[Politics] Election fever.

[davywavy]

Abraham Lincoln once famously observed that you can fool all the people some of the time and and some of the people all of the time, but not all of them all the time. Perhaps less famously (but possibly unexpectedly), Richard Nixon went further and tried to exactly quantify just how many people you can fool all the time. If you're an incumbent in a democracy, he said, it really doesn't matter how bad you are but some people will always vote for you and no matter how good you are, some people never will. He actually gave an exact figure - 18% - for this proportion of the population.
You can twirl your moustaches, cackle evilly and murderously pursue Penelope Pitstop to your heart's content and at least one member of the Anthill Mob (probably Dum-Dum) will still consider you the best candidate, or, looking at it another way, you can raise the dead from their graves and spray free liquor from every rooftop and about one person in every five would still rather have The Hooded Claw, thank you very much.

I was reminded of this 18% rule by the papers last week, when they reported that opinion polls currently show Labour on 19% and were speculating on how much further support for them may slump. My answer to that would be not much further, unless Nixon was wrong. What's perhaps most interesting about this is that even in the middle of Watergate, Nixon's approval levels didn't drop below 20% suggesting that if we were to hold a straight race between Gordon Brown and Tricky Dicky, Nixon would win by a mile. Now that's political unpopularity.
It's been interesting over the last few years to watch the decline in both Brown and Labour's fortunes. Three or four years ago when I would pop something onto LJ suggesting that the Emperor wasn't wearing any clothes I could reliably expect a pro-Brown greek chorus to pop out of the woodwork and start singing the praises of his natty attire. As Brown's manifest nudity became clearer it appears that the cheering section quietly hid their pom-poms in the back of the wardrobe and are pretending that the whole thing never really happened.

Truth may be the daughter of time, but it doesn't half make political debate a lot less fun.

Over the weekend, both the Telegraph and the Guardian led with the same story, and when they agree on something you can be sure that there is something seriously skew-whiff in the state of Denmark. This story was that according to opinion polls, more than two-thirds of people want an general election immediately. This is not all that surprising in the wake of political corruption scandals and economic collapse, and it's also no surprise that the opposition parties (who we may expect to benefit from such an election) are enthusiastically calling for an election too. It sometimes seems that the only person who doesn't want an immediate election is me.
This might surprise you given my well-established loathing for the band of meatheads who we laughingly call our government, but I'm rarely a fan of precipitate action in a crisis. The problem with elections in which one side is plainly going to lose and another plainly going to win (and, barring alien abduction, David Cameron will be the next Prime Minister) is that the obvious winners don't have to try - and that's a bad thing. Think back to 1997 when Blair was so obviously going to romp home that he didn't actually have to make any meaningful policy promises; all he had to do was smile lots, say some fine-sounding but noncommittal words and avoid being arrested for abducting schoolchildren and the election was his. Cameron finds himself in that position now and so he's busily making plenty of 'pledges' but few enough actual written promises - and I rather like to see what politicians actually plan beyond observing that they have a 'passion for excellence' or whatever the management buzzword du jour is.
The LibDems are actually doing rather better and putting forward some interesting and original ideas like the Repeal Bill, which is an excellent notion and something I've been banging on about for years. Indeed, were it not for the fact that the LibDem Constitutional Reform proposals were apparently written by someone with a serious head injury they'd probably have my vote.

But anyway; to summarise. I dislike snap general elections with an obvious winner ahead of time because that winner can avoid engaging with the electorate in meaningful terms. As such I'd say no to an immediate election, in the hopes that it will force some concrete proposals and promises about the people who are going to win it. As I said above; truth is the daughter of time and on this, the time we haven't had yet is just as important as the past.
But what do you think?

[Poll #1406417]

Comments

[fried-chicken.livejournal.com]

Haven't been on LJ overly for ages, but whenever I am your posts always catch my eye.

I definitely think that holding off on an election is the best thing, as people have mentioned previously fixed term is definitely the way to go, but also and perhaps more importantly it allows some of the media smoke to clear.

Currently it really does seem to be the case that the mass majority of people will take the news that's printed in any of the papers as being the facts of the matter without actually looking into it any more themselves, and it's an incredibly dangerous position to find outselves in.

Mass majority is probably overstating it, but worrying high number of people.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Tsk! I produce works of genius daily and people don't come and read them. What is the world coming to?

Politically, the older I get the more I realise just how smart the Romans were in their idea of the will of - and control of - 'the mob'.

[fried-chicken.livejournal.com]

I don't want to go over my weekly quota of genius, otherwise I'll want to build a volcano lair, attach lasers to the heads of sharks and start practising my megalomaniac cackle.

Yes it's strange how ideas like that become more appealing as you realise that at times it's not in peoples best interests for everybody to know the entire story.

For example I have a couple of friends in the banking industry who have said that if the papers had laid off the headlines for a couple of days, and the politicians had lied more a lot of the current climate could have been mitigated.

For example with Northern Rock the reason the other banks didn't see the BoE bailout as a big thing when the news broke is because interbank loans were such a common thing and the week before HBOS had borrowed over twice the amount. But with the spin that it got, panic ensued

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

The problem with bubbles is that sooner or later they burst. The debt mountain was going to go horrifically tits up at some point; the bubble had been inflated beyond any hope of a safe landing. Indeed, I predicted as much back in 2005, back when everyone is saying this wasn't predictable and there even were people who hadn't been sectioned who thought that Brown was a good chancellor. Could it have been mitigated? No, because the borrowed money would have to be paid back sooner or later, and sooner or later johnny voter was going to find out precisely what he owed.
The biggest mistake in the whole procedure was not letting Northern Rock go under, IMHO.

[fried-chicken.livejournal.com]

Oh there was definitely an underlying issue that needed to be addressed - no argument there - problem is the stability issues that have been caused by the panic that the press seemed to push for.

As it crippled the confidence in the system far beyond what was necessary and just cascaded out from there, and whenever people try to inject some confidence back into the system the papers seem to be very happy to drag everything back down again.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I'm unsure about media coverage, but in terms of people's reactions to events I don't think that the mob could have been expected to react otherwise to events. Mass hysteria is powerful and, if you look at every other collapse/crisis in history, there comes a point when the mass mind takes over and runs things for a while. I reckon that the reaction of the public to just where there money has not only gone, but also will continue to go for the next decade, was utterly unavoidable.
It isn't just 'the media' as well; suggesting that all that was needed was for politicians to lie a bit more doesn't work any more. A leak - any leak - online now is round the world in 5 minutes, and that spark is all that is needed. When things are on the up, people want to beleive they will continue like that - look at dotcoms or house prices. however, the reverse is also true. on the way down, people *want* to beleive the worst, which is why Darling's sunny predictions of a soft landing were ignored - nobody wants to beleive them.

[fried-chicken.livejournal.com]

All fair points.

Good old human nature, guarenteed to get us in a state one way or another