Prepare for a run on cardigans
Ihave purely selfish reasons for following British politics more intensely than American politics. Partly it’s ancestry. Partly it’s being an old fart who comes from a more British-flavoured version of our culture. Partly it’s having British professional influences. Partly it is impatience with American conceptual hegemony — with the sense that we are never allowed to ignore or dismiss anything the big brother does. On social media Thursday night, you could see that even Americans regarded a British election as a nice coffee break from the plagues infesting their own institutions.
Normally I would just write about the U. K.’s shocking election result without apology, because it amuses me.
This time I’ll try to stick to a few globally relevant aspects: what parts of Theresa May’s snap- election train wreck might cast shadows on our own lives?
There is certainly going to be a Corbynite Global Youth Movement now. Already Canadian politicians to the left of the neoliberal consensus, like Niki Ashton and Erin Weir, are sending comradely greetings to Britain’s ultimate moral victor. There is an odd sort of counterfactual argument going on over the viability of elderly politicians who have stuck to the same 1970s internationalist, student- left positions since the actual 1970s. Ber- nie Sanders could not beat Hillary Clinton in a Democratic primary, but it seems increasingly plausible that he could have beaten Donald Trump in a general election. And now Jeremy Corbyn can be pulled into the argument: the heroic way in which he narrowly lost an election just shows how electable he was.
Even if you accept these premises, which are not quite as ludicrous as I have made them sound, it is obvious that part of the personal charm of Sanders and Corbyn is that they have paid heavy dues, and appeal to the young partly because of the special mystique of the authentic survivor. Very young people trying to sell the same social-democratic ideas will not have that advantage. But there will be a race among leftists in English-speaking countries to be the most convincing offshore Corbyn. Expect a run on flat caps and cardigans.
Conservatives studying how Theresa May failed to kick such a short field goal will need to study her fascinating, suicidal U- turn on the so- called “dementia tax.” The surface implications of that problem are obvious: a conservative politician has to make sure not to be seen as both vicious and cowardly. ( Pick one or the other!) But the “dementia tax” is actually a glimpse of future decision- making in the demographic hell that is coming for all welfare states.
The U. K. government does means- testing of residential care for the senile, and if you have to be moved into a facility, your home, if you own one, is counted among your assets. The original proposal in the Tory manifesto was to bring “domicilary care” — nursing and social care provided to the elderly in their own homes — under the means- testing umbrella. Oldsters would not be required to sell their houses to pay for in-home care during their lives: the costs, up to a small lifetime limit, would be paid from the proceeds of a patient’s estate.
Not many noticed outside the U. K., but this is pure wealth redistribution. There is a lot of British wealth trapped in multimilliondollar homes. The “dementia tax” is, in this regard, just an inheritance tax in disguise. To tax young working people to pay for the bespoke care of wealthy, declining Boomers while leaving their unearned housing gains untouched is surely a little perverse.
Nonetheless, the aged took fright at effective publicity attacks on the policy, and so did May, who knew that the aged can be trusted to vote. But God had his little joke: high youth turnout devoured her majority.
This interesting wrinkle has helped turn the election into a struggle of polling ideologies — an important incident in the ongoing story of pollsters seeking refuge in the post- telephony apocalypse. Classic polls missed the electionnight result, incorporating faulty assumptions about age and turnout and failing to spot a late break toward Labour. But a team at polling firm YouGov predicted May’s disaster using a sophisticated newer methodology called MRP: “multilevel regression and poststratification.”
We would both die of frustration if I tried to tell you the relatively little I understand about MRP. It uses census data and Bayesian techniques to estimate fine-grained election outcomes in ways classic technique cannot touch. MRP handed YouGov a right answer, perhaps coincidentally, but the company lost its nerve and published a final Tory- majority forecast more in line with the other pollsters. ( This is what the trade calls “herding.”)
Quantitative jocks are proclaiming a triumph for MRP. It needs more real- world workouts, and as a technique it is probably no better than the modeller who wields it, but we are bound to start hearing about it in Canada soon. Remember who told you.