UK Election Update

In a previous post, I wrote that the UK was heading to a hung parliament and a coalition government. After two more debates and Gordon Brown's pathetic "bigotgate", they're still heading there. The latest polls have the Conservatives at 34%, Labour at 27-29%, and the Lib-Dems at 27-31%. At these levels, either the Tories or Labour will need to find around another 4% to eke out a majority, and nothing that's happened in the past two weeks have created that much movement.

The Russian Silicon Valley: Update

What a shocker! Turns out the Russian "system" for defense spending is rife with corruption. From NRO:

Recently, Russian president Dmitri Medvedev announced that the Kremlin would spend 4–10 billion rubles ($134–335 million) to establish a Russian analogue of California’s Silicon Valley....

Several sites in Russia were in the running for this project, among them the Siberian “science city” of Tomsk, where the company NPF Mikron produces complex radars for the latest Russian fighter, the MiG-35 — one of the Russian defense industry’s few real success stories from the last several years. But, to the dismay of many defense-industry observers in Moscow, the final decision by Medvedev was to build this new R&D center in the Moscow suburb of Skolkovo.

..."It is almost certain that large portions of this money will be stolen — like with the Superjet — and siphoned off in the process of creating this new scientific complex." And the land in Skolkovo, which the government is expected to buy for $20–25 million per hectare (a hectare is roughly 2.5 acres), just happens to belong to a government official.

My prior criticism of the project - that it's difficult to enact innovation through government spending - didn't even consider this aspect. Of course the project is doomed.

The Democrats' Long Game on Health Care

If you read the conservative press, you'll see a litany of stories about how the health care bill is already showing signs of trouble. It'll increase costs, they say. It'll force people to change insurers, they say, or even to change doctors. It'll increase budget deficits, they say. It'll create moral hazard for people to game the system (as they have in Massachusetts under a similar plan), they say. All of this runs counter to the Obama administration's statements during the debate about the bill.

I can't, however, shake the feeling that this is all part of the plan. Of course a massive reform of our health care system is going to cause unexpected consequences, many of them painful. Of course you can't increase coverage massively while also cutting costs. Surely the Democrats know this. So what, exactly, is the plan?

It's simply this: the worse, the better. The existing bill is a horrendous mishmash of conflicting measures, poorly-understood provisions, and possibly unenforceable and/or unconstitutional mandates. This will all become apparent in a few years. And when it does, what will the Democrats say? Think they'll say, Oh, sorry, we were wrong, now we're ready to consider the Republican ideas? No. They'll say: See what happens when we're forced to compromise?

President Obama is already getting ahead of this. He laments the exigencies of democracy. If only, he said, he could have crafted a perfect bill with an academic imprimatur and no messy legislative fingerprints. That "perfect" bill will, of course, be single payer. Next time this comes around, that's what they're going to demand. Enough compromise, they'll say. It's time for purity.

The conservative pundits highlighting the problems are not wrong to do so, though. Their hope is that all or part of the bill might actually be repealed before it's implemented. This won't happen before 2013 at the earliest, because of Presidential veto power, and it's unlikely even then. But pointing out all the flaws as they become apparent is the best way to swing enough public opinion to make repeal a possibility. So more power to them... but watch out for the other side's long-term strategy.

You Can Take the Boy Out of Texas...

Kevin D. Williamson writes today in the Corner:

Governor Perry sums up the Texas model in five words: "Don't spend all the money." Here's what a good long run of small-government, low-tax conservatism has achieved in Texas: Once a largely agricultural state, Texas today is home to 6 of the 25 largest cities in the country, more than any other state. Texas has a trillion-dollar economy that would make it the 15th-largest national economy in the world if it were, as some of its more spirited partisans sometimes idly suggest it should be, an independent country. By one estimate, 70 percent of the new jobs that were created in the United States in 2008 were created in Texas. Texas is home to America's highest-volume port, the largest medical center in the world, and the headquarters of more Fortune 500 companies than any other state, having surpassed New York in 2008. While the Rust Belt mourns the loss of manufacturing jobs, Texans are building Bell helicopters and Lockheed Martin airplanes, Dell computers and TI semiconductors. Always keeping an eye on California, Texans have started bottling wine and making movies. And there's still an automobile industry in America, but it's not headquartered in Detroit: A couple thousand Texans are employed building Toyotas, and none of them is a UAW member.

These words warm the cockles of my expat Texan heart. Meanwhile, my adopted state of New Jersey is flirting with bankruptcy, and losing both population and jobs... probably some of which are going to my native land.

Athwart History Notes

Couple of quick notes to loyal readers of Athwart History:

1. I welcome and encourage your feedback! I've enabled commenting without the need to have a Blogger or iGoogle account. So if you think I wrote something brilliant - or insane - or just have something to add, please leave a note.

2. I keep the book log pretty well updated, over there on the left side of the page. Recently I set it up to link to Amazon. If you see a book you're interested in, you can buy it through that link and I'll get a (small) cut of the sale. It's just a small way to show your appreciation for Athwart History.

Thanks to all!

The Path to a Hung Parliament

I've been playing with these interactive tools at BBC: poll tracker and election seat calculator.

If we leave the Other category fixed at 9%, and set the Lib-Dems to various fixed positions (I used 2% intervals between 18% and 30%), then we can use the calculator to determine the breakeven points at which Labour or the Conservatives can obtain an outright majority. The breakdown looks like this:

Conservatives	Labour	Lib Dem
37.6%	31.5%	30%
38.1%	32.0%	28%
38.5%	32.7%	26%
39.1%	33.6%	24%
39.8%	34.4%	22%
40.6%	35.2%	20%
41.1%	36.1%	18%

To read this table, assume the Lib-Dems get the percentage given in their column. Then the other two columns give the minimum fraction of total votes needed to secure a majority.

The latest polls have the Lib-Dems with 30-31% of the vote, the Conservatives with 33%, and Labour with 27-28%. That is, both Labour and the Conservatives are around 4% short of a majority. Even if the Liberal-Democrats slide in the polls, either of the major parties would need to capture nearly all of the defecting voters to get a majority. For example, suppose the Lib-Dems slide to 20% by election time. In this scenario, there are 10% up for grabs. To reach a majority at that level, the Conservatives need 40.6%, up 7.6% from their current polling. But Labour would need 35.2%, up 7.2-8.2%. So in either case, the defectors would have to split something like 3:1 for one of the major parties to avoid a hung parliament.

It's worth noting, by the way, that the poll of polls result before the debate shows Conservatives 39%, Labour 32%, Lib-Dems 18%, Other 9%... and the calculator shows that to be a hung parliament as well.

What Nick Clegg Means

I can't claim to have followed the British election campaigns very closely. But it seems clear that this weekend's televised debates changed everything. Going into the debate, the Tories had a big lead in the polls, translating (due to some peculiarities in the Parliamentary system that I don't pretend to understand) into a likely small majority in Parliament (and hence into the formation of a stable Tory government under David Cameron). Labour was next (under Gordon Brown), distantly followed by the Liberal Democrats under Nick Clegg.

But then Clegg pulled a Ross Perot in the debate, emerging as the clear winner, and now the Lib Dems appear to have pulled into a three-way tie (effectively). The polls are roughly split 30-30-30 with 10% undecided. Will the Clegg effect remain until the election? It's only two weeks away.

During the last Presidential campaign, some Canadian told me that the best and worst thing about the U.S. system was the interminable campaigning. It's certainly grueling, both for the participants and politics-minded observers. But by the time the election comes around, there are few surprises - the candidates have been put through such a wringer that we know them well, or should.

With the foreshortened Parliamentary schedule, can the same be said of Nick Clegg? The Perot bounce after the first debate in 1992 faded and he ended up a distant (but still meaningful) third by the time of the general election. What will happen to Clegg? It's a very important question, particularly in the UK, because if no party wins a majority of seats, it's possible that no government can be formed. Even before the debates, the best the Tories could have hoped was a small majority of seats. If they can't get even this, then an unstable coalition government may be the only possibility. This is bad news for the Tories, since the alliance would probably be between the Lib-Dems and Labour.

However the election comes out, though, the emergence of Clegg probably heralds a leftward swing in the next British government.