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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » PB/Polling Matters podcast on Brexit, Article 50 polling, Scot
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » PB/Polling Matters podcast on Brexit, Article 50 polling, Scotland and the return of GfK
After a momentous day in British politics, Keiran and Rob discuss public opinion on Brexit and Keiran looks at Scotland’s future with Ipsos Mori Scotland Research Director Mark Diffley. Finally, Keiran talks more about the new GfK political polling that has Corbyn’s approval rating among Brits being as weak as Donald Trump’s. More on that polling (including methodology and data tables here).
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I've often felt we should differentiate more between politics and government, though it is more difficult in the UK than the US, as we have much less of a separation of powers. Apart from anything else, they require different skills. Our system assumes that people who are good at one will be good at the other, but my experience working in government has been that many Ministers aren't talented in governing and indeed some aren't even that interested.
It's very telling that Andrew Adonis, who could have gone on to very many things both in wonkdom and beyond, found this politics-vs-government gulf so concerning that he poured his post-ministerial efforts into the Institute for Government.
I wonder if you are in any position to give an informed view of the effectiveness of that institute's work. Looking from the outside and from a great distance, they do seem to put out some quite interesting and clearly carefully thought-through material - whether it actually affects our governance in any meaningful way, I have no idea.
What should be done? I don't have a magic bullet, but here are some ideas:
- appoint ministers with some knowledge of, or experience in, the issues with which their department deals. With the exception of law officers, that is not generally done, e.g. we often have chancellors with no basic training in economcs. It is odd that you are supposed to have a degree, preferably a Master's in economics as the most junior economist in the Treasury, but not as the person who runs the whole thing. The same applies to other departments of course.
- give all MPs, at least those that want to be ministers, some basic training in what government is and how it works, rather than letting them learn randomly on the job. Even a two-day course would make a great deal of difference.
- civil servants should answer back more, and not treat ministers as Gods, though they should always accept the minister's final decision. The minister may have the democratic mandate, but they have the expertise.
Thanks for the response. Much appreciated.
" Quite simply, civil servants are trained to defer to ministers in virtually every instance, unless something is impossible or illegal. ... civil servants should answer back more, and not treat ministers as Gods, though they should always accept the minister's final decision. The minister may have the democratic mandate, but they have the expertise."
Interesting how perspectives run. "My civil servants were too compliant" is rarely the regret of a former minister. Replace "compliant" with "obstructive", however...
But again, at this distance, I have no way of discerning either whether their complaints are genuine and heartfelt (must be nice to have big fat amorphous unloved civil service to blame for you not having met your promises) or even if it's genuine but a sign their expectations of how everything would work were skewed - did they unreasonably suppose they would be The Boss, able to dictate that X, Y and Z would all happen by tomorrow, before they got some more realistic feedback which they filed under "resistance" in their mental cabinet of grievances? Given how few ministers have experience of running large organisations of any sorts, let alone a country, this wouldn't entirely surprise me.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-39435786
No no not that key claim...the less unsurprising one, that the Russian have spys in the US.
No one has done more to detoxify the Tory brand in Scotland in the last three decades, and with Jeremy Corbyn as the current UK Labour Leader that is some accolade!! You do not take your eye of your day job, leave a vacuum for a much needed strong Opposition and then ignore the voters when you have a formidable new Opponent as Leader of the main Opposition at Holyrood. Take it from me, Ruth Davidson will be FM.
Still a long way from that, of course.
It is absolutely a weapon in our arsenal, the PM should not be afraid to use it or to pull back our forces from the Eastern European border with immediate effect before they have the assets ready/built to replace the withdrawn units.
Like it or not, security, military and intelligence gathering is one of the key strengths of this nation. It is also an area where the EU nations outside of France are notoriously poor after decades of neglect and budget cuts.
If the EU wants to withold the benefits of the single market, that's entirely up to them, but in the same manner the benefits of our superior intelligence networks and military support are entirely within our remit to withold.
The PM was absolutely right to pair economic benefits of trade with security cooperation. I am sure the Eastern European nations, Germany and others have noticed. Hence the wailing of Remainers in this country who have suddenly realised that the UK hand isn't as weak as they were all hoping.
It's not just a headline, it is a hard negotiation position that the PM is right to use. You might not like that decreasing the security of the continent is a useful card to play, but it is definitely within our remit to play it if they force our hand.
Also, it's not helping terrorists, it is witholding intelligence from foreign agencies. If you feel that way then look to the US who have shared very little with the Europeans for the better part of 50 years. Are you really saying that the US is "helping terrorists"? It may not suit your agenda of the UK not using the strongest hand to get a good trade deal but so be it.
Serious people on the continent are now looking very worried at the idea that the UK's vast intelligence gathering networks will no longer be available. That's the bottom line. We retreat to the Five Eyes, keep our existing arrangement with France and let the rest of the continent fend for itself as the US does.
And of course, we will still be fighting them in our own country, as I said we have the virtue of being an island nation which has a hard border with Europe.
Like it or not, the Europeans are stuffed because they spent the last 30 years neglecting their own intelligence gathering networks and became reliant on an outside power who is able to withdraw support at any time.
Also, if both sides share information then connections might be made that are unavailable to only one side.
It's in our interests as well as theirs to work with EU countries on intelligence.
That is quite a long time in political terms but it is difficult, given the state of SLAB, to see how the SNP will not still be dominating Scottish politics at that point. At the moment I would say there is about a 75% chance of an Indyref in 2022 or 2023.
As someone who is pretty optimistic about our trading relationship with the EU post Brexit I do not think it will have much impact. OTOH we are getting pretty close to being due a recession. It is already 9 years since the last one albeit growth has generally been very restrained. If that recession is blamed on Brexit, and the timing could be unfortunate, then Scots might be persuaded to have a grievance about it. Some of us are rather good at that, unfortunately.
The practical upshot of this is that many politicians are subsumed into and by the job and come and go without having left a personal mark on it at all, with the more determined/focused/capabable needing to focus all of their efforts on the two or three things they absolutely want to achieve. The effort to direct the bureaucracy's attention to these, on top of doing all the politics with colleagues and the public, is immense, but with drive and determination it can be done. But the outcome is as you describe - the politician leaves with these few personal things achieved; the officials get all the other business done as it would have been done regardless.
Edit/During the Blair years, ministers were chopped about all the time, which didn't deliver good governance. I suspect this was a lot to do with New Labour's command and control mentality with the top team never wanting to risk anyone below them getting a power base from authority in the job.
As for not warning them, I'm sure we would do so if a plot was uncovered, even the Americans go that far. The issue is the day to day surveillance and basic information gathering networks are complete and utter shit on the continent and half of the agencies are riddled with double agents. That is where British agencies are incredibly strong and secure. That all costs money and the UK taxpayer has borne this burden for a very long time, while we were in the EU it made sense, outside of the EU it changes the balance. Not all 27 nations are immediately our allies and not all 27 nations can be trusted. We can and should help prevent active plots just as the Americans do, but base level intelligence sharing? Let's talk trade first.
UK - We're leaving
EU - OK - you will become a "Third Country" and should expect to be treated as such
UK - Fair enough - same applies to Intelligence
EU- OUTRAGEOUS!!!
"I'm sure if there was an imminent attack we were aware of we'd tell them"
Intelligence is often about connections as well as 'hard' intelligence. With less information sharing all sides will miss potentially useful connections.
The lack of sharing information would mean that connections between other pieces of information would not be made, and an attempt to perform an atrocity may not be caught in time.
But IANAE, and it would be good to get Yokel's views on this.
"half of the agencies are riddled with double agents"
That's an interesting claim. Do you have a source?
This requires a different kind of intelligence with the equivalent of boots on the ground trying to weigh which of the nutters mouthing off is actually a threat and which can be safely ignored. I honestly don't know how much help we can be to EU countries in those kinds of assessments. At best we could suggest a list of people who are seriously worth a look.
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/11/29/german-intelligence-officer-arrested-islamist-plot-raising-fears/amp/
Stopping a plot is literally just informing them of an imminent attack, it doesn't require much sharing of intelligence. It's what the US does with most of its allies outside of the Five Eyes.
As for your last paragraph, you miss the point: we may not know their is going to be an attack because some of the base-level intelligence required to detect it has not been shared.
Poverty
NHS
Oh well, at least the SNP can campaign on their infrastructure record:
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-39417642
High winds on the East Coast? Who knew?
Actually no.. Its a collective responsibility of past PM's who allowed the UK to be sucked into the European mulch. Lets not forget Gordon Brown's disgraceful behaviour over the Lisbon Treaty.. Eventually when given the chance the Nation said enough is enough. To blame Cameron for allowing a democratic choice is far too simplistic.
It should be remembered that several European mainland terrorist attacks involved men who had moved extensively around Europe and elsewhere before the attacks; we can expect some other would-be terrorists would also have left traces abroad.
What next? Pointing our nukes at Berlin?
There was publication overnight of some Prof Curtice led research in Scotland relating to Brexit conducted by Nat Cen Social research. They largely want the same relationship with the EU that their fellow Britons do.
At some level this potentially puts British citizens at potential further risk anyway, and the EU will know that. Fuck em (us) I say.
http://blog.whatscotlandthinks.org/2017/03/what-do-voters-in-scotland-want-from-brexit/
Another nail in the "Scotland is different" coffin.....
That said, since Britain has now definitively ruled out by far the optimal negotiating strategy of seeking to play a constructive part in post-Brexit Europe, attempting brute (though relatively much smaller) force is a massively inferior second best - akin to the strategy of the Huns facing the more powerful but more effete approach of the late Roman Empire. Though how Theresa May thinks she's going to get unity behind her on this approach is quite beyond me.
You keep repeating that, but I think you're wrong, for the reasons I state below. Intelligence is often about connections, and this change would mean that we might miss many potentially useful connections.
As a perhaps-poor example: person A is of interest to us. Person C is of interest to us. They meet Person B, who is a foreign national. And we now know f'all about whether Person B is someone we should now be paying especial interest in, and whether what might be an innocent meeting is something more sinister. Worse, person B's country won't know that he met with two people of interest to us.
Person B could be a 'clean' distant relative of person A who has come to the UK to visit a mutual sick relative. Or he might be a career criminal with a record of violence and who has been known to meet with others of interest in his own country.
Both sides are weakened by a lack of cooperation.
I met up with an old Leaver friend in Westminster, where we had ribeye steaks washed down with Chapel Down English champagne.
Delicious. Didn't get back till late. Suffering a bit today.
The end to end encryption model is robust, which is why nation states have largely moved efforts on to the end point. The message whilst in transmission is unbreakable.
The weaknesses of our politicians is being laid bare. They have spent too much time shouting at each other at Westminster and think the world works that way.
And if you want to use the line that we shouldn't be putting European lives at risk by such a strategy, then a) they are only at risk if the EU holds out against acknowledging our strength and b) we need to get the best deal we can to fund the NHS. The snowflakes can't scream that "Tory cuts to our NHS put lives at risk" - and then bitch when we make the case to get the best financial settlement to, er, help fund the NHS....
If this is our strongest card, boy are we screwed.
Churchill's actions at Mers-el-Kebir spring to mind.
Of course, this assumes that we actually do this and it is actually useful to them. Bottom line is it's something we have going for us so why not use it?
To appeal to this raw meat tabloid culture even semi sane people are pumping out their chests advising our ex allies 'don't mess with us'.
And all this despite the uncomfortable fact that nearly all our terrorist outrages are home grown. It's the continent who ought to want to quarantine themselves from us.
So they see nothing wrong in being hardline with us, but expect us to be nothing sweetness and light, if we expect anything at all from them, and very grateful for what we do get.
Similarly, how many of their considerably more frequent and higher impact incidents have been a consequence of our terrorists?
There is either a cross border threat, as Leave always suggested and Remain denied, or there isn't.
Hopefully we ask for half up front and the other half when we show them.
Bit grumpy on here.
F1: I was thinking about the Shanghai circuit the other night. More straights, including a big one, than Australia. I suspect McLaren will have a hellish race. Might be relatively poorer for Renault too (I think they're having to use last year's ERS which is costing them quite a few horsepower).
The UK has developed a huge and unsustainable trade deficit with the rest of the world, one which dwarfs the scale of previous decades, and almost all of that trade deficit is accounted for by trade with the EU. We're pretty well in balance with the rest of the world, so without EU trade, our trade deficit would virtually disappear. As such, it's overwhelmingly in the EU's interests to continue with the current arrangements, while by contrast the UK can afford to be sanguine over the prospect of some scaling back of the volume of such trade under some tariff and non-tariff barriers, should the EU demand a high price for continuing as now.
We'd be foolish not to have one in the barrel for them.