Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Sheilbh]

What happened in Australia Sheilbh?

The Liberals lost and Labor (led by a fairly boring guy) won - but the big story was the Teal independents. They're not a party, just a coalition of independent candidates on similar principles. They're teal because it's halfway between green and the blue of the Liberals.

They won a number of the Liberals safest seats in really comfortable, very wealthy areas by emphasising climate - but also general stuff like integrity in public life and more socially liberal attitudes. The Liberals went in on a very culture war campaign (because there wasn't much else).

The Tories are very, very aware of it - partly because the same (Aussie) company of consultants that's run Liberal campaigns since John Howard have run most Tory election campaigns since 2005. But also because there are just a lot of echoes. Right wing party in government that is, at best, exhausted and has had a few recent bouts of in-fighting/leadership spills - Scott Morrison and Johnson apparently had quite a similar style too (though I never saw it).

I think they'll be very aware of the similarities and that the Lib Dems pose a very similar risk to the Teal independents. A lot of articles in the Tory press on next election's prospects for the Tories start with a warning from Australia style paragraph

[Josquius]

On teh gays and the census - the northern agenda podcast might be of interest. Recently covered this. The guy speaking did mention people being willing to identify as a key factor and the numbers shown being a start though still likely higher.

It reminded me again of the existence of Hebden Bridge. Gayer than Brighton (albeit famously lesbian). Britain's second biggest city with quaint suburbs such as Leeds and Manchester.

[Sheilbh]

On teh gays and the census - the northern agenda podcast might be of interest. Recently covered this. The guy speaking did mention people being willing to identify as a key factor and the numbers shown being a start though still likely higher.

Yeah I think that's definitely true.

It reminded me again of the existence of Hebden Bridge. Gayer than Brighton (albeit famously lesbian). Britain's second biggest city with quaint suburbs such as Leeds and Manchester.

The lesbian capital of Britain It also really fulfills gay male stereotypes of lesbians that at some point they just got organised, moved into and took over a very attractive old mill town.

Which you'd never know watching Happy Valley.

[Tamas]

I dare to say, there is a society-wide effort unfolding to prevent the fall of property prices:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jan/15/new-homes-at-risk-as-english-local-authorities-cut-housebuilding-plans

Thousands of new homes are at risk after a series of local authorities cut or delayed their housebuilding plans after ministers decided to drop mandatory building targets.

Nine local authorities in England have paused or scaled back their plans after Michael Gove announced last month that the government would no longer pursue a mandatory target of 300,000 new homes a year, a Guardian analysis has found.

They join nearly 30 other authorities that made similar decisions while they waited for Westminster to make a decision on its targets, with analysts now warning the confusion over housing policy could cost 100,000 new homes over a five-year period.

Matthew Pennycook, the shadow housing minister, said: "The impact of Rishi Sunak and Michael Gove's reckless decision to signal the end of enforceable housebuilding targets without a viable alternative is already being felt across the country.

"Their weakness in the face of backbench pressure will mean fewer homes built, a deepened housing crisis and a further blow to our economy."

Gove announced the U-turn in December, three years after the Conservatives included the target in their 2019 manifesto and months after Downing Street said it was "central to our levelling up mission".

His decision came after months of heavy lobbying from backbench Tory MPs, many of whom believed the party had lost the 2021 Chesham and Amersham byelection as a result of its national planning policies.

As dozens of MPs pushed Sunak to soften or reverse his commitment to the target, a number of local authorities stopped work on their local housebuilding plans, which were meant to be in place by the end of this year.

The planning consultancy Lichfields has calculated that 33 councils have halted or cut their housebuilding plans in the past two years, leaving England with a shortfall of between 50,000 and 100,000 new homes over the next five years.

Many of these authorities were Tory-led councils in rural areas. Dorset, for example, announced last July it was delaying the implementation of its local plan for over two years, a decision which Lichfields estimates will result in 259 fewer homes being built in the county each year.


Others, however, were in more urban areas. In 2021, Sheffield, where Labour is the largest party, announced it would delay its proposals by a year, citing changes to national planning rules. Lichfields calculated that would cost the city more than 700 new houses a year.

...

Councils would no longer have to plan for 20% more houses than they need, he said, ending a requirement for authorities to include a buffer in their proposals. And those with up-to-date plans would no longer have to maintain enough land supply for the next five years of housing need.

....

[Sheilbh]

As predicted

I thought this was really interesting on housebuilding - basically an MRP to work out what voters think where:
https://benansell.substack.com/p/the-uks-political-housing-crisis

Key points (in my view):

Enough build-up. What's the take-home? The average level of support across constituencies, according to the MRP is 36.8%. For people who think the country desperately needs to build new houses, that's not... great. If it makes you feel any better, the average level of support in the combined polls (i.e. of the 6624 respondents) is 38%. The difference comes from compacting things down into constituency averages. But look, either way, this is bad news for building houses.

Now we could umm and er a little here - I have thrown in people who neither support nor oppose with the opposers. I do this because ultimately I think relying on allegedly indifferent people to get houses built is foolhardy. But you probably won't feel hugely relieved to discover that 39% of people oppose any local house-building. We may have a housing supply crisis in the UK but more people oppose building houses than support it.

Anyway, whatever we think of the precise level of support for house-building, the really interesting stuff is how it varies across the country. If you want to see how your constituency fares an interactive table is available here. Or you can wait for the pretty graphs.

Let's begin by looking at the top and bottom ten constituencies in terms of support for building new houses. The top group read like a Rough Guide to Hipster Haunts of London. Otherwise known as the home constituencies of the Corbyn-era Shadow Cabinet. We have over sixty percent estimated support in both Hackney constituencies, in JC's own Islington North and in David Lammy's Tottenham constituency. Keir Starmer is bringing up the rear with 58.3% support.

How about the bottom ten? Here we have a series of the most Conservative parts of the country - the Lonely Planet Special ERG edition. They are more geographically varied - Dorset, Lancashire, Essex, Derbyshire, Lincolnshire. But they are largely rural, right-leaning, older locations.

Now in a way none of this is surprising. The MRP model uses information on local indicators including past voting as well as demographics. And the MRP also uses age, education, subjective social class, gender, and homeownership from the YouGov surveys. Because many of the the latter are strong predictors of support for building new houses, places with young, non-owning, high-education, high SES people - like Hipster London and Bristol - will be estimated to have high support for building new houses. And places with older, lower-education, lower-SES homeowners, will be estimated to have low support. That's how the model works. We don't know what Wyre and Preston North's true support for house-building is. But this is our best estimate given what we do know about (a) what kind of people support building houses, and (b) what Wyre and Preston North looks like demographically.
[...]
The pretty obvious thing from this figure is that support for building new houses is concentrated in four areas. 1. London. 2. Scotland. 3. Liberal cities (Bristol, Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester), and 4. the Red Wall!

What of course is in common is all of these places are, or were, major centres of support for the Labour Party. This is very apparent in the next map, which I rather like.3

This is a cartogram where the size of the constituency depends on their estimated support for building new houses and the colour is who won it in 2019.


It's easy to see from this just how different the constituencies of each party are with respect to house-building. Is it really surprising that the Conservative Party has largely failed to create a sea-change in building houses, given many - perhaps most - of their constituencies hate it? Those places that are big and blue are either in London or in the Red Wall.

Conversely, the implication is that if and when Labour take power, their base will be much more supportive of house-building. But of course nothing is constant. Marginal seats that Labour needs for a majority are less likely to be supportive of house-building. So electoral politics may override any other pro-construction factors.
[...]
Let's shift gear and look at other factors predicting support. You will not, I am sure, be surprised to find that non-homeowners have higher levels of support for building new houses locally than homeowners. Frankly, I'm a bit surprised it's only a ten point difference. Interestingly, if you split it out - homeowners who own outright and mortgage-holders look pretty much the same, as do private renters and people in social housing. People living in housing associations are somewhere in the middle.

What about house prices? Amusingly, the group of homeowners with most support for building houses are those who think their house is worth more than £750,000. Other than them there's a mild decline in support as house prices rise. This clearly speaks to something about urban homeowners and their partisan preferences (clue: not Conservative).

As we'll shortly see, when you ask people to explain their views on housing, the Green Belt regularly comes up. I am able to match people to their local authority and then in turn to the proportion of land in the local authority that is either Green Belt or an Area of Outstanding National Beauty. And, well there's something to this. It definitely looks like people living in these 'prettier' areas don't want new housing.

Finally, let's quickly look at the other trifecta of demographics that predict voting: income, education and age. What we see is more support for home-building among high income households (over £100k), among postgraduates (and maybe graduates) and among younger people. In other words - yuppies. A group who seem to have drifted a long long way from the Conservative Party and their housing policies.
[...]
Word clouds are fun and all but they don't show us the different arguments people make. And that's where we can see Britain's political divide over housing more clearly. The way we look at this is to do what's called 'keyness' analysis - this identifies words that are statistically more associated with one group of respondents than another (it's a simple chi-squared test). I will do that for two groupings - homeowners versus non-homeowners and people who voted Conservative in 2019 versus those who voted Labour.

Let's start with the former pairing. The two graphs below show how homeowners and non-homeowners speak differently using (a) single words and (b) pairs of words. The little dots on the vertical line in the middle correspond to the words to the left (or right) and measure how 'distinct' that word is across the groups. So for non-homeowners the most distinct word is 'homeless' and others include 'affordable', 'desperately', 'crisis', 'ever', 'need', 'opportunity'... it's kind of heartbreaking.

For homeowners the most distinct words are - by a mile - 'infrastructure', followed by 'road', 'school', 'doctor' and things like 'appointment' and 'village'. A very different set of priorities.
[...]
Topics 10 and 4 are the most common, appearing in 15 to 20% of people's responses. We can then ask the computer to pick out some especially choice answers that fit into the topics. Topic 10 as you can see has a bunch of responses that really emphasise infrastructure. I want to emphasise these are real and meaningful concerns - that building more houses means local infrastructure can't logistically or physically (in the case of flooding and sewage) cope.


Topic 4 picks up on another set of real and meaningful concerns - but quite distinct ones: no-one can afford houses, especially young people; homelessness is being created. I am grateful that respondents to the survey made such thoughtful comments. I think it's easy for people to mock NIMBYs, or indeed the proverbial avocado-eating millennials, and therefore ignore their concerns or claim they aren't real. But these are completely coherent answers. They just stress different problems in British life - fears of overcrowding and system under strain; fears of never being able to get on the property ladder at all.

[Gups]

Surprised you haven't picked up on the new National Planning Policy Framework, sneaked out on 23 December. A complete surrender to the Nimbys (or their Tory back bench reps).

Rant from my barrister friend

https://www.planoraks.com/posts-1/notes-on-reform-whats-the-nppf-for

[Gups]

Is Rishi getting serious about gender going to help him with Scotland?

I imagine not. He's probably watched what happened in Australia as closely as the rest of the Tory party. I suspect it's the other way round - the SNP passing legislation (which it's not clear is particularly supported by Scottish voters, if you ask a very high level question people are very supportive, if you ask about the specific measures then they're opposed) in order to provoke a politically helpful constitutional row with Westminster.

The UK government has, in my reading, a pretty decent argument that the Scottish government doesn't have the power to pass this legislation and that it should be blocked because it affects the operation of equalities law, which is reserved to Westminster.

Stephen Bush set out the legal points really clearly in the FT today - and pointed out that if the SNP wanted to pass this reform they could do it in a way that doesn't cut across reserved matters. But even someone like Shami Chakrabarti - who was a great human rights lawyer at Liberty before she was a made a peer by Corbyn and joined his shadow cabinet, so not a natural sympathiser with the government - has said that there's a pretty good case this legislation cuts across reserved powers.

Agree with this. Whatever your views on the principles underlying the Scottish Act, the way it was drafted was very clearly aimed at trying to create a constitutional issue for SNP purposes.

[crazy canuck]

I think one of the issues with our press is that too much is done through the political correspondents/Westminster/Whitehall reporters. A consequence of that, I think, is that they understand issues purely through a political lens because that's their job and their sources etc. But also I don't think they have the depth to challenge. I feel like it's maybe justified for the PM or generic MPs, but if the Chancellor wants to do a media round it feels like they should be getting questions from an economics correspondent like Faisal Islam not (though I think she's great) Beth Rigby.

Yes, and the whole thing becomes self-reinforcing.  Politicians create policies for the purpose of making policy announcements to cater to the superficial political lens because they know that is exactly what the press will focus on.  But who is minding the broader public policy issues?

[Sophie Scholl]

Labour just totally sitting out the vote. That's a... choice. 
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[Josquius]

As predicted

I thought this was really interesting on housebuilding - basically an MRP to work out what voters think where:
https://benansell.substack.com/p/the-uks-political-housing-crisis

Its interesting. Wish there was labels on the constituency vs. housing desire map as it is a bit too abstract.

One thing I'd like to see a solid study involving is a question of whether we need more houses (expect a universal yes) then put that up against asking people about building housing on a particular local brownfield site. Would be fascinating to see NIMBYism at work like so.

Labour just totally sitting out the vote. That's a... choice. 
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The whole thing did smell a bit of a trap for Labour TBH.
They do need the brown vote.

[Sheilbh]

Labour just totally sitting out the vote. That's a... choice. 

Labour's line is not easy to understand.

I think it's basically that the UK and Scottish government should have some meetings that would allow them to avoid the constitutional conflict (obviously I'd add that constitutional conflict advances the SNP's primary objective: independence). There is a divide though as Scottish Labour supported the legislation in the Scottish Parliament and don't seem happy with the stance taken by the national party - and, interestingly, neither does Welsh Labour.

My suspicion is the problem for Labour is because they basically agree with the UK government that this bill cuts across reserved matters (which will end up going to the courts) but don't want to vote with them. They agree with the government on the constitutional issue but disagree on the actual issue of gender recognition reform legislation (which, I think, in their view requires UK legislation) - which is a nuanced position on an already complicated issue.

[Tamas]

Yeah the whole thing is a Labour trap, really. It helps the SNP since they want to make it untenable for Scotland to stay in the UK.  It also works for the Tories, it gives them a culture war angle where law is (twistedly) on their side and where Labour's only option beside silence is to escalate (based on Sheilbh's explanation, they could argue lets make this UK-wide the proper way) and serve to the Tories on a silver platter the re-focus from economy to the much more controversial culture war. And of course the Tories strengthening over Labour I am sure is good for the SNP as well since independence can better be established via animosity and running England-Scotland relations to the ground.

It does seem like the only winning Labour move is not to play.

[Gups]

I don't feel that the Tories are really using this for a culture war play. Not at the moment any way. They are being quite careful to stick to the constitutional point.

[Josquius]

I don't feel that the Tories are really using this for a culture war play. Not at the moment any way. They are being quite careful to stick to the constitutional point.

I'm not so sure. I think the tories are stepping very carefully with that stuff to avoid the mentioned Australian example as we've already seen in recent bi-elections with the libdems. On a national level their heavy hitters aren't embracing the culture war. But on a local level its definitely bubbling up.
It seems this is the tactic the tories are going to be following through to the next GE- nationally try to appear sensible and rational... but where appropriate in local areas be more than willing to push the culture war populist insanity.

[celedhring]

Yeah the whole thing is a Labour trap, really. It helps the SNP since they want to make it untenable for Scotland to stay in the UK.  It also works for the Tories, it gives them a culture war angle where law is (twistedly) on their side and where Labour's only option beside silence is to escalate (based on Sheilbh's explanation, they could argue lets make this UK-wide the proper way) and serve to the Tories on a silver platter the re-focus from economy to the much more controversial culture war. And of course the Tories strengthening over Labour I am sure is good for the SNP as well since independence can better be established via animosity and running England-Scotland relations to the ground.

It does seem like the only winning Labour move is not to play.

Reminds me of how the Catalan parliament passed a bunch of pie-in-the-sky social laws in the runup to the independence referendum, knowing full well they were unconstitutional. It was hard for the left-wing non-indy parties to sit them out.

Of course, the whole point was to get them tossed out by the Spanish constitutional court so they could go "see? we need to be independent", even though most of these laws were not actually feasible.