Corbyn's win and the future of politics

The election of Jeremy Corbyn as the new Labour Party leader tells us three things. First, that we have (deservedly) lost faith in the prevailing political class. Second, that the old class-and-age-based party alliances are dead. And third, that things are going to be a lot more interesting (if also a little worrying). First, Corbyn (like Donald Trump in the Republican Party election in the US) did well because he does not follow the accepted norms for politicians. For one thing, he didn't wear a suit in regulation camera-friendly plain colours or, like rival Andy Burnham, blue-grey and the regular white shirt and camera-friendly plain tie too. Indeed, there was speculation that Corbyn's minders had briefly got him to dispose of his undershirt, but this hope was soon dashed. He was neither clean-shaven nor coiffured. Unlike the others he looked like a regular person, in fact – acting his age as a mature person who does not need to dress like a mannequin to be taken seriously, but can be taken seriously on his experience alone.

Maybe that is why he used just two words when the others used ten. He had no need to exert his presence by filling the available airtime, because his presence alone was quite sufficient, and the views he was expressing were so gripping. No need to fill the airways with platitudes when you can simply drop one or two bombshells and enjoy the silence.

The reason why he gripped the debate and garnered the votes was precisely that. Whatever you might think of his positioning, he seems like the sort of person you can have an honest conversation with in the pub, rather than someone who believes nothing and spouts focus-group-tested soundbites at you. Britain, it seems – or at least the Labour side of it – is ready for such straight talking after the porage of the Blair-Cameron era. The fact is that we are fed up with identikit politicians and want leaders who will take firm views on things they believe in – even if we sometimes disagree with them.

Second, with this stance, Corbyn can attract new people to his side of politics, breaking them away from their traditional tribes (as the LibDems tried, but failed to do). Mrs Thatcher, similarly, had strong support in the working-class and Northern areas that were hardly traditional Tory heartland communities. They voted for her, even though they disagreed with much of what she did, because at least she looked like a leader, who knew where she was going, and not as a cipher that could let us drift off down the path to hell if it seemed to be less controversial. And there are a lot of potential things coming up that might split old alliances too – such as Scottish devolution and the EU referendum. The Labour Party in Scotland is dead, but might a more-left UK Labour Party be more willing to do a deal, or be more able to pick up the votes of disgruntled Scots? It all suggests that a Corbyn-led Labour Party (if it can hold together) could well pick up all kinds of new support from new places, and from non-voters who have given up on Westminster government entirely.

Third, all that is going to be interesting. The Labour (or indeed Tory) moderates who try to paint Corbyn as a dangerous nutter will seem as significant as the temperance campaigners who complained that Churchill drank too much.

With any luck the old consensus in which we drift gracefully into more and more public spending and more and more regulation and more and more intrusive legislation over our lives might suffer a shock, as it did in the Thatcher era. It probably won't last long until we are drowned in cross-party porage again, but enjoy it while it lasts, if you enjoy a white-knuckle ride that is.

The genetics of political views

Why do we have the political views we have? It's always an interesting question. One angle which is less regularly explored is the influence of genetics on political views. Most people seem to have similar views to their parents, but there are usually convenient and intuitively plausible just-so stories as to why that is down to nurture, rather than nature.

I came across a paper from 2012 which lays out some of the results that psychologists and behavioural geneticists have come to in a clear and intuitive way. By Peter Hatemi and Rose McDermott and entitled "The Genetics of Politics: discovery, challenges and progress" it summarises findings in the literature most cleanly in its two diagrams.

We find that political knowledge is about 60% genetic, and 35% down to 'non-shared environment' (the environment people create for themselves rather than upbringing and schooling and so on), with only 5% identifiably down to upbringing. At the other end of the spectrum the specific party one identifies with is barely genetic at all, and comes overwhelmingly down to 'shared environmental influences' like schooling and parental nurture.

This is despite the fact that lots of traits you might think affected party affiliation (traditionalism, authoritarianism, foreign policy preferences and so on) are highly genetic.

Just how similar people with the same genes are politically is displayed below. Monozygotic, i.e. identical, twins are the pink bars and once they reach late adolescence, their political ideology correlates together with a coefficient of about 0.7 through their life! By contrast dizygotic, i.e. non-identical, twins are similarly close together politically while they live together with their parents and twin, but their correlation falls to about 0.4 as adults.

If it sometimes seems like no one ever changes their mind, and stays stuck to their guns, thinking up new arguments to defend their prejudices—well the science seems to agree with you.

Osborne scraps the worst tax in Britain – the ASI's reaction to the Autumn Statement

Here are our comments on today's Autumn Statement: Stamp duty:

Head of Research at the Adam Smith Institute, Ben Southwood, said:

The old stamp duty slab system was one of the worst taxes Britain had, and we welcome the Chancellor's radicalism in abolishing it, rather than simply tinkering around the edges.

According to the best economic research, raising £1 through stamp duty imposes £2-£5 of cost on the economy. Though it will still, as a transactions tax, cost the economy heavily, the reform will reduce the economic cost substantially. This is a tax cut for the squeezed middle that will make a big difference to a lot of people's lives. Politically, it could be a game-changer.

Business rates:

Deputy Director of the Adam Smith Institute, Sam Bowman, said:

A cap on business rate rises is welcome but the rates system itself needs more fundamental reform. The longer rates take to be revalued, the more distortionary the system is, penalising firms located in areas that have done badly since the last valuation. The longer the gap between rates revaluations, the greater the penalty for businesses in poorer areas and the effective subsidy for businesses in richer ones. Ideally the government should move towards a system of constantly rolling rates revaluations. If Zoopla can judge land values accurately on a rolling basis, so can HM Treasury.

Road infrastructure:

Head of Research at the Adam Smith Institute, Ben Southwood, said:

Infrastructure investment, especially into congested roads, is bound to pass a cost-benefit analysis. The problem is that we had to wait this long. If private firms could build roads, funded by tolls, then we'd likely have all of these roads already. As well as providing funds for investment, and making sure the investment goes to the most in-demand areas, pricing roads also means they get used more efficiently.

Pensions: 55% tax, tax-free inherited ISA

Director of the Adam Smith Institute, Dr Eamonn Butler, said:

The Chancellor is right to kill off the iniquitous 55% tax on inherited pensions, as well as the tax on inherited ISAs. If people have saved for their retirement but die before exhausting their nest-egg, it should go straight to their dependents, not to the Chancellor.

NHS Spending:

Communications Manager at the Adam Smith Institute, Kate Andrews, said:

The Conservatives, along with the opposition parties, are playing politics with the NHS budget. Everyone is vying to be seen as the 'party of the NHS' but no one is willing to have a serious conversation about the reforms that could make the NHS financially viable for the next ten years, let alone for future generations; like charging small fees for non-emergency visits.

It's been estimated that the NHS could fall into a budget crisis as early as 2015, which could result in cuts to core staff, longer patient waiting lists, and a deterioration in the quality of health care. While the extra £2 billion per year proposed by Osborne today will offsets short-term worries, it merely kicks the can down the road for a little while longer. Serious proposals to address the spending and demand that comes with free care ‘at the point of use’ could not come soon enough.

Personal Allowance rise:

Deputy Director of the Adam Smith Institute, Sam Bowman, said:

The Adam Smith Institute has called for the personal allowance to be raised to the full-time minimum wage rate for over a decade and it is welcome to see the government move in this direction. But the National Insurance Contributions threshold has been left untouched, which costs full-time minimum wage workers £667.68 a year. To really help low-income workers the Chancellor should make raising the National Insurance threshold one of his top priorities.

Capital gains tax on property for foreigners:

Head of Research at the Adam Smith Institute, Ben Southwood, said:

Capital gains taxes are some of the worst ones on the statute book, making society poorer by reducing the efficiency of investment and its total amount, but if we have to have them then everyone should pay them.

This is not just because of fairness, but because it causes massive distortions when different groups face different tax rates. In this case it's likely to both lead to excessive foreign ownership of property—both by favouring foreigners over natives in property taxes and by favouring property over other assets for foreigners.

Masters degree loans:

Director of The Entrepreneurs Network, Philip Salter, said:

By extending Entrepreneurs’ Relief and R&D tax credits George Osborne is backing Britain’s entrepreneurs. However, the government’s intervention in the postgraduate student loan market risks crowding out private sector solutions. Banks already provide Professional and Career Development Loans, and entrepreneurial companies like Future Finance, StudentFunder and Prodigy Finance are responding to the demand for loans for postgraduate studies. We are on the verge of the equivalent of the funding revolution we are seeing in SME finance but this intervention risks stymieing it.

The deficit:

Deputy Director of the Adam Smith Institute, Sam Bowman, said:

The deficit is still enormous and much higher than anybody expected at the beginning of this Parliament. We are borrowing £100bn this year, both because planned cuts to the welfare budget have not taken place and because the growth we have had has not translated into much extra tax revenue. But as high as this is, the Chancellor’s plans to reduce the deficit still seem credible – financial markets are lending to the country at unprecedentedly cheap levels and once productivity eventually does start to recover, things should begin to look considerably better.

Notes to editors:

For further comments or to arrange an interview, contact Kate Andrews, Communications Manager, at kate@old.adamsmith.org / 07584 778207.

The Adam Smith Institute is an independent libertarian think tank based in London. It advocates classically liberal public policies to create a richer, freer world.

Two cheers for technocracy

Who needs experts? The minimum wage was once an example of the triumph of technocracy, where decisions are delegated to experts to depoliticise them. The Low Pay Commission was set up to balance competing priorities – increasing wages without creating too much unemployment. If you were a moderate who thought the minimum wage was a good way of boosting low wages, but recognised that it might also create unemployment, the LPC gave you a middle ground position. (For what it’s worth, I’m an extremist.)

That technocratic settlement also allowed politicians to, basically, safeguard against an ignorant public. By delegating decisions like this to experts, bad but politically popular policies could be avoided. Relatively well-informed politicians could avoid having to propose bad policies by depoliticising them.

Other examples of this include NICE’s responsibility for deciding which drugs the NHS should and shouldn’t provide, and the Browne Review that recommended student fees, which had cross-bench support. The old idea that “you can’t talk about immigration” comes from an informal version of this – everyone in power knew that people’s fears about the economics of immigration were bogus, so they were basically ignored.

But that technocratic settlement now looks dead. Labour has now made a specified increase to the minimum wage part of its electoral platform, following George Osborne’s lead earlier this year. That means that voters will have to choose not just between two rival theories about the minimum wage, but two competing sets of evidence about whether £7/hour or £8/hour is better, given a wage/unemployment trade-off.

Whether voters are self-interested or altruistic doesn’t really matter. A self-interested low wage worker would still need to know if a minimum wage increase would threaten her job; an altruistic voter would similarly need to know a lot about the economics of the minimum wage and the UK’s labour market to make a judgement about what level it should be.

And of course the minimum wage is just one of dozens, if not hundreds, of questions that political parties offer different answers to that voters have to make a judgement about.

In practice this does not happen. Voters are very uninformed about basic facts of politics, and are almost entirely ignorant about economics, which almost everyone would agree would be necessary to make the correct judgement about something like what the minimum wage level should be (even if they didn’t agree on which theories and evidence was relevant). Even the use of rules-of-thumb such as listening to a particular newspaper or think tank (ha) will suffer from the same problems.

Voters, then, face a nearly impossible task. Assuming they are bright, well-intentioned, and believed that it was important for them to cast their vote for the party that would have the best policies, they would have to amass an enormous amount of information to make the right decision on all the questions they, in voting, have to answer.

So voters are trapped. They cannot know what minimum wage rate is best any more than they can know what drugs the NHS should pay for. They are, empirically, very unaware of basic facts, but they would find it hard to overcome that even if they wanted to.

Does democracy make us free? Maybe, but it’s the freedom of a deaf-blind man – we can choose whatever policy we want, without any idea about what those policies will actually do. So, if the alternative is more direct democracy like this, maybe technocracy isn’t so bad.

No, Boris - we are never guilty until proven innocent

The proximity of the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta next year makes Boris Johnson's Telegraph column from Sunday even more shocking. His plan to arrest anyone who travels to Syria or Iraq without 'good reason' utterly abandons the presumption of innocence. Instead, all travelers would be presumed guilty – and guilty of the extremely serious charge of terrorism – unless they could somehow convince 'the authorities' otherwise:

We also need to be far more effective in preventing British and other foreigners from getting out there…We need to make it crystal clear that you will be arrested if you go out to Syria or Iraq without a good reason. At present the police are finding it very difficult to stop people from simply flying out via Germany, crossing the border, doing their ghastly jihadi tourism, and coming back. The police can and do interview the returnees, but it is hard to press charges without evidence. The law needs a swift and minor change so that there is a “rebuttable presumption” that all those visiting war areas without notifying the authorities have done so for a terrorist purpose.

Boris of course has the laudable aim of curbing the jihadists. But that is just the sort of ambition that has excused too many careless erosions of our ancient freedoms. Already he calls for the return of control orders and laments how hard it is to press charges against British citizens without evidence; as if the assumption of innocence until proven otherwise has not acted as the ultimate safe-guard of citizens against radicals throughout modern history.

According to the Mayor, such controls and assumptions need merely a 'swift and minor' change in the law. Are our Magna Carta liberties to be so swiftly and so triflingly abandoned?

Does the GOP need a new stool?

Does the GOP need a new stool?

This is the question that upcoming TNG guest Tim Stanley's been asking in a recent blogpost for the Daily Telegraph. To give a bit of context:

the Republican stool is at risk of losing its balance. As William F Buckley once argued, support for the GOP historically rests on three conservative legs: free market libertarians, social conservatives and foreign policy hawks.

However, in the absence of a strong anti-communist message American politics has drifted leftwards, whilst the GOP's 'Middle American' unity has been replaced with a "discordant alliance between wealthy grey technocrats and populist crazies". The legs of the Republican stool now look wobbly and unbalanced, leading to some uneasy and often contradictory politics. As a consequence, the Republicans fail to provide a convincing or consistent alternative to the liberals and Obamanomics.

So, what's the solution? Tim suggests that it lies in a 'rugged constitutionalism', where politics is conducted at a state level, individual freedom carries real significance, and Republican governments promise to largely get out of the way. Certainly, this has real appeal to libertarian-leaning conservatives both in America & the UK, but what's the likelihood of it actually becoming an election strategy?

Fortunately, under 30s are invited to ponder this question further at the TNG with Dr Stanley on this very subject tomorrow.

The event starts at 6pm in the ASI offices, and RSVP either on Facebook or to events@old.adamsmith.org.