May the wombat of happiness snuffle through your underbrush.
(Native Australian greeting)
© Bryan Ferry, 1973
Hastings, mon ami, tell me. To blow up the English Parliament, was it a sin or a noble deed?
(Hercule Poirot, Murder In The Mews, 1989)
Back home now, as the world recovers from Donald Trump's comeback to the White House. Today's soundtrack is Roxy Music's second album For Your Pleasure, which could have been the best British album of 1973 if King Crimson had not released Larks' Tongues In Aspic on the very same day, David Bowie Aladdin Sane four weeks later, and Pink Floyd The Dark Side Of The Moon three weeks earlier. And, of course, there were also Paul McCartney's Red Rose Speedway and Band On The Run that same year. Those were the days. The usual bonus tracks are at the top, from the non-album single Roxy Music released a month to the day before the album. And again at the bottom, with live versions taken from the later Viva! album. Enjoy one of the greatest art-rock masterpieces of all time.
As you surely know, the images look better if you click on them for larger versions.
For a fleeting moment, it looked like the Big One in British politics was Kemi Badenoch becoming leader of the Conservative Party. So let's deal with than one first, once and for all, while I am still angry at all the lefties, feminists and gays entertaining massive delusions about her. Kemi Badenoch knowing what a woman is, and shouting it from the rooftops with a megaphone at every opportunity because it made good headlines, does not make her a good leader or even a good person. She is as much of a hard right radical as Nigel Farage and that's the only thing that should matter if British politics had not been totally polluted by transgenderism. Don't be mistaken or delusional. The only fallout of Kemi Badenoch taking the Conservatives even more to the right, to cuddle Reform UK voters, will be to convince Keir Starmer and Labour that the only safe course for them is to swing further to the right too. So that was definitely a very bad day for the UK. At least Robert Jenrick was totally faking it, but the Tory grassroots saw through it, and that's why he lost so convincingly to Badenoch. But we should also see the bright side of the silver lining. Keir Starmer will never again get the titles mixed up at PMQs and call her 'Prime Minister', as he did repeatedly with Rishi Sunak.
Now I could argue that the real Big One happened just a couple of days earlier, with the first poll since the general election finding the Conservatives ahead of Labour. This was fielded by BMG Research on 30 and 31 October. It took Labour 119 days to get there, the same duration as George Canning's Premiership, which can't be a good omen in any timeline of the Multiverse. After the 1997 election, Labour was not overtaken by the Conservatives in polls until 14 September 2000. That's 1,232 days, and it held just for a fortnight and seven polls, never to happen again until Tony Blair's second landslide in 2001. Even David Cameron did better after the 2010 election, as it took him until 26 September to lose a poll to Labour, 143 days after the election. Then, just three weeks after the first, a second poll fielded over the Remembrance Week End also had the Conservatives coming first. The trendlines of voting intentions have thusly become far less stellar for Labour than they probably expected after just four months in charge.
The Labour Party are now licking their wounds from the American election results. No shit, mate, they really are. First they were accused of unacceptable foreign interference in the campaign by Elon Musk, the bloke who made Russian interference in the campaign bigger than it ever was. Then the hundred staffers they had sent on a staycation to North Carolina couldn't prevent Kamala Harris's brave and stunning defeat. Now Keir Starmer's spads and Peter Mandelson's focus groups are saying there are lessons to be learned from the American elections, something the woke wing of the party don't want to hear, because it doesn't fit what is said on Bluesky, in the echo chamber inside their groupthink bubble. But Keir Starmer doesn't look better, emphasising the 'special relationship' between the UK and the USA in the wake of Trump's election, as if the world hadn't changed since the days of Michael Sheen and Dennis Quaid... oops, my mistake, Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. But, despite relentlessly saying what he thinks people want to hear, Keir Starmer's personal ratings since he became Prime Minister are still conclusively in the red, unlike himself.
Broadly speaking, half of Brits now think Sly Keir is shit at his job and only a quarter think he is any good. He now has a net rating of -26, 130 days after the general election that took him to Downing Street. It took Boris Johnson 316 days to reach the same level of discontent after the 2019 election, though he admittedly benefited from some weird Covid Euphoria early in 2020. For a possibly more relevant comparison, it took David Cameron 715 days, well into 2012, to reach a similar net negative after his ascent to power. If that's any consolation for Keir, Liz Truss already got a net -36 on 7 September 2022, or one fucking day after her appointment. But nobody can possibly beat Liz at that game, can they? Keir's main problem is that he has managed to make himself unpopular, in such a short time, with all demographics. Men and women, old and young, Englanders and Scots, Scousers and Cornish, you mane it, he's got it. The only subset of the electorate who still see him favourably are Labour-voting Remainers, and that's certainly not the grassroots base from which you can reframe yourself as a success story.
He hasn’t the brain power. He is just a low-voltage nutcase.
(Gina Hudd, They Do It With Mirrors, 1991)
© Andrew Mackay, 1973
I love this, this idea that door-knockers and canvassers can make any difference. Like, if door-knocking worked, then, for a start, we’d all be Jehovah’s Witnesses with excellent broadband.
(Angela Barnes)
I have a problem now with all these voting intentions polls. Which is in fact not a new problem, as it was there already before the election. These polls tend to be very volatile, as you can see from my selection of six from the last seven conducted over the last fortnight, so I can't help suspecting that the electorate is actually far less volatile than the polls are showing, and it's all about different methodologies. We also have fresh memories of polls massively missing the results of our election, and that it was only a fluke that the actual headcount of seats won was not too different from seat projections made before the election. Then the American elections reinforced the feeling that pollsters couldn't hit a barn with a Storm Shadow if their life depended on it. Which is not irrelevant as several renowned and respected British pollsters did survey the American elections, and ended up as crassly wrong as the natives. And the methodologies are pretty much the same anyway, which is the crux of the problem. But my selected batch of six are quite interesting, as we have two each from three pollsters. So we can see an evolution, if not an actual trend, and it does not look good for Labour.
All three pollsters see Labour losing votes, starting from an already weaker position than at the general election, and surely we need to find some explanations for this. I'm not ready yet to deliver my post-mortem of the American elections, as Donald Trump may have some more surprises in store, but there are some lessons to be learned from them. Not just because some of the major factors at work are the same, but also because we have this uncanny habit of importing American political fads without questioning their validity. The most obvious example is wokeism, that has totally infected the Establishment Left, but also impregnated one of the many factions in the Conservative Party. Then there is illiterate student politics, that have turned the legitimate political support for the unalienable rights of the Palestinian people into an abject mash of unhinged anti-Semitism and promotion of Islamo-Nazi terrorism. The latter had little impact on our last election, but definitely worked against Labour. I fully expect the former to become much more of a factor in the near future, and to make things even more difficult for Keir Starmer than the last batch of polls, that translate into a massive loss of seats and the plausibility of a hung Parliament.
What the seat projections from the most recent polls reveal is quite worrying. Even the more Labour-friendly Opinium predicts a significant loss of seats compared to just two weeks ago. There are better than even odds that we would end up with a hung Parliament, where Labour would have to rely on a deal with the Liberal Democrats for a workable majority in Commons. This is not a good prospect because the LibDems are desperate to repaint themselves as 'true progressives' and have become worse woke absolutists than even Nadia Whittome. That's where I have to mention a post-election poll by the American branch of YouGov, that found 3% of American voters considering wokeism a factor in their vote, pretty much the same proportion as in the UK. But it rises to 26% among swing voters, those who have knowingly handed over their country to Trump's assorted squad of FSB assets, conspiracists and sex pests. My gut tells me we're close to seeing the same trend here, and we already have a poll of Wales, that I will discuss further down the road, that may already be evidence of that as it shows an even bigger swing towards the radical right represented by Reform UK than the average GB-wide poll. Labour should consider themselves warned, though they probably won't listen, as it is what the Establishment Left usually do. But mark my words, this won't end well.
You toffs don’t notice much what’s going on down among the workers, aren’t worth.
(Chief Inspector Japp, The ABC Murders, 1992)
© Bryan Ferry, 1973
Plenty happens in a village. Always something. That’s just my point. There’s always something.
(Jane Marple, A Caribbean Mystery, 1989)
My snapshot this time is based on the last four GB-wide polls, one each from More In Common, Opinium, JL Partners and Techne. I have also added the last Full Scottish from Norstat and the last Full Welsh from Survation to the broth, as both have been fielded in the same time frame. They also both cover more than Westminster voting intentions, and I will tell you more about it later. We thusly have a GB-wide super-sample of 7;846, a Scottish super-sample of 1,512 and a Welsh super-sample of 1,919. And the end product is as bad for Labour as you can imagine, now just 1.4% ahead of the Conservatives, and with dismal results in Scotland, Wales and the regions of England that used to be Labour heartlands. There are definitely similarities with what happened years ago in several European countries, and just a few weeks ago in the United States. Labour seem oddly unable to see what's happening, and are only offering more examples of their willingness to kowtow to faux progressive lunatics, rather than pay attention to the multiple voices of the people, no matter how contradictory they sound. When will they learn that dismissing inconvenient non-conforming opinions as 'bigoted' and 'far right' no longer works, and that it will come back to bite them in the arse?
To illustrate my point, a few days ago, The Hipstershire Gazette gave us more insight into our collective madness, with The Curious Incident Of Kebab On Diwali Night, definitely worth a read. This may sound like an isolated incident, but it is a sad reminder of the abject culture of coercion and cowardice that wokeism has infused into society. All it takes is one person fabricating an imaginary 'rule' or 'tradition' that never existed, whining and faking offence, pretending that she speaks 'in the name of the community' when she only represents her own opinion and prejudice. And instantly Labour and Keir Starmer fall to their knees and kowtow to an extremist fringe of special interests, or in this case one Conservative MP with a bag of vegan chips on her shoulder and desperately seeking her five seconds of media attention. Of course, discontent translates instantly in a very alarming seat projection, with Keir Starmer doing worse than Theresa May in 2017, and reduced to go begging for a coalition deal with the Liberal Democrats.
On current numbers, Labour would suffer some quite iconic blows, which would also hit Keir Starmer quite personally. Wes Streeting in Ilford North and Jess Philips in Birmingham Yardley defeated by Galloway-compliant Hamas-hugging independents. Kim Leadbeater in Spen Valley and Nia Griffith in Llanelli unseated by Reform UK. And it could easily get much worse as Angela Rayner, Yvette Cooper, Shabana Mahmood and Bridget Phillipson are all predicted to be in the danger zone, just some hundred votes ahead of their closest competitor. That should definitely ring a massive alarm bell, but will it? Or is it already too late for Keir Starmer to overcome popular discontent? In related news, Labour are now down nine MPs since Mike Amesbury was withdrawn the whip on 27 October for behaving quite heavy-handedly, not to say ham-fistedly, with a constituent. In just 115 days, less than George Canning was in office, Keir Starmer has lost more MPs than John Major during a full Parliamentary term. But I guess that's not exactly the kind of record Keir enjoys holding.
Mike Amesbury showed more integrity than anyone we’ve seen in Labour recently. Because, if you watch again, you will see every single punch was thrown from the left.
(Nabil Abdulrashid, Have I Got News For You?, 1 November 2024)
© Bryan Ferry, 1973
The budget wasn’t that bad. I mean, bus fares are more expensive, but pints are cheaper. Which means the night buses are going to be less crowded, but the people on it will be drunker.
(Nabil Abdulrashid, Have I Got News For You?, 1 November 2024)
Now we have had Rachel Reeves's first Budget, which you can alternatively see as the first Labour budget in 14 years, or the 15th Conservative budget in a row. Whatever floats your goats, as it is all a matter of differing perspective, which the lack of really bold innovation can only fuel. Of course, we were then subjected to a polling blitz as it was a perfect opportunity to give the pollsters' teams some work to do, rather that paying them to stay at home for lack of willingness to return to weekly voting intentions polling. But I will spare you the absolutely frighteningly boring prospect of leafing through all these polls, and expose you only to a few select highlights, which are enough anyway to get a pretty good idea of the Great British Public's mood. Which is not exactly cheerfully festive, despite Christmas Season being already open for like six weeks. First we have Savanta, asking the key question that every sleuth asks at the start of every investigation, "Cui bono?"
And we have one of many explanations why Brits are not happy bunnies with Reeves's first Budget. We don't think it will benefit us personally, and by quite an impressive margin. Reeves even gets a negative rating on working people benefiting from the Budget, which might have been a convincing talking point for her and Starmer. If only their answer, when asked to define what working people are, had not been ass waffling and muddied as when they're asked what a woman is. The Great British Public agree that the Budget will benefit low earners and young people, but that's just not good enough when their main concerns are focused on the cost of living and the cost of housing. Part of the Chancellor's mission statement is also to be summat of a Mr Motivator, including stuff in the Budget that will be incentives for the common people to act in ways deemed good for the community, if not for themselves. Alas, poor Rachel, another poll from More In Common shows that the public do not feel that way at all. The verdict is that the Budget will neither encourage people to save more, nor to spend more. Which may seem quite contradictory at first glance, but is actually quite natural when lots of people say they have a hard time making ends meet or even affording the essentials.
That's when you notice that the sales of dog food have increased, but because the people are eating it themselves, not feeding it to their dogs. Because there will be no dogs left in the UK soon, as we are heading for a Dog Cull worse than the Badger Cull. Dogs are being abandoned by the thousands as we speak, starting with the Lockdown Puppies, tied to a post outside a Council pound that will execute them after seven days, because no-kill shelters are already swamped and can't accommodate new arrivals. Back to the Budget, I also have my doubts about the More In Common poll because of the bit about people moving away from the UK. That's too obvious an echo of the claims that abolishing the non-dom status will force the poor billionaires into exile, as if there was something evil in making legal tax evasion illegal at last. Just as their two items about business sound like a replay of Kemi Badenoch accusing Labour of being bad for business, while they are struggling to be as business-friendly as possible without actually duplicating all Tory policies. Then we had another poll from BMG Research, probably wanting to adopt a more rational approach by probing their panel about the impact of the Budget on an array of specific issues.
Of course, this kind of assessment is also very likely to be shaped by the dominant narrative, which is definitely more influenced by doom-and-gloom headlines in the right-wing press that by the messy opinion columns in the already discredited metropolitan 'progressive' journotariat. To be honest, I can't imagine a Chancellor knowingly proposing a budget that would have no positive impact at all, except on funding public services, which the public see as the only really positive point, and properly regulating business, which is strictly speaking not a budgetary matter. We also find in this poll the idea that Labour is bad for business, and will do nothing to help with the cost of living or improve the common people's individual situation. That's again a full echo of the opposition's talking points, and quite plausibly not a really fair assessment of what the Budget will achieve. It is also fair to remember that the Great British Public already had quite a negative view of Rishi Sunak's sole budget earlier this year, and what we see here is also the result of a loss of confidence in all parties. By the way, before I forget, I may have exaggerated the part about people eating dog food just a wee smitch, but the incoming Dog Genocide is real. Sadly. And that will be far worse than the Great Massacre of 1939.
Labour inherited the budget black hole from the Tories, so you’ve got to pay tax on that as well now.
(Ian Hislop, Have I Got News For You?, 1 November 2024)
© Bryan Ferry, 1973
This was the first Labour budget in 14 years. One controversial move was to raise the cap on single bus fares from £2 to £3. What the Government don’t seem to realise is that a lot of people have to use buses, especially if they’ve bought a train ticket.
(Jo Brand, Have I Got News For You?, 1 November 2024)
BMG Research also used a more familiar and practical approach, asking their panel if they oppose or support some measures included in the Budget. Interestingly, the first half of their laundry list shows convincing popular support for provisions that can genuinely be labelled left-wing, or seeking to improve social justice and equity. Brits are much more circumspect about the rise of employers' NIC, as they have seen media reports pointing to the risk of it being passed either to the staff, via lower pay rises in the near future, or the customers, via instant price hikes. But surely no business in the UK would do that, or would they? Before you answer, that's a rhetorical question, mates. Of course they will, what did you think? Rachel Reeves gets far less support when she goes against the people's perception of social justice, best exemplified by the 50% hike on bus fares. Which is not a surprise as it will hit low earners the hardest, specifically car-deprived young people and pensioners, and also contradicts the government's green strategy. But Rachel desperately needs the dosh, doesn't she?
The second half of BMG's laundry lists goes broadly in the same direction. Every item gets a majority of support, except the axing of the Winter Fuel Allowance. Which could have been avoided if New Model Labour weren't so feart of the ultra-rich owning the right-wing press and had included a wealth tax in the budget. Which definitely wouldn't have turned the UK into Fidel Castro's Cuba, as there was no wealth to tax there anyway. Oddly, two items are missing from the poll, for no obvious reasons. The ringfencing of £3bn a year for aid to Ukraine, and the halving of the inheritance tax relief on business and agricultural properties valued over £1m. Did BMG expect both to be unpopular, or did they think they don't really matter? I guess they would change their minds if the same poll was fielded today, after we have seen Vladimir Putin announcing World War Three for the seventeenth time, and Jeremy Clarkson recasting himself as Wat Tyler 2.0. Which does not actually change the true nature of the measures, but just the public's perception of them. But we are now firmly in a variant of the time-space continuum where perception trumps reality because, ye ken, both Elon Musk and the woke mob say it does, don't they?
J.L. Partners surveyed a different approach, testing the public's willingness to accept either increased borrowing or higher taxes to deal with some specific issues. The idea of borrowing to plug the deficit is something lots of people have considered in real life to manage their personal finances. The crude version of that is pretty simple. In plain English, that's applying for a loan to grant yourself a permanent overdraft that your bank would never accept. Rephrased that way, you surely see how fucking stupid that is. Especially as it is a vicious circle. Taking new loans increases the debt, which increases the debt repayments, actually just interests repayments as you're still seven generations away from repaying the capital, and that increases the deficit unless you slash other spending. So your best case scenario is that it changes nothing, and the most likely one is that it makes things worse. But the Great British Public still like that option as much as raising taxes to plug the deficit, which is indeed the smart option, because neo-liberal brainwashing has made us so taxphobic, even when the issue is adding much needed resources to defence in the context of combined American isolationism and Russian imperialism.
Oddly, the poll included a much smaller range of options when testing of acceptability of higher taxes, as if they assumed that increased borrowing was the umbrella option to cover all our financing needs. This makes sense only because Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are obsessively unambitious about taxation, and ruling out options that would bring billions to the Treasury. First of all plugging all the loopholes in current tax legislation, not just the non-dom status that will probably bring less than expected because the tax evaders have had too much of an advance warning. And of course a wealth tax, which they have ruled out only because it is anathema and heresy to neo-liberals, and New Model Labour fear the pre-arranged coordinated faux outrage in the right-wing press. So they disregarded the one truly progressive option, that could have brought £25bn or more to the Treasury, and allowed them to avoid the very unpopular reform of inheritance tax. So all they have left is more borrowing, at en extravagant cost as interest rates on international markets have increased massively over the last two years, and great uncertainty on the actual return on investment during the current term.
The world is run from wherever the merchant ships set sail off into the West. Not from castle walls, from counting houses. From the pens that scrape out your promissory notes.
(Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall: Anna Regina, 2015)
© Bryan Ferry, 1973
Deliver me from that god whose face is that of a hound, but whose skin is that of a man, who liveth upon the damned, digesting human hearts and voiding filth. One seeth him not.
(Hercule Poirot, The Egyptian Tomb, 1993)
Now the biggest thing in this month's news was actually not Kemi Badenoch, the Budget or Donald Trump. Obviously it was Justin Welby. The sad story of one of the privileged high and mighty forced to resign for doing what the privileged high and mighty always do. Protecting each other from the consequences of their crimes, in this case known paedophile abuser John Smyth. The saddest, though less surprising part of the scandal, was other privileged high and mighty rushing to TwiXter to tell us what a good man Justin is, just after telling us they were leaving TwiXter because, ye ken, Trump. Unsurprisingly too, this obviously pre-scripted and orchestrated media blitz came mostly from the privileged woke high and mighty, the same corner of the political spectrum that is currently propagandising that paedophilia is just another legitimate sexual orientation that should be protected by law. YouGov couldn't miss the opportunity to probe the Great British Public about their feelings towards the Church of England. Which, in the heat of the moment, are not favourable.
Even the older generation of Conservative voters are not as enthused with The Church as they once were. Reform UK voters are also not amused, and you can't blame them when you consider how The Church has become one of the pillars of the establishment woketariat, with all the zeal of recent converts confusing fabricated guilt with genuine repentance for the dark side of the past. But one sacrificial black sheep is not enough, now that first blood has been drawn, and even voices from within The Church itself are calling for a wider purge. Even Wes Fucking Streeting is going after them now. After raising many an eyebrow, The Curious Incident Of The Bishop And The Paedo is now raising many a question about the the future of The Church within the institutional framework of The Realm. I have a hunch the supportive woketariat cannot impose an omerta of 'no debate' now, and YouGov felt it too, also testing a number of topics directly related to the Church of England's involvement and influence in British public life.
The results are quite interesting, and probably upsetting for some. The public's replies to the second, third and fourth items, and to a lesser extent the sixth too, directly point to a basic principle born out of the Enlightenment. A principle notionally embedded in the Constitution of the United States, but not actually respected there. That of Separation of Church and State, the various most essential aspects of which are supported by a clear and undeniable majority of Brits. All four of these could easily be enforced by an Act of Parliament, which of course New Model Labour will never even try,, and it would surely fail the medieval requirement of King's Consent anyway. Such a pity. In totally unrelated news, the award for the most outrageously stupid column of the month, and probably of the year, goes to Will Dunn in The New Statesman. His argument is pretty much that spooking and killing dogs with fireworks is progressive and cool because, ye ken, only old bigots love their pets, while disadvantaged kids prone to anti-social behaviour love the fracas. He just missed 'transphobia' and 'white privilege' in his word salad of asinine bullshit, but I bet they were at the tip of his pen all along. And you wonder why people hate the privileged metropolitan middle-class so much.
If I had a crossbow, I would shoot your fucking head off.
(Thomas Howard, Wolf Hall: The Devil’s Spit, 2015)
© Bryan Ferry, 1973
All I have, all I own, is the ground I stand upon. If you want it, you must take it. I will not yield it.
(Thomas More, Wolf Hall: The Devil’s Spit, 2015)
We have had two Independence polls recently, both fielded after Alex Salmond's untimely death. Find Out Now came first, finding a 1% swing towards No since their previous poll in January., but with Yes ahead 52-48. Norstat came second, as part of an omnibus Full Scottish on behalf of The Sunday Times, and found a 3% swing towards Yes since their much more recent previous poll in August, resulting in a tie. Was it summat of a 'sympathy vote' after Big Eck's death and the many tributes reminding us of the glorious days of the 2014 campaign? I'd like to not think so, and that it reflects the start of a genuine movement towards Yes, but who really knows? The trends of voting intentions don't really go that way, unfortunately, as we look stuck again on that dreadful plateau of 48% Yes to 52% No, even with one poll predicting it would go the other way round. It has improved slightly, but I'm still not convinced it can only get better, especially after such a long time without any serious campaigning by the nominally pro-Independence parties.
To add some spice to the haggis, Norstat also polled their panel's opinion on the Reeves Budget, a redux version of it covering only reserved matters. As expected, the measures most obviously labelled left-wing, or reflecting social justice concerns, meet with solid approval. Oddly, the reduction on beer and cider duties is not popular, though I really can't imagine why. Finally, I think the replies on Ukraine funding sadly reflect very real underlying trends in Scottish politics, and more broadly the Scottish psyche. There is no strong support for NATO here, unlike England, and even the SNP converted only relatively recently to accepting it, and it caused major friction and defections. There is also a deep distrust for anything rooted in Anglo-centric Westminster policies, and that includes defence and international alliances. On top of that, add the confluence of minds between the old Birkenstock-wearing geezers of the Soviet-funded 'pacifist' generation, and the young nose-ringed wankers of the Hamas-hugging Gen Z, both pavlovianly anti-American, within the Scottish left, and that does it. Sadly.
Finally, and more relevantly to the other topics surveyed in the poll, Norstat also tested the popularity of some political leaders. This was fielded before Kemi Badenoch was elected Leader of the Conservative Party, so they still tested Rishi Sunak, and he got his lower rating ever in Scotland. Badenoch will be featured in the next iteration, but I doubt that she will do better, given the amassed bad blood between the Conservatives and the Scottish people. But there is a new factor here. The honeymoon between Scotland and the Labour Party, which was really a thing earlier this year, has now ended. In quite a shocker for Labour, we have again fallen out of love with them, and as quickly as England.
For months, Keir Starmer and Anas Sarwar were more popular than Humza Yousaf and then John Swinney. It's gone the other way now, but not because Swinney has been able to gain support. It's just Starmer and Sarwar falling from grace, and the consequences on voting intentions are quite clear. But the voting patterns, the demographics and geography of the vote, as inherited from the most recent elections, also mean that it would be wishful thinking to expect a genuine game-changing political earthquake from this.
It’s not enough to claim a country, you have to hold it. It has to be made secure, in every generation.
(Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall: Entirely Beloved, 2015)
© Bryan Ferry, 1973
The Scots will be allowed to send to Westminster, a handful of men who will make no weight whatever. They will be allowed to sit there for form's sake to be laughed at.
(Daniel Defoe, 1706)
There have been nine Council by-elections in Scotland this month, a belated consequence of the general election, with new MPs resigning their Council seats to avoid double-jobbing. Four of these seats were preciously held by the SNP and five by Labour. After the by-elections, four seats are held by the Conservatives, one by the Liberal Democrats, four by Labour and none by the SNP. Of course, we shouldn't read too much into these by-elections, especially not take them as a sort of test run for a general election that won't happen for another four-and-a-half years. But there are some interesting results in here. Labour falling to third place and losing to the LibDems in Edinburgh is quite a shocker, with no rational explanation spontaneously coming to mind. The SNP losing Elgin City South is also a surprise as the SNP came first and the Conservatives a distant third there in 2022. But the three Aberdeenshire seats are not upsets, as the Conservatives were the first party in all three in 2022, and the SNP bagged these seats only because of the single transferable vote system. The most interesting part is what kind of vote shares the competing parties got on first preferences in these by-elections.
We can't draw too many peremptory conclusions from these, as only the SNP and the Conservatives fielded candidates in all wards, and Labour sat out the three in Aberdeenshire that were totally hopeless for them anyway. The most significant result, duly identified by the Scottish media as such, is how Reform UK fared. 8.5% of the popular vote on average, but a more impressive 11.2% in the six wards where they stood. Reform UK bagged only 0.2% at the 2021 Scottish Parliament, didn't even bother to stand at the 2022 Council elections, and then skyrocketed to an unexpected 7% at this year's general election. Their most remarkable achievement was to contribute to Douglas Ross's defeat in Aberdeenshire North and Moray East, where they were the perfect outlet for enraged Conservative voters seeking revenge on Doogie over the abhorrent way he stole the selection from incumbent David Duguid, who would obviously have held the seat. And now the new Norstat poll predicts them skyrocketing again to 14%.
But that's not the most important lesson from this poll. What matters here is the massive loss of votes for Labour, while the SNP are stagnating at the same level as at the general election. Of course, the massive paradox, and the massive irony, is that such a huge shift away from Labour in the popular vote would not trigger a tectonic shift of seats back to the SNP. Partly because the swing towards Labour in July was colossal, second only, in the whole electoral history of Scotland, to the swing from Labour to the SNP in 2015. Partly too because the SNP brand are still discredited enough that they don't benefit from Scotland falling out of love with Labour again. Sadly, the right-wing parties are the main beneficiaries. What Norstat found about transfers from the general is very enlightening in this respect.
So we have Labour losing a third of their past votes, with only marginal transfers from other parties' voters. Especially noticeable is that the SNP get back only a tiny fraction of voters who went for Labour at the general. Which leads to the unavoidable conclusion that SNP voters who switched to Labour in July are still happy with it and stay there. There's quite a different message from Labour's July voters as more than one in five would switch to the England-based right-wing parties. This is actually not as surprising as it seems, as polls show the same thing happening in England, and more visibly in the North of England. So why should Scotland be immune? And, more relevantly, how could we? There is nothing in the air North Of The Wall that would make people react differently to the same events. Scotland is falling out of love with Labour, but so are England and Wales. The SNP may have hoped it would benefit them, but their Westminster cred has been too shattered to bits for that to happen. Which, as you probably expected, doesn't work at all for Holyrood, as we will see below the fold.
If you can’t cut the mustard, you’re out with the ketchup.
© Bryan Ferry, 1973
You see, tolerance can become a vice if it isn’t guided by a strong moral sense. Know what I mean?
(Alex Nicholson, The Avengers: Mission To Montreal, 1962)
Norstat of course also polled the next Holyrood election, and here too the results are quite a shocker for the Labour Party. They should listen and take this seriously, as Norstat's polls were the closest to the actual results at the 2021 Scottish Parliament election, and for the Scottish seats at this year's general election. Now they find quite a reversal of fortunes from earlier this year, with the SNP again in the lead and Scottish Labour losing ground. The trendlines of both the constituency and list votes show this quite clearly. But the main beneficiary is not the SNP, as you would expect from past swingometers, but Reform UK. Looks like everybody has some introspection to do, to explain how the fuck an English nationalist party, that counted for fuck all in Scotland three years ago, is now outperforming established parties like the Liberal Democrats and Greens.
Don't think that this Norstat poll is all milk and roses for the SNP. They are still predicted to lose a fuckload of voters on the 2021 election, and do just a wee smitch better than at this year's general election. The real event here is the massive fall of Labour's voting intentions which seriously harms their prospects in seat projections. The nominally 'pro-Independence' majority is lost, but not by the enormous margin predicted by earlier polls. Right now, they would be just three or four seats short, so a minority coalition government would probably be a viable option. All they have to assume is that Labour would never agree to be part of a Unionist coalition including Reform UK. That would be the massive irony that the massive repellent power of absolutist English nationalists would help election-losing Scottish nationalists to stay in power. But don't miss the other significant result. The strongest coalition would still be one of the SNP and Labour, just don't stay stuck in the belief that it can't happen.
The transfers of votes from one election to the next are quite revealing here too. Norstat offered crosstabs of current Holyrood voting intentions, and I use only the constituency vote here, with both the 2024 general election and the 2021 Scottish Parliament election. You would surely object that the general election is irrelevant, as it's like mixing turnips and avocado. But it's actually the only clear evidence we have of Scotland falling out of love with Labour, which is this year's thing and what I want to catch, much more than the rationally relevant comparison with the previous Holyrood election.
Remember that the SNP were still massively dominant in 2021, the Conservatives still a credible force, and Labour a disappointing third. This is definitely not what we have now, even with a terrible result for Labour, so of course transfers will show a better picture for Labour if you factor in only the 2021 election. A comparison with last July's vote is actually more relevant and enlightening because it was also the timeframe when polls showed Labour becoming the first party in Holyrood again, and also the favourites to form the next Scottish government. What we see here is also quite consistent with the predicted transfers at the Westminster election, with Labour losing a third of their vote, and more of their voters switching to the right than back to the SNP. There are multiple reasons for this. First came the shafting of the Winter Fuel Allowance, and the SNP have used the full potential of this, and also of Anas Sarwar's U-turns within U-turns within U-turns about it. Then another game-changer may be the controversial reform of the inheritance tax for businesses and farms. The inheritance tax is within the reserved part of taxation in Scotland, so it's only fair that Scottish Labour should suffer some backlash over it, especially after one of their own gave credence to the idea that it's all about a programmed Farmer Cull.
We can do to the farmers what Thatcher did to the miners. It’s an industry we could do without. If people are so upset that they want to go on the streets and spread slurry, then we don’t need small farmers.
© Bryan Ferry, 1973
He was the big winner of the last election in the UK and he’s a very spectacular man, very highly respected. Nigel Farage.
(Donald Trump, introducing guest stars at a campaign rally)
We have also had a Full Welsh poll from Survation, which is not really good for Labour, though less radically so as Norstat's Full Scottish. But enough to make The Hipstershire Gazette reflect on the existential threat that Reform UK may represent for Labour in Wales. Not coincidentally just three days after Donald Trump's return cruelly highlighted the divorce between the struggling working class and the woke political establishment, of which Welsh Labour is a prominent and unhinged member, and always eager to prove it in the most unexpected ways. More on this later, when we take a look at the Senedd voting intentions. Westminster voting intentions show a significant slump for Labour, and no surge for the Conservatives. Instead Reform UK is benefiting from the people's discontent, like everywhere across England, and now doing better than the Conservatives.
Interestingly, Labour's crumbling voting intentions don't translate into a massive loss of seats. In Wales, just like in Scotland, Labour have secured their seats with such huge margins that it would take a much bigger swing to endanger them. Only three Labour seats were won on less than 5%, while twenty were won on more than 10%, including five on more than 25%, which makes them pretty much impregnable. Besides, the fight between the Conservatives and Reform UK for the right-wing vote means they are cancelling each other out in many seats that would otherwise be clearly in jeopardy. So the Survation poll predicts only four seats would change hands, all among the closest marginals at the general election. Ynys Môn shifting back from Plaid Cymru to the Conservatives, Clwyd North and Mid & South Pembrokeshire from Labour back to the Conservatives, and more surprisingly Llanelli from Labour to Reform UK. But it could be just the start, as Reform UK came second in 13 Welsh Labour seats last July, and are fast building a following in parts of Wales that once looked safely Labour. My model says that the next two to fall would be Montgomeryshire & Glyndwr, then Neath & Swansea East, and another nine across Red South Wales could plausibly get close to the danger zone. Many examples abroad prove that a long suppressed discontent, a stiff upper lip for the good of the party of their forebears, can lead people to quite explosive reactions when they suddenly decide enough is enough and the time for a change has come. Any change. Even the demonstrably worst one.
To Poirot too, it sounds like the tosh. But I think there is happening something mysterious. Perhaps you should be on your guard.
(Hercule Poirot, The Adventure Of The Western Star, 1990)
© Bryan Ferry, 1973
I don’t hold with plague, sleeping sickness, famine and cancer, but they happen all the same.
(Alexander Bonaparte Cust, The ABC Murders, 1992)
The Senedd voting intentions from that Survation poll are not good news for Welsh Labour either. They're admittedly doing better than in the two previous polls fielded in July, but they are still significantly below there 2021 result. With an annoying surge of Reform UK too, who are now in the high teens, and plausibly displacing the Conservatives as the Party Of The Right in Wales. That's not a done deal yet, but I am definitely not sure that Kemi Badenoch can snatch back enough voters in the 18 months remaining before the election. Especially as the numbers clearly say that many voters have also migrated from Labour to Reform UK in a very short time since the beginning of this year, and that's just the kind of migrants Nigel Farage will welcome with open arms and no questions asked. It has become such a clear and present threat that even The Hipstershire Gazette has taken a crash course in Welsh politics, and is warning a complacent Labour about it.
Survation offered an interesting novelty, a breakdown of voting intentions for the 22 Councils of Wales. Which led me naturally to an estimated breakdown for the 16 new six-member Senedd constituencies. We already know these will be drawn by pairing the 32 Westminster constituencies, and that's pretty much what I did. Some pairings are obvious. The two Swansea constituencies, the two Newport constituencies, the two Clwyd constituencies go together. The four Cardiff constituencies become two, and I chose East and West, but it could also be North and South. Brecon, Radnor & Cwm Tawe and Montgomeryshire & Glyndŵr are merged for a big Powys constituency, and so on. When you have done the obvious ones, many others become unavoidable, like Torfaen and Monmouthshire, Wrexham and Flintshire, Gower and Llanelli, Ynys Môn and Bangor Aberconwy, etc... The only tricky part is when you find yourself stuck with only two non-contiguous constituencies left in a region, and have to go back four steps for a combination that works. But I got there in the end in like twenty minutes and it looks good. I'm not saying the official map will be the same, but I would be surprised if it wasn't pretty close. So, here we go, with the poll's national vote first and then the 'new' constituencies from West to East, and North to South.
Of course, you whole point of the exercise is to estimate the voting intentions for each of these 16 constituencies, and that's where Survation's breakdown by Council comes in handy. Sometimes you can use them directly, sometimes you have to use the average of two Councils as the best estimate for an overlapping constituency. It's not totally failsafe and foolproof, but it's obviously the best I could do with what the poll offered. Which is a lot, and I certainly hope they will duplicate that in future polls. And here we go with the final eight constituencies, covering the more populated areas in South East Wales.
The upside of having a detailed breakdown of voting intentions is that you get a fairly accurate view of the massive discrepancies between the regions of Wales, which you don't get if you stay with the former five electoral regions. You see how the very unevenly distributed Plaid Cymru vote can be both an asset and a liability, and where the sometimes unexpected areas of strength for the Liberal Democrats are. Or the sometimes unexpected areas of weakness for Labour, which generally have more to do with transfers to Reform UK rather than to the Conservatives, LibDems or Greens. But it isn't like we haven't seen socially conservative working class voters switch from the woke social-liberal left to the nationalist right before, innit? It would be foolish to assume that what happened in Pas-de-Calais, Lorraine, Saxony, Thuringia, Lombardy, Ohio or Pennsylvania can't happen in Wales, wouldn't it? Especially when you have multiple polls that just reflect a widespread disenchantment with the Labour government and some sort of buyer's remorse across all Three Nations of the Big Isle.
Thank God. I was sitting here going, “I’ve only just realised how stupid America looks to the rest of the universe”. But other people have done it. We’re all stupid. We’re back. OK.
(Desiree Burch, QI: Vets, 2024)
© Bryan Ferry, 1973
Facts, Hastings, facts. Those are the cobbles that make up the road along which we travel.
(Hercule Poirot, Murder In Mesopotamia, 2002)
The upside of having more detailed data closer to the grassroots is that it shows that the new electoral law is far less ruthless than I initially thought. Of course, the d'Hondt quota in six-members constituencies is still a massive 14.3%, but the odd mechanics of the highest averages method mean that you don't actually have to reach the quota to get a seat, once the bigger parties have snatched theirs. This is especially true when the first party, despite being weakened, is still predicted to get more than twice as many votes as its right-wing competitors. Even with Plaid Cymru losing votes, compared to the previous poll in July, we are still as close to a four-way split as Welsh polling ever was. And the wildly uneven distribution of everybody's votes means that the allocation of seats is not limited to just the four main parties.
Even the Greens would have a chance, which is not as obvious as it seems, despite getting a better national vote share than usual. Only their predicted 14% of the popular vote in my theoretical Merthyr Tydfil and Blaenau Gwent constituency would get them a seat, which could even not happen on different pairings with less Green-friendly neighbouring areas. Like pairing Merthyr Tydfil with Pontypridd and Blaenau Gwent with Caerphilly. Which would obviously make less sense geographically or in the perspective of shared community interests, but could happen. The final official map will obviously seek to maximise Labour's number of seats, even if some of the pairings are more acrobatic, and they can get their way with support of just the Liberal Democrats in the current Senedd, so long as they agree to the common-sensical Powys constituency that would make continued LibDem presence in the Senedd a given, no matter how their votes fluctuate elsewhere.
The full headcount shows that the next Senedd would indeed be summat of a Rainbow Chamber with no majority, just what you would expect from proportional representation, even in a version where the hurdle is high. You have to wonder what Labour expected from their electoral reform. Getting a majority of seats on proportional representation with the D'Hondt method requires 42% of the popular vote with a single national list, and 40% if you go for a large number of regional lists. And even that works only if you have a clearly diverse political landscape with several parties competing from both the left and right. But Labour never got such a high vote share at any Senedd election on the list vote, which is probably the best estimate of what the current law would have delivered, they didn't even come close. So why choose a system that pretty much deprives them of any chance of ever getting a majority?
This poll, with all the caveats you can imagine, is quite a shocker for Welsh Labour and, more broadly, Labour HQ too. Welsh Labour would be forced into a coalition, with Plaid Cymru the only partner that could take it to a majority, and I can't imagine them being happy bunnies with that. On top of that, the massive surge of the Reform UK vote, pushing Welsh Conservatives down to fourth place and breathing down Plaid Cymru's neck, is a huge reason to not be cheerful, either in Cardiff or in London. I am sure Labour spads would be tempted to dismiss it, because that Survation poll was commissioned and paid for by Arron Banks, if they weren't getting the same signal from GB-wide polls and Scottish polls, and also from the very real votes cast at the Scottish Council by-elections I mentioned earlier. So they should definitely suspend disbelief, ditch their preconceptions and listen. Which would be a good way to avoid becoming the laughing stock of Wales with stupid bullshit like 'dogs are racist and allotments are white male privilege', that is stratospherically cretinous even by the usual abysmally low standards of woke fanaticism. Remaining deliberately deaf and blind to multiple warnings, and doubling down on their most ridiculous virtue-signalling stunts, would lead Welsh Labour nowhere, except down the same road as the American Democrats. Which may be what awaits them anyway, and even a committed social-democrat like me is close to thinking it would be a good thing, to get their feet back on the ground and their brains in the real world.
I make people aware, and I certainly don’t swan around like a fop. I’m studying conditions.
(James Ferguson, Death On The Nile, 2004)
© Bryan Ferry, 1973
Well, if you put your head in the mouth of a lion, you can’t complain if one day he bite it off, hein?
(Hercule Poirot, The Lost Mine, 1990)
Stuff is happening outwith the UK too, so let's end with some news from abroad. Much to nobody's surprise, given the massive amount of speculation and pressure throughout the year, a snap general election will be held in Ireland on the 29th of November. Fine Gael leader and Taoiseach Simon Harris is seeking a personal mandate after he succeeded Leo Varadkar just seven months ago. This can be a risky gamble, as Theresa May learned the hard way in 2017, but can also lead to a resounding success, as the whole UK learned the hard way with Boris Johnson in 2019. Obviously, the Irish electoral law, with 174 TDs elected from 43 constituencies on single transferable vote, the worst of all possible options, does not generate genuine landslides, but polls show that some interesting upsets could happen. The trendlines show how significantly Irish public opinion has evolved in the four years since the last election.
The most obvious change is how the Sinn Féin vote skyrocketed after their undeniable success at the 2020 election, then plummeted way below the predicted vote shares for Fianna Fail and Fine Gael. It's definitely the people's verdict on Sinn Féin becoming the most unhinged absolutist woke party in Ireland, forgetting their ancestral mission statement to fight for a United Irish Republic. It will not save Ireland from woke radicalism though, as the current government coalition of Fine Gael, Fianna Fail and Greens have fallen deep down that same rabbit hole, and Leo Varadkar was a prime propagandist of the toxic ideology of gender self-identification. There is indeed quite a lot of confusion among Irish political parties as Fine Gael, notionally more to the right, appears more likely to endorse woke 'progressive' talking points while Fianna Fail, notionally more to the centre-left, is more reluctant. Now, the weighted average of the most recent batch of polls, as well as the seat projection you can deduce from it, show that Fine Gael is likely to be the big winner of the incoming election, and Sin Féin the big loser.
These results are not without ambiguity and potential fragility, as the outgoing government coalition is predicted to get only a minuscule one-seat majority, less than in 2020 despite the increase of the Dail's size to its largest number of seats ever since Independence. Interestingly, the second winner on current polling would be the Social Democrats, supporters of Nordic Model policies, doubling their share of the popular vote and their number of TDs, and highly unlikely to join or support the coalition. That still leaves the notionally left-wing Labour, who have proved to be quite opportunistic in their choice of alliances in the past, to boost it. Or could Fine Gael solicit the conservative Independent Ireland, just one year old and already predicted to enter the Dail, to add their votes to the government's side? We will probably know quite quickly, as Harris has every reason to want short negotiations for the next government's formation. Now, mates, to be honest, I am truly devastated that The Hipstershire Gazette has chosen to fold its operations on TwiXter, and that we won't benefit from them wokesplaining us what the Justin Welby Fan Club groupthink take on this election is, and why Sinn Féin would have won it if they had been more woke, just as Kamala Harris would now be Leader Of The Free World™. Because they never learn.
I never realised before that common sense is as powerful an instinct as love, hatred or patriotism.
(Cedric Crackenthorpe, 4:50 From Paddington, 1987)
© Bryan Ferry, 1973
