What’s going on here?

Immigration politics are a little different, country to country, but not that different. Here’s how it breaks down in the U.K.: The Conservatives are fairly akin to America’s Republican Party, as the least bashful representatives of British nationalism on the scene. Meanwhile, Britain’s two left-of-center parties align with the two faces of our Democrats.

Brown’s Labour Party, the traditional representative of the working class and its interests, has felt some obligation to respect anxieties about immigrants taking jobs and changing neighborhoods. But Labour has long since shed its old crusading socialist identity, and is basically a technocratic party of government. These guys run for reelection by talking about 2 percent increases on various indices, and the old connection with working-class struggles has gotten a little tenuous. In Brown’s contempt for Duffy, you can hear some of New Labour’s pencil-pushing hauteur.

The surging Liberal Democrats, on the other hand, are sort of the British equivalent of the cosmopolitan, less class-conscious wing of our Democratic Party, based in college towns and the cores of big cities. (I shudder to use the term, but think “wine-track.”) As such, they don’t really see immigration as a problem at all.

To judge Brown, it’s helpful to ask how this would play out in the U.S. Imagine if, say, Al Gore in 2000 — a figure in some ways similar to Brown — had been caught calling a retiree in Youngstown, Ohio, a bigot, after she complained to him about the Mexicans filling up the neighborhood. Would this imaginary Gore have been right?

There’s not really any use saying no. It takes a certain amount of delusion to miss the racial animus in anti-immigration politics. Just have a look at this sneering and nonsensical ad from Alabama Republican gubernatorial candidate Tim James, in which he complains about multilingual driver’s license exams. Or give a moment’s thought to the fact that a real candidate for office actually proposed “micro-chipping” undocumented workers. Besides, despite our disturbingly common willingness to write off Latinos and black people as not “real” members of the working class, their problems also count as the problems of working families.

At the same time, though, blaming Duffy, or her hypothetical American equivalent, does sort of amount to blaming the victim. Because while the racism is real, so is the grievance. Not necessarily the particular racial hostility against Mexican immigrants — let’s not try to apologize for that. But it shouldn’t be so hard to understand why working people would resent a political order that seems thoroughly uninterested in doing anything about ever-growing levels of economic inequality.

Note, for example, that Brown actually had a somewhat satisfactory answer to the original question. The EU has meant that foreigners can take British jobs, but it’s also meant that British people can get foreign jobs. This is nowhere near a comprehensive approach to the yawning worldwide gap between the rich and everyone else, but at least it’s an attempt to deal with concerns about job loss. And it worked! The “bigot” in question was convinced. But Brown, who’s absorbed endless consultant training about how he needs to be friendlier, felt compelled to halfheartedly ask about her grandchildren — whom she had no apparent interest in discussing — and to talk down to her, “jokingly,” about her red jacket. Then he got in his car and berated her. You see what’s not working here?

Now consider Arizona. The state has come in for a beating among liberals — richly deserved — for its new apartheid-style requirement that Latinos carry documentation with them everywhere they go. Arizona, incidentally, has been one of the places hardest hit by the collapse of the real estate market. It’s a near-perfect encapsulation of the unraveling American dream: people move from the dying Rust Belt to the Southwestern desert, where rapid growth and cheap housing are supposed to guarantee their futures. Instead, they get underwater mortgages and wage stagnation, and we act surprised when they turn viciously on their Spanish-speaking neighbors.

Something’s not working about the post-industrial economy, either in Britain or in the U.S. With economic growth limited to the rich few, a feeling sets in of being abandoned by haughty elites and their impenetrable institutions, among which are the free labor markets that drive immigration. And then, when they catch a glimpse of this anger, leaders like Brown don’t know what to do or say except to condemn.

It’s the latest in a long line of missteps by lawmakers whose private remarks have been made accidentally public — from President Ronald Reagan’s 1984 joke declaration of war on Russia to President George W. Bush’s overly familiar “Yo, Blair” greeting in 2006 for Brown’s predecessor, Tony Blair.

And Brown isn’t the first British leader caught off-guard — in 1993, then-Prime Minister John Major was recorded calling rebellious members of his Cabinet “bastards.”

But the political consequences of his blunder could be severe, with Brown already third in opinion polls for Britain’s May 6 election and desperate to show his supposedly statesmanlike credentials to dispatch less experienced rivals, Conservative leader David Cameron and Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats.

Brown’s campaign team even overhauled its election strategy this week — betting that more contact between the leader and ordinary people would revive his flagging election hopes.

That was the plan, at least. But then grandmother Gillian Duffy in the northern town of Rochdale, quizzed Brown about issues such as tax policy, education and immigration, telling the prime minister that “you can’t say anything about immigrants.”

“All these Eastern Europeans … where are they coming from?” she said.

Brown said that 1 million people had come to Britain from the Continent but that the same number had moved the other way.

Duffy also complained about people on welfare.

“There’s too many people now who aren’t vulnerable but they can claim, and people who are vulnerable can’t claim, can’t get it,” she said.

The exchange appeared good-natured, but after Brown ducked into his car, he was heard on his open microphone telling an adviser: “That was a disaster. They should never have put me with that woman. … Whose idea was that? It’s just ridiculous.”

Asked what Duffy had said to upset him, Brown told the aide: “Everything. She’s just a sort of bigoted woman.”

Shortly afterward, the BBC played Brown the audio recording as it interviewed him. Brown’s head sunk into his hands and he shielded his face from the camera.

Duffy told reporters that Brown’s remarks left her shaken. She said she was a lifelong Labour Party supporter and had planned to back Brown, but would now likely abstain.

“He’s an educated person. Why has he come out with words like that?” Duffy said. “He’s calling an ordinary woman who’s just come up and asked questions … a bigot.”

Duffy said Brown had initially appeared receptive as they discussed policy. “I thought he was understanding but he wasn’t, was he?” she said.

Asked on BBC radio about his remarks, Brown appeared to suggest that Duffy had been overly critical of eastern European migrants and he claimed to have been frustrated at being unable to properly answer her questions.

Brown told reporters that he had telephoned Duffy to apologize, and his campaign bus later unexpectedly showed up outside her home as he made a personal plea for forgiveness.

“I’ve apologized to her and I hope she’ll accept my apology,” Brown said.

George Osborne, a senior Conservative Party lawmaker, summed up the delight among Brown’s foes.

“The thing about general elections is that they reveal the truth about people,” he said.

Charlie Whelan, a former aide to Brown, used his Twitter Web site to defend the leader. “Who has not let off steam under stress and strain” of a campaign? he wrote. “He’s apologized, move on.”

Other allies also rushed to Brown’s defense. “This is something that he knows he shouldn’t have said,” said Treasury chief Alistair Darling, a Labour lawmaker.

Ivor Gaber, a political campaign analyst at London’s City University, said the incident would damage Brown but may not prove fatal.

“People know that Brown is no angel, and though this won’t do him any good, it’s not certain how his will play out,” he said.

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Associated Press Writer Jennifer Quinn contributed to this report.

In recent years, Britain has been characterized as a 2  1/2 party system: It has two viable parties that can win elections (Labour and Conservative), and then a third party that wins a non-trivial amount of seats but has not really been considered a legitimate contender to win an election (Lib-Dems). While strategic voting ultimately occurs at the district level, one would have to assume that in the past, the Lib-Dems have been disproportionately hurt by strategic voters: With Labour and the Conservatives assumed to have viable shots at winning elections, we would have to guess that more often it is potential Lib-Dem voters that abandon their party to choose between Labour and Conservative than the other way around.*

Which brings us to the 2010 elections. As I noted in a response to Henry’s previous post, one effect of the recent British debates and the explosion of Cleggmania could be that it frees up Lib-Dem supporters who have in the past voted strategically to actually vote sincerely in 2010. This would suggest some sort of underlying tipping model: As long as Lib-Dem support stays below a certain level, added popularity in the polls might still not transfer into that many additional votes if strategic voters defect on election day. However, once the party reaches the level of the big three (i. e., Lib-Dems are presumed to be just as viable an option as the other two parties), then there might be a rather dramatic increase in actual votes for Lib-Dems as the strategic voters come home.

My question for readers is the following: How could we know if this was actually occurring? Two options seem fruitful to me, but I am interested in other suggestions (especially from anyone who has surveys in the field!).

First, anyone with repeated surveys in the field could compare thermometer scores (0-100 rankings of how much you like a particular party) for the three parties with vote intention. The hypotheses would be that up until some “tipping point” there should be a significant gap between the proportion of respondents who rank the Lib-Dems highest on the thermometer scores and those intending to vote Lib-Dem. On the individual level, if we regress vote intention on ranking the Lib-Dems highest on thermometer rankings, we would expect to see the size of the coefficient on ranking the Lib-Dems highest increase after the tipping point. What’s great about the 2010 British elections is that we have a good guess at where this tipping point should be: in the days immediately after the first P.M. debate. Moreover, I think this type of analysis could work either with panel data or repeated new surveys, although with panel data we could of course track actual switchers.

A second strategy would be to compare the proportion ranking Lib-Dems highest on thermometer scores who go on to vote Lib-Dem in 2010 in post-election surveys (or immediate pre-election surveys) with previous elections. If the proportions are roughly constant, then we could conclude 2010 was no different, and — provided there was a drop-off between the thermometer scores and the vote intention/choice — the strategic voters stayed away. If the proportions increased, however, it would be evidence that strategic voters came home.

What are some drawbacks of this approach? The most serious seems to be that voters who are planning on voting strategically might need to rationalize that decision in their own heads by changing their thermometer rankings to reflect vote choice. Does anyone have any previous research suggesting whether or not this is the case?

Other thoughts? Ideas for how to proxy for preferred party other than vote intention or thermometer rankings? Anyone have surveys in the field attempting to test for strategic voting in this election?

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*It is possible that in individual districts, pre-election polling could convince a possible conservative supporter that their particular race was going to come down to the Lib-Dem candidate and the Labour candidate, and therefore strategic voting in that instance could actually help the Lib-Dem. That being said, I would still maintain that if the national election was presumed to come down to Labour and Conservative, the Lib-Dems should be disproportionally disadvantaged by strategic voting. Although the more I think about this, the more this strikes me as an interesting question: Has anyone tested whether strategic voting at the district level is moderated by national implications of elections in parliamentary systems with single member districts?

The SEC said the Royal Bank of Scotland paid Goldman $841 million to unwind ABN Amro transactions. Royal Bank of Scotland is now 84 percent owned by British taxpayers after being partly nationalized by the government.

Germany’s IKB Deutsche Industriebank AG, an early victim of the credit crunch, lost nearly all its $150 million investment, the SEC said.

Brown on Sunday called for a full inquiry by Britain’s Financial Services Authority in conjunction with the SEC. Britain would join Germany, where government officials said they would seek information about the bank’s activities.

Brown, currently facing a tough re-election battle, seemed additionally angry at Goldman Sachs’ plan to pay 3.5 billion pounds ($5.4 billion) in bonuses as reported in British newspapers.

“I am shocked at this moral bankruptcy,” he said on BBC TV. “This is probably one of the worst cases that we have seen.”

Brown called for a “new global constitution for the banking system” that would, among other things, ban bonus packages like the ones planned by Goldman Sachs.

The U.S. charges against Goldman Sachs relate to a complex investment tied to the performance of pools of risky mortgages. In a complaint filed Friday, the Securities and Exchange Commission alleged that Goldman marketed the package to investors without disclosing that the pools were picked by another client, a prominent hedge fund that wanted to bet the U.S. housing bubble would burst. Within months, most of the mortgages had been downgraded as the U.S. housing boom went into reverse and the securities fell sharply in value.

The company denies it did anything wrong, saying investor losses came from the deterioration of the whole sector, not regarding which securities were in the pool.

Goldman Sachs already is facing an EU investigation into a 2002 swap deal it carried out with Greece that may have helped hide the extent of the country’s financial troubles.

Brown said strict reform of the banking sector is needed. He was responding to British Sunday press reports about the billions in bonus payments planned for Goldman employees worldwide.

“Everything I find out convinces me that we have got to go in deeper, and I believe that I am the man to deal with these problems of the banks and to challenge them about the way they behave in the future,” said Brown, who faces a difficult challenge from both the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats in the May 6 election.

The Goldman Sachs case also may spur legal action in Germany. The Welt am Sonntag newspaper quoted Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman, UIrich Wilhelm, as saying that German regulator BaFin will ask the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for detailed information.

“After a careful evaluation of the documents, we will examine legal steps,” he said, according to the report. The government later confirmed Wilhelm made the statement.

IKB issued a profit warning on July 30, 2007, saying that it had “felt the impact of the crisis in the U.S. subprime mortgage market” and that then-chief executive Stefan Ortseifen had resigned.

IKB’s problems sprang from its Rhineland Funding investment vehicle’s apparent inability to cover its funding needs because of exposure to U.S. subprime loans.

The lender’s biggest shareholder at the time, Germany’s state-owned KfW development bank, and the banking industry put together multibillion-euro (dollar) rescue packages for IKB. IKB was sold in 2008 to Dallas-based Lone Star Funds.

Ortseifen went on trial in Duesseldorf in March, charged with share price manipulation and four counts of breach of trust. He said that he carries “no guilt.”

German prosecutors accuse Ortseifen of misleading markets over the extent of its exposure to the financial crisis. They said that, 10 days before the profit warning, he issued a statement in which the economic impact on IKB from the looming financial crisis was deliberately portrayed too positively.

Ortseifen maintains that the market for mortgage backed securities was still functioning at the time of his statement and denies manipulating share prices.

He said when his trial opened that, from today’s point of view, the assessment of subprime market risk was a “collective misjudgment,” but that on the basis of the financial world’s knowledge at the time he gave correct information.

The trial is scheduled through the end of May.

Woods has not played competitively since crashing his car into a tree outside his Florida home, setting off revelations he had been cheating on his wife.

“We’re pleased to hear that Tiger is to return to golf,” Royal & Ancient Golf Club spokesman Malcolm Booth said. “Golf needs the world No. 1 to be playing.”

The Royal & Ancient, golf’s governing body sport outside the United States, hopes Woods will play at the British Open in July.

Woods has not yet entered to play at the British Open at St. Andrews, but has until May 27 to send his entry form. Booth said it’s “normal” that he hasn’t entered yet.

“Typically, we would receive entries within a few weeks of that deadline,” Booth said, noting several players from the “exempt field” of former champions have already sent their forms.

The Masters begins April 8.

Woods has won 14 majors, including four Masters titles and three British Opens — two of them at St. Andrews, Scotland. The British Open is July 15-18.

“We’d always want the world No. 1 to return to the Open championship,” Booth said. “He could be the first to win three times at St. Andrews, and it would be back-to-back. No one’s ever won three at St. Andrews.”

English golfer Ross Fisher was driving to this week’s Transitions Championship in Florida when he heard the news of Woods’ plan to return at the Masters.

“It’s going to be very interesting now to see what happens at Augusta,” Fisher said. “But I thought he might have come back a bit earlier at either the Tavistock Cup or Bay Hill to get some golf in. Still it’s going to be very exciting.”

Fisher said the atmosphere had not been the same at the recent Accenture and CA Championship without Woods in the field for the first two big-money tournaments of 2010.

“There is always an extra element when you have the best golfer in the world taking part,” Fisher said. “But the best news now is that he is coming back.”

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Associated Press Writer Graham Otway contributed to this report.