, the 85 people who have as much wealth as half the world of wanting the ogre system in the heart of the gumdrop gingerbread village to stay cosy, to stop us from realizing our common cosmic plight.

We know liberal democratic governments are plutocracies and that candidacies tend to be sponsored by financial elites and that these states have become more authoritarian in time. The topsy-turvy reality of politics is tucked out of sight and censored from narrow and selective narratives of mainstream media. Establishment forces, although having broad, complex and diffuse strategies, all have tendencies for managing information, eliding from the public knowledge which might cast hegemonic discourse in a dubious light and topple methods of control (see: Manufacturing Consent.) Far from being assemblies embodying a transcendent collective will, our governments are intricately entangled with big businesses and unaccountable multinational corporations, systems which irrationally let profiteers expand margins and extract more labour by practices only legally differential from slavery, proven to have brutally deleterious effects on human lives, animals and planetary ecosystems. That’s the problematic, not just for Brand but for everyone.

Much of what is said about politics in the public sphere today is still governed by the erroneous belief that there is no alternative to capitalism and that we have less in common with the migrant labourer on our street than members of parliament dressed in privilege. With that in mind a lot of people have told a lot of lies and we have put faith in those lies. Today the real demon doesn’t live within overseas people in desperation of survival and happiness, but inside the premeditated, segregationist idea that immigration has been making citizens worse off. Inequity is the real source of destitution – a manipulation of truth generated from the heart of the establishment itself. Yet despite differing views of self-interest in separate echelons of society, based on grinding materialism and individualism, the outcomes of our behaviour are converging and getting worse for everyone (see: Tragedy of the Commons.) Climate change has no romantic attachment to nationality or class, and it will get us all somehow; unless you have a moon-rocket and have sussed the physics of living in an airless, frozen mass. The barriers and cliff-edges making a gulf between us in society aren’t true in nature; that is to say they are artificial, man-made. The sooner we realise it the sooner we can put our minds to creating beneficial, joyful ways of living together.

Expounding on these themes Brand affirms:

Chomsky says that at this point history alternative visions for society are vital and those based on cardinal human values of sharing and being ecologically minded deserve serious consideration.

In the same breath he quotes his friend Daniel:

“We can create a peaceful planetary civilisation, entirely powered by renewable sources of energy, based on cradle-to-cradle practices, where everyone on earth enjoys a high quality of life… The transition is from a paradigm of competition and domination to one of symbiosis and cooperation, from greed to altruism. It begins with the realisation of our shared responsibility for the future of the earth, and our inherent unity with each other ad with all of life.”

It’d be hard to find a practitioner worth their salt who seriously disagreed with that. The facts in Revolution are not inaccurate or invented. So you have to wonder why a lot of high-minded criticism is spiteful in tone and neglects to mention the book’s key points.

Brand’s audience isn’t a tiny anglophone elite, and he speaks to our times. His scheme is to subvert sensationalist journalism and swivel our minds towards the thoughtful critique of Noam Chomsky and soaring poetry of Buckminster Fuller, to get us all sentient and soul-deep in the truth. The unrelenting media claw has been clenched round his waist since he sprung up on telly as Paxman’s adversary, rafting the sensible idea that when “democracy” is tantamount to a singular act of voting for a corporate, elitist party on one day in every 1826.21 – concurrently we possess the technological and informational capacity to comprehensively include people in policy making, just look the voting stats for X Factor – it leads one to question if the status quo is behaving for common purposes. Sound reasoning.

His emphases on channelling non-violent spirituality in to revolution, a theory of moral action, echoes his hero Gandhi, who personified a supreme opposition to British imperial rule through the attainment of understanding and co-ordinated civil disobedience, as opposed to violence, and said:

“Non-cooperation is not a passive state, it is an intensely active state – more active than physical resistance or violence. Passive resistance is a misnomer. Non co-operation in the sense used by me must be non-violent and therefore neither punitive nor vindictive nor based on malice, ill-will or hatred.”

There’s a whole world with ears for Revolution’s truth and proto-communist sentiments. Its greeting started a sparked rebellion in my own mind anyway. There’s a sunrise of hope risen above the gnarly mountain ranges of consumerism, a renewed faith that self-sufficient communities where lives and the environment are more sacred than profit are plausible are growing now. Don’t underestimate the strength of the message. It’s not for nothing that the media cloud that view. The ogre of selfishness and acquisition has been gobbling up the planet in one long cosmic breath for a lot longer than it should’ve. Russell Brand is at heart still a rainbow-headed kid who wants what’s best for the world. And why can’t that be an ocean of strength and prominent in the universe?