Weekend Box #114: A Tri-Ing Time, Audley Talks Trade & more
Welcome to The Weekend Box, Audley’s weekly round-up of interesting or obscure political, business and cultural news from around the world.
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KEEP YOUR OPINION POLLS TO YOURSELF!
In France, it’s illegal to publish opinion polls within 24 hours of an election. One week into the UK’s festival of democracy, The Weekend Box wonders if we shouldn’t extend this policy to the entire campaign.
We are now drowning in opinion polls. Most of them tell us little – or worse, give us a distorted view of what’s going on.
Consider this past week. On Tuesday the media became excited by one poll showing Labour’s lead falling to 12 points following the Tory Party’s policy blitz. The only trouble is that the fieldwork was conducted before the policies had been announced, the change in the poll numbers was well within the margin of error, and it was contradicted by at least three other polls published at the same time. Otherwise, the reporting was spot on.
Yet there is a serious issue here. There was much soul-searching after the 2015 election as the polls failed to anticipate a Conservative victory and focused on the potential coalition scenarios instead. As a result, they ended up supporting the Conservatives’ narrative and many consider them to have been an influencing factor in the result.
There was talk of a ban during campaigns in the aftermath. Instead, the industry has prospered. The public understanding of politics has not.
Our advice? Ignore the daily tsunami of pointless polling. Focus on the long-term trends instead. Labour’s lead lies somewhere between 12 and 27 points. Any narrowing would probably be helpful to Keir Starmer, as his greatest danger is complacency driven by the view he has it in the bag.
Oddly then, both leaders might be hoping to see the polls narrow as the election approaches. It would support the narratives they both want to run. They understand that polls don’t just report voter behaviour. They are an important influence on it too.
For more UK election analysis, listen to Audley CEO Chris Wilkins discussing the campaign every Thursday in the leadup to July 4th on the Bloomberg UK Politics podcast. Hear Chris discussing Week One of the campaign here.
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A TRI-ING TIME
Seeking a delicate balance of effective diplomacy while navigating divergent interests and geopolitical tensions, China, Japan, and South Korea met in Seoul on Monday for their first trilateral talks in over four years.
The long-awaited talks between the countries, which last met in 2019, have been stalled by Covid-19 as well as aggravated relations between the three. An obvious source of tension is Japan and South Korea’s allyship with the US. In the last month, Japan has announced not only a ‘new era’ of military cooperation with America to counter China, but military exercises with both the US and UK to take place in the Indo-Pacific region from 2025.
Defence Secretary Grant Shapps described the exercises as a critical display of alliance in “an increasingly volatile world.” The question for Japan and South Korea this week was how they would avoid any further volatility while keeping one of the greatest rivals of their Western allies happy.
North Korea’s nuclear programme is another source of tension, and despite not attending, the country made its presence felt by attempting to launch a spy satellite into orbit. It exploded. Luckily, there were no such eruptions at the trilateral talks, as Chinese Premier Li Qiang welcomed the opportunity for a “restart and a new beginning” in relations with Japan and South Korea.
Qiang, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, and Japanese PM Fumio Kishida made progress on numerous fronts, including a joint declaration “to formalise regular communication at the highest levels” and collaborate on priorities such as climate change, trade, and international peace.
Could this truly be the “new beginning” Qiang hailed? Notably, the premier also called on his fellow leaders to exercise restraint and not allow politics to interfere with their talks. Forgive us for finding it difficult not to read that as a warning…
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A-N-SEE THE WRITING ON THE WALL
On Wednesday this week, South Africa held elections for a new parliament. While results are still being counted, it looks as if the African National Congress (ANC) may lose the parliamentary majority that it has held for 30 years since the fall of the apartheid regime.
Initial results give the ANC around 43% of the vote, the pro-business Democratic Alliance (DA) 26% and the Marxist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) 8.5%. If the vote split remains similar, the ANC will need to form a coalition to govern, a major adjustment for a party that has dominated South African politics so heavily but which has seen support ebb away due to poor governance, corruption, and economic malaise. Where some see new checks on the ANC’s power as potentially constructive, others fear infighting and gridlock as the new reality.
Counting should be complete by the weekend, then the new parliament must convene within 14 days from results being declared, with its first act being to elect the president. Expect some intense negotiations. If a deal is done, the ANC’s leader Cyril Ramaphosa stands to remain as president. If the results are shockingly bad, he may face a challenge from within the party.
Another challenge has already complicated life for the ANC. In the populous eastern KwaZulu-Natal province, home to the city of Durban, a new party led by former president Jacob Zuma, uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), stood against the ANC and performed strongly with around 43% of the vote versus the ANC’s 21%. Zuma was ejected as president in 2018 after a string of corruption scandals, then fell out with the ANC leadership. Despite being recently barred from standing as a candidate due to a criminal conviction, his party is clearly taking large bites out of the ANC’s majority.
AUDLEY TALKS TRADE WITH DMITRY GROZOUBINSKI
This week Michael Heseltine called the 2024 general election the ‘most dishonest in modern times,’ because both the Tories and Labour refuse to debate the consequences of Brexit.
On Wednesday, Audley hosted an event with Geneva-based trade expert Dmitry Grozoubinski, Executive Director of the Geneva Trade Platform. Amongst other trade-related subjects, Grozoubinski discussed Heseltine’s views, why he thinks Brexit and trade issues are not being discussed at this election, and whether a future Labour government would consider rejoining the EU.
Lord Heseltine argued in The Independent that issues such as the state of the British economy, the need to level up society, and controlling immigration cannot honestly be addressed in isolation from Britain’s relationship with Europe. Grozoubinski argued that part of the reason neither the Tories nor Labour want to discuss Europe at this election is because it is not seen as a vote winner: “If you polled Brits: 1) ‘Was Brexit a good thing?’ 2) ‘Was Brexit a bad thing?’ Or 3) ‘Do you never want to hear about Brexit again?’, category 3 would win by a landslide.”
There is also less divergence in the parties’ rhetoric on Europe since Sunak became leader, he noted. The Sunak government significantly lowered the temperature of the discussion with the EU compared to his predecessors, an approach which contrasts sharply with the 'performative divergence' of the Johnson era.
Audley asked Grozoubinski whether he thought a Labour government would consider rejoining the EU, for example, when seeking a second term in office. For Grozoubinski this was a ‘Nixon going to China’ scenario. It would take a Conservative government seeking to rejoin the EU for Brussels to take any UK efforts seriously. The wounds in Brussels are still too raw.
To hear Grozoubinski speaking at our event, watch our videos on LinkedIn here and here. Buy his book ‘Why Politicians Lie About Trade’ here.
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WU, ARE YOU KIDDING?
Finally, years after the announcement of its release, fans will be able to hear the single existing copy of famed hip-hop collective Wu-Tang Clan’s album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin – if they travel to Tasmania.
The collective, renowned for classics like Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), announced the release of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin in 2013. Shaolin was conceived as a “a single-sale collector’s item,” released only once as a pair of CDs encased in an “engraved silver-and-nickel box,” which constitutes the sole copy of the album in the world.
The unconventional release strategy was intended to “return the value of music, which has been lowered by the advent of streaming and piracy, to the level of other types of fine art.”
The journey it’s been on to get to Tasmania is storied, for good reason. The single copy of Shaolin was purchased by a mystery buyer, later revealed to be the infamous pharmaceuticals CEO Martin Shkreli. As Shkreli feuded with Wu-Tang member Ghostface Killah and threatened to destroy the album, the future of its rare, unheard tracks looked bleak.
However, after he was convicted of fraud, the album was one of the assets seized from Shkreli to pay a $7.36m penalty. It later ended up in a vault in New York after being purchased from the US federal government by crypto collective PleasrDAO.
Now, PleasrDAO has loaned the album to the Museum of Old and New Art in the Tasmanian capital of Hobart, enabling visitors to listen for free in ticketed sessions running from 15th-24th June – sort of. Listeners will be treated to a 30-minute curated mix of songs, played from a personalised PlayStation 1 games console, rather than the entire 128-minute album.
We’ll hold out for those curious to make the trip to Tasmania and report back, to see if it was worth all the trouble.
And that’s it for this week. I hope you found something of interest that you might want to delve into further. If so, please get in touch at cwilkins@audleyadvisors.com.
For now, that’s The Weekend Box officially closed.