Bad Spreadsheets Part II: Horse and Hound edition

So: despite the extraordinary Sturm and Drang over the Tory leadership, the Boris-ing and the coming Brexit rebellions, it seems that the return of two-party politics in the UK has got us stuck in a kind of cold war. Both parties appear to be electorally maxed out at over 40% (let's not forget that on 8 June although Labour got its best vote share since 2001, the Tories got their best vote share since 1992). David Runciman, amongst others, thinks there's "no reason to suppose either party is capable of making big advances from its current position: both may be close to the limits of their appeal." Despite public Tory meltdown, neither side is moving very much. And Labour are still 60-odd seats away from a majority.

If, then, I said I thought we were a whisker away from a progressive government (assuming we can get an election) you'd be forgiven for scepticism. Needless to say, I -- like everyone else -- was wrong about the last election. So why believe me, when six months ago, right before Seven Nation Army and a 10% swing, I was arguing obstreperously that the young simply aren’t numerous enough to propel Labour anywhere close to winning?

But in fact, as the post-election surveying has shown, most pundits' first diagnosis of the Corbynite 'youthquake' was also wrong. Although turnout was up massively amongst under-25s – from around 43% in 2015 to at least 54% in 2017, and perhaps as much as 58% – it seems clear that they weren’t numerous enough to deliver Labour's big gains. [Jan 2018 edit: in fact the authoritative British Election Study now shows under-25 turnout was barely up at all -- the margin of error means it could even have decreased]. Very substantial boosts in Labour support amongst 30-44 year olds were equally if not more important. My piss-poor spreadsheet was wrong not because I overestimated the electoral stranglehold of older voters, but because I hadn’t imagined there could be anywhere near as big a shift in the voting intentions of middle-aged cohorts as there was between April and June this year. The underlying demography, however, is still there. Indeed, it’s extraordinary testimony to the demographic dominance of the elderly electorate that Labour can have a majority in every age cohort under 50, and still be 56 seats down. 

Paradoxially, though, Labour’s reliance on 8 June on a middle-aged swing, rather than massive youth turnout, is good news for the potential power of the youth vote. Because it suggests that, whatever Runciman et al may say, Labour still has some powder dry. Nearly half of Labour's most supportive demographic constituencies still aren't turning out to vote. Meanwhile Tory-dominated age cohorts are already giving it everything they’ve got. Turnout amongst over-55s was pushing 70%. Amongst the Conservatives’ shock troops, the over-70s, it was around 84%, and surely can’t go much higher. 

The middle-aged swing, in other words, gives the under-30s the electoral space to be truly influential. Which in turn suggests a strategy, says my friend Mika Mino. 

Let's assume that age-specific voting intentions stay roughly the same (a heroic assumption, of course, and precisely what everyone was wrong about before; but I find it very hard to believe that under-25s will swing significantly towards the Tories any time soon). In other words, assume that around 62% of under-30s are going to vote Labour again, about 22% will vote Tory again, and that those who didn’t vote this time round have roughly the same voting intentions as those who did (another heroic assumption). 

In that case, maybe just going down to knife-edge marginals and helping register new under-30 voters (and who, left-wing or right-wing, could argue with youth voter registration as a democratic pursuit) would generate enough new Labour votes to tip us over the line next time round? 

Mika has been having a look at how the maths stacks up. At the risk of well-deserved ridicule, I’ve extended the thought by tabulating the numbers for Tory marginals with the slimmest majorities (many thanks to BritainElects.com for spreadsheeting the GE2017 results).

Assume that a working majority, taking into account Sinn Féin empty seats, is still 322, and that we’re after a Lab-SNP-LD-Green pact – currently on 310 seats. Labour therefore needs to win at least another 15-odd seats. And the numbers in the top 15 Tory super-marginals are pretty striking.

The six most-marginal Tory seats each need less than 1000 new under-30 voters, in theory, to fall to Labour. These are not all new Labour voters, remember, just new voters for all parties in that age-range. Across all 15 seats, we need just 21,200 new under-30 voters to come out and vote. That’s about 0.2% of the 18-to-30 population. More people bought Horse and Hound magazine last month. Seriously - we're talking about a number of people smaller than that proportion of the population for whom "Can You Prove You Own Your Horse?" is clickbait.

This is, of course, a reductio ad absurdum. It doesn't take into account age-specific variations in voting intention between constituencies (because we don't have the data, for the most part). And it's built on huge assumptions, at a time when the only rule in British politics is, of course, that all assumptions are wrong. This isn't a static fight. The Tories will seriously up their offer in the next election. There will be many, many other things to be done. Nonetheless -- to completely reverse my previous argument -- it does look like a targeted youth registration drive might be a significant component of bringing a progressive government to power.

If only we could have another election sometime soon.

Which is the thing the Fixed-term Parliaments Act seems to make impossible. That's a subject for my next post. But for now, have a look at these lovely numbers...

Constituency	2015	2017	2017 Result	Con majority 2017	Number of new under-30 voters needed for Lab majority
Middlesbrough South & East Cleveland	Lab	Con	Gain	1,020	2,550
Bolton West	Con	Con	Hold	936	2,340
Broxtowe	Con	Con	Hold	863	2,158
Northampton North	Con	Con	Hold	807	2,018
Telford	Con	Con	Hold	720	1,800
Stoke-on-Trent South	Lab	Con	Gain	663	1,658
Aberconwy	Con	Con	Hold	635	1,588
Calder Valley	Con	Con	Hold	609	1,523
Norwich North	Con	Con	Hold	507	1,268
Chipping Barnet	Con	Con	Hold	353	883
Hastings & Rye	Con	Con	Hold	346	865
Thurrock	Con	Con	Hold	345	863
Pudsey	Con	Con	Hold	331	828
Preseli Pembrokeshire	Con	Con	Hold	314	785
Southampton, Itchen	Con	Con	Hold	31	78

Eight speculations

I know, I know: bloggers should resist the urge to speculate about a company’s tax affairs unless they’ve really spent a good long time scouring company registries, reading court cases, talking to people in and outside the company, corresponding with tax directors. Doing their best to review everything that’s in the public domain, and as much of what isn’t as they can get their hands on.

I haven’t, it’s fair to say, done all this with Starbucks.**

But Starbucks sits so interestingly in the tax arena - as ‘bricks-and-mortar’ a retail operation as it’s possible to get, yet accused of all the same shenanigans with royalties and intangibles and offshoring of intra-group services as the ‘digital economy’ guys – that I just couldn’t resist the company’s announcement last month about moving its European HQ to the UK, a move Starbucks claims “will mean we pay more tax in the UK”.

Why does it matter?

Never mind the regime change

There's little more to be said about the efforts expended by successive UK governments in recent years to brown-nose Colonel Gaddafi's military and security apparatus, right up until the moment in February when they suddenly decided it had always been a "brutal regime" that "had to go" (with a sort of twisted jingoism, this ground's been particularly well-covered in the Sunday Telegraph).

A couple of extra vignettes from a belated FOI request, though, confirms in particular the primacy of international arms fairs as occasions for a quick spot of security diplomacy. It seems Libyan and British security officials could hardly bring themselves to meet at all without leafing through a weapons catalogue:

• David Cameron's 'Counter Terrorism Advisor for North Africa', Maj Gen Robin Searby (right) visited Tripoli in November 2010 along with a "senior UK Military officer". November 2010 just happens to have been the occasion of the last 'LibDex' arms fair in Tripoli.
  
  (Maj Gen Searby, incidentally, has moved smoothly on from brown-nosing Gaddafi in the name of counter-terrorism and arms sales, to brown-nosing that other noted democrat and human rights enthusiast, President Bouteflika of Algeria).



• Libyan Interior Minister, General Abd Al Fattah Younis Al Obeidi (left), met with Foreign Office Minister Gerald Howarth on 19 July 2010, during the Farnborough International Air Show, vis Farnborough Arms Fair.
  
  (Abd Al Fattah, you'll recall, was formerly head of Libya's human-rights-friendly special forces, switched to the rebels in February, and was killed in an inter-necine rebel row in July).

This is in addition to the regular visits of Libyan military missions to the UK (which might be expected to take place under the aegis of arms fairs and weapons sales).

• "A visit took place in late July 2010 when five members of the Libyan Air Defence Technical Committee (ADTC) attended the Farnborough International Air Show (FIAS) between 19-21 July at the invitation of the previous Government. The delegation was led by Brigadier General Suliman Ramadan Ahmedah and was combined with a visit to General Dynamics UK in Wales to assess the company’s capability to act as prime integrator for Libya’s Air Defence modernisation programme. Additionally, the ADTC visited RAF Boulmer to see Air Defence Command, Radar and the Search and Rescue Squadron facility."

(Memo to Libyan Air Defence Technical Committee: don't let a foreign country redesign your air defences if there's any chance in the near future they might want to, um, rapidly destroy your air defences).


• "A further visit took place 19-24 September 2010 of a four-man delegation from the Libyan Military Engineering Academy. The delegation was led by Brigadier General Ali Mohamed Saeed al Fakri. The visit programme included a number of UK military technical training and academic establishments such as; the armoured training school at Bovington, the Royal Signals school at Blandford, the REME Arms school at Arborfield, the Defence Academy, Cranfield University and the marine engineering school at HMS Sultan. A demonstration of a REME Light Aid Detachment (LAD) ‘in action’ was also provided at in the vicinity of Tidworth garrison."

Needless to say, the UK Ministry of Defence declined to release to me any actual documents or records related to these meetings, or the "wide-ranging "Accord on a Defence Co-operation and Defence Industrial Partnership" that the UK signed with Libya on 29th May 2007 (for anyone hunting this Accord in future through FOI, training aspects were apparently the subject of a separate Memorandum of Understanding signed on 17 February 2009). I particularly enjoyed the rationale for their refusal: that disclosure could "damage our [the UK's] ability to co-operate militarily with Libya in the future". And if we were left in any doubt about the government's firm intention to resume yet another round of cosying up to yet another Libyan regime with arms sales and security training, there's this nice aside to the MOD's description of the UK-Libya Defence Accord:

The aim of the Accord (which technically remains extant) is “to build stable and long-term special relations between the countries as equal partners, proceeding from the principle of mutual respect and confidence”. (Emphasis added)

Cute.