How long with Cameron's party last in government?

By Irfan Ahmed

I am someone who believes if the Conservatives get elected to government they won’t last very long, on that note I would like to run a poll on Political Betting Channel 2 to try and find out what other think. I would like to know, how long people think a Tory government will last.

My view is that they will only last one term, as Cameron and Co. will show the general public they are politically unable to run the country and will lose the 2015 general election.

But what do you think?

Schumacher's Stiff Neck

So, it now looks highly likely that Schumacher will race for Ferrari again, quite probably for the remainder of the season. However, this is not yet an absolute certainty as there are still questions over his neck, stiff after a motorbike crash some months ago and possibly not up to the tremendous G-forces of F1.

Should he get in the car Schumacher will also face the problem of never having driven it. The ban on testing means that Ferrari needed to acquire unanimous agreement from the other teams for their ‘new’ boy to play with the F60 prior to Valencia, permission they failed to be granted thanks to Red Bull (title contenders), sister team Toro Rosso and Williams.

He has, however, been practising in a privately owned Ferrari F1 car from the 2007 season, equipped with slicks. He’s also been practising with karting and shed a few pounds already.

Importantly, Schumacher’s enormous experience of circuits will be less valuable at Valencia because he’s never raced there. The next race after Valencia is Spa in Belgium, a classic circuit Schumacher will know like the back of his hand. He’s won there no fewer than six times, and Ferrari is the top winning team, with 15 victories in Belgium. A second place in Hungary will fuel speculation Raikonnen and Schumacher have real podium potential, especially at Spa.

It will also be interesting to see whether or not Hamilton can retain the form that saw him triumph in Hungary after Alonso (probably not driving at Valencia due to a team punishment for Renault after a failed pit stop meant one of his wheels went walkies on the track) dropped out.

Morris Dancer

Unknown Knowns

Following the Rumsfeldian theme....

What are the events that will happen, but are not general known/thought about? There are many occasions when specialists or intersted parties have knowledge that hasn't reached the counciousness of the general public as a whole. For example, I was quite surpised during the Petrol Strike by the fact that people *didn't* know that 80% of the price of petrol is tax.

An interesting event that will occur is the replacement of petrol with battery powered. The current state of the art is that such cars have a reasonable range and good performance, but a very high price. Within 10 years, we will have cars in the sub-£20,000 category, capable of a driving 500 miles between charges. Such vehicles would be cheaper to own than the equivelant fossil fuel vehicles. While the possibility of electric vehicles is known, the rapidity wth which they are going to become a cheap practical transport system isn't

Hydrogen - the main competitor - is not capable of improving the energy density (the amount of fuel that can be stored) much further. Refueling times are fixed at the half hour level by the physics of cryogenic material. Fuel cells are complex and just as liable to degrade over time as batteries.

What will be the results of this change. A common place about electric vehicles is that if there is a mass takeup of the technology the electricity grid will collapse. There is a power shortage in the near future by most measures, after all. But consider - such vehicles might well be charged at night, when there is a vast surplus of generating capacity. An interesting possibility is that filling stations would store power in huge, fixed, battery banks. Cars would "fill up" from them rapidly, and they would steadliy charge overnight. This would be preferable to huge, short duration loads on the grid, by directly charging a car in 10 minutes (say). This infrastructure has been suggested by all the studies into mass use of electric vehicles.

Such a battery bank would be a vast store of electricty. This would enable electricty generators to "smooth" the generation curve. A perfect world for the generating companies would be a completely flat level of demand, 24 hours a day. This would mean that the number of power plants could be massively reduced - a huge amount of capacity is only there to meet peak demand. Good bye power shortage? Wind power would also become much more usable if there is somewhere to store the power generated at the wrong time.

What of revenue? Green vehicles are currently barely taxed. It would not take a great deal of takeup to start hitting the government hard in the wallet. Introducing taxes on green vehciles will be very difficult. For the foresable future, taxes at the level levied on fossil fuel vehicles would render alternative fuel transport uneconomic - they will cost more. It is quite possible that this will begin to be felt before the end of the next parlimentry term - definitely by the end of the one after next.

Planning is currently based on the idea that cars are undesirable. If they are silent and non-C02 emitting this will change. Houses next to major roads may become a lot less undesirable, for example...

So, power station construction may become less of an issue - not something that many are predicting at the moment. Taxation will be a major problem and urban planning will be massively effected. All within a decade or two. That and the collapse of the economies of the major oil producers. Scotland with oil no-one buys? Saudi Arabia minus 90% of it's income?

Political betting - a Rumsfeldian perspective

Chess is a trivial game. I do not make this statement to annoy chess players: it is a mathematical statement. All information is available to both players throughout, the rules are predetermined and in theory at least all possible outcomes are known.


Unlike chess, bridge is a non-trivial game. The different players have different information at different times. Each player must make his decisions not on the basis of perfect information but on the basis of what he knows at the time. It is possible to make objectively the right play but for it to fail where other plays would have succeeded. Good players will win in the long run, but they can and often will lose in the short run.


Politics is non-trivial and it is not a game. Not only do different players have different information at different times, the rules can change dramatically - if indeed there are any rules. Things that can seem completely unimportant in advance can become the subject of all-consuming debate. Dull subjects can become the lead story. Who would have guessed in January that the public would have been transfixed for days by a political story involving a bathplug and porn?


All of this is perhaps stating the bleeding obvious. But political betters do have a tendency to assume inevitability about the future in a way that they would consider barking mad in other aspects of life. Sometimes the race goes not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but time and strong happen to them all.


Political betting involves weighing up contingencies: when is the election date? will Gordon Brown be replaced? can Labour recover in the polls? But behind those contingencies, the known unknowns if you like, there are, as Donald Rumsfeld put it, unknown unknowns: the things we don't know we don't know.


Some things are truly unknowable, but others are unknown unknowns simply because no one has bothered to think about them. So in that spirit, I set out five things that might transform British politics in the next 10 months.


1. A natural disaster


George W Bush was able to invade Iraq, screw up the occupation and still get comfortably re-elected. But he never really recovered from the debacle of Hurrican Katrina. In Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen, but we could get floods, storms, unnatural heat (don't laugh), a big freeze or, if you are a fan of the Discovery channels, the fallout from supervolcanoes or asteroid strikes. Would it be to the benefit or detriment of the Government? That depends on how it was handled. An asteroid strike would, I expect, lead to a sharp rise in Lib Dem prospects in Wales.

2. Financial turmoil

Amazingly, given that we have only just come out of a bout of this, everyone seems to have forgotten how scary it can be. Might it happen again? If it did and the Treasury responded with as much assurance as it did last time round, might the Government benefit?

3. War


As late as mid-July 1914, the war that British people feared was a civil war in Ireland. A new war could erupt very quickly. There are plenty of obvious flashpoints where Britain might get sucked in - and staying out might be as controversial as going to war in some locations. If the war was of worldwide significance, British politics would be shaken up completely.


4. Flags at half mast


This is rather morbid, but if the Queen were to die, the nation would go into mourning. Things that seemed perfectly fine in normal circumstances would seem horribly inappropriate. Some politicians would get it right, some would get it completely wrong.


Then the nation would be consumed by issues of the succession and the difficult question whether Camilla should be queen. No politician is going to rush into that, particularly since the heir to the throne is hardly a man without opinions of his own.


Fortunately, the Queen seems to be in excellent health.


5. David Cameron trashes his brand


The story of the last few years has been the inexorable rise of David Cameron. But he is a man not a demigod, and he can make mistakes. One serious mistake is all it takes to finish a politician off. If David Cameron becomes damaged goods, all bets are off for the next election.


Of course, none of these things may come to pass. Other entirely unexpected things almost certainly will come to pass. Each year something comes as a bolt from the blue. When calculating political odds, a discount factor must be applied for "events".


antifrank

Mandy for MP may not mean Mandy for PM

There is evidence that Peter Mandelson wants to return to the House of Commons.

Why? Why does he need to be an MP?

The conventional wisdom is that he wants to be leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister. However, we should consider what this would mean. If he is parachuted into a super safe seat, then it might be possible to have in place by the end of the year. Could a man who had to resign a record number of times from the cabinet lead the party to victory? The odds suggest that the best that Labour can hope for is a hung parliament. Even that is probably a slim prospect.

A further question is whether he would actually get the job. Brown would have to step down – is that probable? Then, he would have to be elected by the party at large in a coronation – there is little time left for a fully contested election. Many in the Labour party - especially those on the left – would oppose him, whatever the cost. After all of that - would Mandelson want to return to lead the party to defeat?

Could it be that he wants to be an MP, one of the survivors after the next election? To run for leader in the aftermath? I think that this is more plausible - but still very unlikely. There would be time for the leadership battle, and some on the left might accept him as the price to prove that their party wasn’t heading for the 1980s again – a party lead by Mandy couldn’t be considered hard left, despite left wing policies.

Another issue, and one that I think is much more important, relates to the Tory plans for the Lords (what follows assumes a Tory victory). Currently there is a Labour majority. Brown (or whoever is the Labour leader at the next election) will submit a large honours list as well. Cameron could deal with this by appointing a vast number of new Lords – but this would swell the size of the house to ridiculous proportions. More likely is the possibility of a largely (90%?) elected house of a smaller, fixed size. This would just happen to chuck out the vast majority of the peers created under New Labour. Mandy and Michael Martin losing their positions would play very nicely with the Conservative base. To the public at large a massive cut in the size of the House of Lords combined elections and clearing out the dead wood could be a very popular.

The impetus for such reform will be the (almost certain) use of the Labour majority to try and stop the policies of the new Conservative government. I do not expect them to respect convention on what the Lords can and cannot do. They will see themselves as the last bastion of the Labour party, and will attack in whatever way they can.

Mandy would be smart to avoid this sad fight – the sight of the life peers vainly trying to hold onto their allowances will not be pretty and will play very badly with the public. Peter Mandelson MP would be unaffected - he could get on with the job he probably wants, being the power behind the throne. Betting on him becoming PM before the election seems like a very long shot to me – even afterwards would be improbable. But Mandy returning to the Commons seems increasingly likely.

The punters' view of how well Cameron will do

In a recent post on Political Betting, antifrank listed the best odds available from the various bookies for bands of seats which the main parties might win in the General Election.

Using that data as a starting point, we can estimate the implied probability for any particular result. For example, let's take the Conservative seat total. The best odds quoted for the low end were:

Under 100 200/1
100 - 124 200/1
125 - 149 150/1

Converting these odds to probabilities, and adding them up in turn, this means that the bookies think there is a 0.49% chance of the Tories winning less than 100 seats, a 0.995% chance of them winning less than 125, and a 1.65% chance of them winning less than 150 seats. Or, to look at it the other way round, the bookies are saying the Tories have a probability of 0.9951 of winning at least 100 seats, 0.9905 of winning at least 125, and 0.9835 of winning at least 150.

Continuing the process, we can find the cumulative probability for the upper figure in each of the bands quoted, right up to 450 or more. (We have to make a correction, to allow for the bookies' profit margin of around 15%, to ensure that our probabilities add up to 1.00). And it is then a simple matter to fit a curve to the resulting data points, to give us a smooth interpolation of the probabilities for any number of seats in the range. (Note for pointy-heads: I used a degree-6 polynomial fit). The results are as follows (Click on the graph for a higher resolution version)


It is now a simple matter to read off the probability for the Conservatives winning at least N seats, for any value of N. For example, the markets are saying that there is around a 50% chance of Cameron winning 350 seats or more.

I have also marked a few points which show the implied probabilities for other markets. (The ones I've shown are all bets on the Conservatives winning either a majority of a certain size, or winning individual seats - see below).

By seeing where they lie on the chart, you can see if they are good value or not, compared with what the seat bands are telling us. If you are betting for the Conservatives, you want the point to be as far below the line as possible (i.e. lower implied probability, which means better odds). Conversely, if you are betting against the Conservatives, you want the point to be as far above the line as possible.

Take the Betfair Party Seats line, for which the current mid-point and last matched price is 360 for the Tories, i.e. this is the figure which punters on that market think corresponds to a probability of 0.5. If you look at the graph, you'll see that this is about 10 seats higher than the seat bands market implies for a probability of 0.5; this indicates that buying the Tories on this market is not good value compared with the seats band. The same is true for the Paddy Power and Ladbrokes markets for majority of over 50 and over 100 (however, in these cases you need to allow for the bookies' profit margin). On the other hand, betting on the other side (for a majority of less than 50, on Paddy Power at odds of 2.5, implying a probability of 0.4 that the Tories will NOT get a majority of at least 50), looks good value compared with the seats band (To avoid clutter, I haven't shown this on the chart).

We can also do something very interesting for assessing spread bets. Since we now have the cumulative probability, we can trivially deduce the implied probability for exactly N seats, for any N (it's just the difference between the probability of at least N and at least N-1). And if we sum the product of those probabilities times the number of seats, we get the price which the seat band markets imply should be the mid-point for the spreads (i.e. the expected value). This is currently very substantially less than the actual mid-point for the Tories: SPIN's mid-point is 359.5, the weighted value of the seat-bands market is about 340. This is not a surprise when you look at the shape of the chart, which has a long flat tail at the low end of the distribution. But it does mean that if you want to bet on a Tory seats value of greater than 360, you may be better off betting on the seats bands than on SPIN.

I must emphasise that none of this means that the other markets are necessarily wrong ; what I have done here is simply reflect what one particular betting market (the seat bands) implies is the probability distribution. We'll never know whether it is correct; this is not a physics experiment, you can't simply repeat this general election hundreds of times under identical conditions to find out how many times each outcome occurs. This is where one has to apply one's own judgement; personally, I think the distribution is too skewed towards the low end, and that the actual probability distribution should be more weighted to a Tory majority in the 25 to 100 region. Others may disagree: that is the essence of political betting.

Finally, a note on individual constituencies. This is much more speculative, because of individual variations (although not every seat can buck the trend!) I've marked a few examples, where I've taken the implied probability from the best available odds in the market, and related these to the corresponding Tory majority at which the seat would fall, everything else being equal. (I used Anthony Wells' excellent UK Polling Report website for the data. )

Take, for example, Broxtowe, the constituency of PB regular Dr. Nick Palmer MP. According to UK Polling Report, the Conservatives would have 214 seats if the 2005 election vote shares were repeated with the new boundaries,and Broxtowe is Tory target 42. Therefore, if everything else were equal, the probability of Broxtowe going Blue would be the same as the probability of the Tories winning 214+42=256 seats in all. Looking at the chart, the probability of this is around 0.9, so we would expect the odds to be no better than decimal 1.11 (1/9). In fact you can get 1.20 (1/5) from Ladbrokes, implying a probability of just 0.83 (and that's without making allowance for Ladbrokes' profit margin). This means that either a bet on the Conservatives winning Broxtowe is very good value compared with the seat bands, or there is some specific reason why Broxtowe is less likely to fall to the Tories than other targets which would fall to similar swings.

Conversely, applying the same method to a seat like Birmingham Selly Oak, you get a data point which falls far above the line on the chart; this suggests (in the absence of any other information) that it is bad value to bet on the Tories winning here; it could, therefore, be very good value to bet on Labour retaining it.

Richard Nabavi

Naming the Date - When will the General Election be?

From time to time there is a fresh round of speculation about the date of the General Election. Some say that, with unemployment [a lagging indicator] getting worse, the sooner it's called for Labour the better. But then Mark Penn pops up so say that Labour can still recover so actually it might be a case of wait-and-see. But one thing's for sure, until we have fixed term parliaments, the Government can call the date so I want to think about when that might be.

The Electoral Commission's website http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/faq/elections/what-is-the-last-possible-date-for-a-general-election states quite clearly what the latest possible date for the General must be.

The five years run from the first meeting of Parliament following a UK Parliamentary general election. The current Parliament was first summoned on Wednesday 11 May 2005, so will cease to exist at midnight on Monday 10 May 2010. A general election to elect the new Parliament must be held by no later than Thursday 3 June 2010.

But how did they get these dates?

For that you need to visit the Parliament Website and an interesting paper RESEARCH PAPER 01/14
Parliamentary Election Timetables http://www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/rp2001/rp01-014.pdf, where it lays down the statutory basis for calling the date including such interesting details like the provision to delay the date by 14 days should the monarch die during the campaign.

Parliament can be disolved at any time but recent convention has been to proroge it, which is a prerogative act of the Crown, which suspends nearly all business of both Houses, including the sitting of committees, until Parliament is
summoned again. In previous C20 elections, the prorogation ceremony was an elaborate affair that took place whilst the houses were sitting but dissolution can occur at any time, even in the recess by simple Royal Proclamation and the issue of Writs.

Once the dissolution takes place the current timetable provides for a bare minumum of 24 days to polling day. This used to be 17 days but the additional time for postal voting has extended this to 24 days. But this is a tight time scale is rarely followed.

Oftentimes there's a televised announcement that the PM "intends to ask The Queen" to dissolve Parliament and the prorogation follows some days later.... and then a longer date than the 24-day minimum period for the poll is selected. In 1997, the campaign was a record 44 days made up of two parts: The announcement that John Major intended to call a dissolution then the dissolution and Campaign itself.

In Brown's case, he wants the shortest possible campaign because we know [Mike Smithson's third rule] that the more Cameron appears on the television, the better he does in the polls. And in the election period, broadcasting rules mean that the BBC have to give more coverage to the opposition parties than is unsually the case.

The current wisdom is that the General Election will be called on the 6th May 2010, just 28 days before the absolute deadline set by Statute.

And that 6th May day implies that Parliament would be either proroged or dissolved by the 12th April [24 days earlier]. Rather unhelpfully, the Parliament website does not give the dates for the 2010 Easter Recess but, taking this year's as a guide, Parliament returned on 20th April 2009 after just under 3 weeks holidays, that is 7 days after Easter Sunday.

Next year, Easter Sunday falls on 4th April, implying that Parliament would return on 12th April.... the last possible date to call the election on 6th May. Are MP's going to go on holiday in late March and just come back for one day to call the election? I just can't see this myself.

If Brown going to wait until after the holidays, why not announce the Poll on the last day of the Parliamentary spring term, which I assume [based on last year's calendar] to be on Thursday 26th March.... indicating a date of 23rd April as the date.

So, my initial gut feel is that Brown will wait until the last day in June and hang-the-consequences or use the Easter Recess to announce the date indicating a mid April poll. St Georges Day.

But what might spoil this analysis? Well, we have local elections on 6th May 2010 but only in those district Councils that elect by thirds... and nowadays they are in a small minority. I don't actually see coincidence with the Locals next May as important as I did.

In my view, The key determinant to spoil the St George's Day polling-day prediction will be the date of the Budget. This year Darling's budget was delivered on the latest date for many years [22nd April] and the date was announced on 12th February... 69 days ahead of time.

My own Man-On-The-Spot tells me that Brown will use the next budget as a last throw of the dice and then go to the Country straight away. In 2008, the budget was delivered on 12th March, over a month earlier than this year. That date was announced on 1st February, just 39 days ahead. I'd say we're looking at an early budget next year.

If you ask me to guess, I'd say that next year's Budget will be on Weds 10th March 2010 [it always seems to be a Wednesday] with Parliament proroged in an elaborate ceremony the following day... with a quick 28 day campaign to Thursday 8th April in Easter Week, when, Brown reasons, all the Tory voters will be on Holiday.

So, forget the 6th May. it's either 8th April or 23rd April.... And I'm piling it on the earlier date! Whatever it is, it's the date of the budget announced at the end of January which will tell us the date of the election.