Jeremy's Den

The poetry of the Earth is never dead. When all the birds are faint with the hot sun and hide in cooling trees, a voice will run from hedge to hedge. That is the grasshopper’s.

(John Keats)

Life moves around pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

(Ferris Bueller)

57 years ago this week, the legendary Woodstock festival ended, after "three days of peace of music", as its USP went. Those who attended remember it either as the best days of their lives, though their memories may be blurred by the on-site ingestion of various products, or as a complete fucking mess, and the two are not mutually exclusive. The complete recordings of the whole festival have been released on its 50th anniversary, including the between-sets announcements by the festival's MC Chip Monck. And they prove that it was a fucking mess. There is a 61yr-old bloke called Derek out there whose first childhood memory is that his parents took him to Woodstock and lost him in the crowd. Twice. But the performances were memorable. Well, most of them, including Jefferson Airplane whose set, played in the wee hours of the third day though being technically the last of the second day, is widely considered one of the best of both the festival and their own career. So here we go, with a handful of bonus live tracks from a performance in San Francisco, three weeks after Woodstock, tacked at the end. The two canonical versions of Joni Mitchell's legendary song "Woodstock", her jazzy-experimental original and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's hard rock cover, serve as bookends.

We surely can agree that the most important event of the year was neither the change of Prime Minister, nor the unprecedented spread of forest fires triggered by climate change all across Europe, from Ukraine to the Cairngorms, but the by-election in Clacton-super-Mare, the town that thought that electing a corrupt millionaire and pathological liar would make their life better. Well, it didn't, did it? I really hoped, up to the last second before the declaration, which Farage didn't even bother to attend under a pretext he totally made up, that Jonathan Harvey would defeat Benito Fromage. A cunt kicked out by a Count, what's not to love? Alas, it wasn't to be, though Jon Harvey was the undisputed star at the declaration and delivered the one true victory speech of the night. He even ended up a better magician than Andy Burnham, as he got Shitweasel to crawl out of his hole and for once focus on the Fash, instead of shitting on Labour. We could have guessed the outcome through the prism of the lone poll of this by-election, conducted by Survation, the only ones who took that farce seriously enough to poll it. They even tested three scenarios. The actual by-election, but with all other candidates bundled into one except, for some unspecified reason, batshit crazy Lozza Fox. A Farage-Binface one-on-one. A standard election with everyone standing, which is probably what awaits Clacton-super-Mare in just a few short weeks, after the Standards Commissioner concludes his investigation. In all scenarios, Benito won. Which does not mean he will win the next by-election after more inconvenient revelations.

The Clacton campaign has been the weirdest ever, as the main candidate never showed up in the constituency, too terrified that the no-longer-complaisant media would ask inconvenient questions about bribes and corruption. Now he can borrow Count Binface's bin to hide in it. There were even fears that Benito had boarded a plane to Ceuta to campaign there for the benefit of British expats. But that window of opportunity shut in his face within two days, as the socialist government of Spain managed to defuse and solve the incident without the use of brute force, amidst strong evidence that it had all been staged by the Moroccan government to take pressure off their own backs over domestic issues, and score points in a generations-old territorial quarrel with Spain. Sue-Ellen Braverman couldn't resist stoking the fire with fake news too,, and looked like a fucking pathetic idiot when all the illegal intruders had returned where they came from. Fabricating stories about The Invasion Of Dover was certainly better value for blood money. But delegating Reform's media presence to Zia Yusuf and Vigilante Bob Jenrick had its obvious downside, as Zia was exposed as a foaming-at-the-mouth lunatic and Vigilante Bob as a mendacious dimwit, which is probably what both actually are. The bottom line is that it backfired and hurt Reform's credibility and image, as exemplified by a YouGov poll about which party is setting the political agenda.

There is now quite a wide consensus, which only Reform voters truly resist, that Labour are setting the current political agenda, a view very obviously supported by facts. For months Reform topped this type of poll, as they actually set the tone of the national political conversation thanks to the mediataro-punditarial complex, including the BBC's political team under the hugely biased Chris Mason, giving massive coverage to their every putrid brain-fart and selling it as some unquestionable self-evident truth. Now Andy Burnham is setting the tone, amusingly because he has adopted the same strategy as the Fash, flooding the airwaves with new announcements and statements day after day and using social media to spread The Word. Keir Starmer was always one step behind and reacting to Reform, and now Andy Burnham is one step ahead and forcing Reform to react to him. This is a win-win situation, first because it ensures him maximum exposure during the summer break that used to be Reform's exclusive playground, and then because Reform's every reply exposes their total lack of understanding of basic political issues and their unfitness for government. All the ingredients are here to confirm and solidify the Burnham Bounce before Commons return and the government attracts flak from all sides, and all of Reform's excuses won't make a fucking difference.

Burnham was always going to get a lot of oxygen at this stage of the cycle. Why would we waste key announcements?

(Anonymous Reform source, The Guardian, 1 August 2026)

There have clearly been longstanding issues with things like defence procurement, value for money. And as I said to the team at the Ministry of Defence this week, these things matter not just in abstract.

(Wes Streeting, Sky News, 26 July 2026)

A month ago, YouGov published the results of their International Flagship Survey, covering various issues related to our perception of the current situation of the world and international relations, including our views on NATO, the USA and national defence. Let's start at home, and then we will widen the perspective. YouGov tested our level of confidence in The Forces' ability to defend us against foreign attack, or to defend our interests abroad, and found both rather low. You would obviously expect Reform voters to be the most pessimistic, as their party's core strategy is to denigrate everything while posing as the only true patriots, which is a bit rich from blokes funded by foreign blood money. Ironically, Conservative voters come out as the second most pessimistic, which shows a complete lack lack of memory and self-awareness, as the governments they voted for are the ones that inflicted the most damage on our Armed Forces in fourteen years of neglect, indifference and incompetence. But it's surely more fun to blame Labour and chastise them when they try and fix the mess the Tories left behind.

It is obviously highly unlikely that the Russian Reich will attempt a landing at Great Yarmouth, though they would probably be welcomed by the local MP, or somewhere along the South Coast, as Hitler once planned. It is also highly unlikely that any future British government will engage in some adventurous operation overseas. Keir Starmer set the tone when he refused to get embroiled in Trump's asinine war against Iran, despite being urged to do so by Badenoch and Farage. The nature of war and the tools of defence have changed dramatically over the last five years, so our government has to face a second level of tough choices, between reinforcing our conventional forces and diverting funds to the most advanced technology of the proverbial "hybrid war". Unfortunately, both are now necessary as a matter of urgency, and we lack the appropriate levels of funding. The Great British Public are fully aware that we do not do enough for defence, and this awareness has certainly been increased by the controversies over the Defence Investment Plan during Starmer's last weeks at Number Ten.

Labour and LibDem voters are oddly not the most convinced that we are doing too little for national security, but nothing beats the cloud-cuckoo-land where Green voters have chosen to reside. Of course their Lider Minimo Che Polanski has chosen to invoke the Ghosts Of Corbyn Past, and reframe himself as the reincarnation of CND activists of 1983 who protested the deployment of US missiles on UK soil at a free Billy Bragg concert subsidised by the Soviet Embassy. But it does not mean any sentient being has to embrace the Greens' irresponsible policies on defence and foreign relations, including the verbatim regurgitation of the Russian Reich's propaganda about NATO. Aggression, war crimes and genocide are not self-defence, whether it's Israel or Russia committing them, but Polanski's Weltanschauung is an edifice of bad faith and double standards. Fortunately, there is no majority supporting his views among the Great British Public, which does not mean we don't corner ourselves in contradiction when the time comes to decide how we fund the reconstruction of our defence. That's what we told YouGov, rejecting al three possible ways to achieve it.

We have no serious proposal on the table because we recoil in fear at the prospect of blood, toil, tears and sweat. Unsurprisingly, Conservative and Reform voters are ready to slash public services, which is a wider scope of possibilities than the welfare vs defence choice usually proposed by pollsters. But they would support that no matter the justification, just out of ideological preconceptions, wouldn't they? Fortunately the Labour Manifesto of 2024 offers Burnham some wiggle room. It never promised to never raise taxes, contrary to the current narrative from the right. The headline on page 10 just pledges to keep taxes "as low as possible", and the detailed commitment on page 21 is only to "not increase taxes on working people". Then Burnham should take a look at our national debt, Labour's policy on borrowing, and possibly take his cues from Japan. Japan's national debt is massively huger than ours, 235% of GDP vs 94% here. But it not an issue because 88% of it is held domestically, including 47% by the Bank of Japan. in contrast, 31% of ours is held directly by overseas operators, and only 31% by the Bank of England., which makes us more vulnerable. It may be time now to resurrect the old National Savings Movement, which offered the government ways to borrow domestically and avoid being taken hostage by Invisible Hand Of The Market.

It’s the right thing to do to spend money wisely, it’s also because it matters because we’re asking a lot of taxpayers.

(Wes Streeting, Sky News, 26 July 2026)

Intellectuals have been predicting the imminent collapse of Western civilization for more than one hundred and fifty years. Yet when I point this out as evidence that, to paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the demise of the West might be greatly exaggerated, I usually meet with strong scepticism.

(Arthur L. Herman, The Idea of Decline In Western History, 1997)

If you look at the bigger picture, our commitment to defence and national security is closely linked to our views of the UK's position in the world, which YouGov also dutifully polled. The replies reflect a rather bleak view bordering on the acceptance of the narrative of declinism, especially among right-wing voters, more likely to consider we have been relegated to the status of a minor power punching above its weight. Reform obviously have a vested interest in spreading the narrative of declinism, or else they would have no justification for importing the poisonous MAGA ideology from Trumpistan, and rebranding it as Make Britain Great Again with only minor adjustments. Conservative voters also embracing it again shows how devoid of self-awareness they are, as the symptoms of decline are the direct result of fourteen years of Tory rule, pursuing adventurous policies that left the Four Nations worse off than they were at the end of the Blair-Brown Era.

The truth is certainly less sombre than the poll seems to show, but we nevertheless have to accept that the UK has been demoted to medium power status, alongside our natural allies in the European Union like France or Germany, while faraway nations like Japan and India are rising through the ranks towards great power status. We should also consider ourselves lucky that we have not declined as much as Russia, who have fallen from super-power status to a mere sock-puppet of China. But having been pushed down a few rungs on the global food chain does not mean our influence has decreased as dramatically, either through hard power, the military and the economy, or soft power, diplomacy and culture. YouGov felt there was a whole uncharted domain to explore here, but our replies do not evidence optimism about the hard tools of influence.

Our expectations of military influence have obviously taken devastating blows as the sorry state of The Forces, after years of Tory neglect, was revealed bit by bit. Every new revelation makes it even worse, including the unexpected news that we no longer have any attack submarine fit for operational service. Always see the bright side of life, though. So long as they are stuck in drydock, they can't get stuck in silt off the Isle of Skye. You may also remember how the deployment of HMS Dragon to Cyprus, in the early days of Trump's War, became kind of a running joke for weeks. So much for our military power.. What the poll says about our vision of our economic influence is pragmatic as all that matters here is how much we weigh, and we don't weigh much. The UK has the fifth nominal GDP in the world, but falls to tenth if you calculate it based on purchasing power parity, per the International Monetary Fund's data for 2026. PPP-based is what the IMF economists rely on, so, in their eyes, we weigh less than Germany and Japan, which we already knew, but also India and Brazil, which must be a painful slap in the face for BritNats. Fortunately it gets better when we switch the focus to the two levers of soft power.

We should not underestimate the influence of British diplomacy in a world where the only certainty is that the United States will betray you sooner or later, as soon as the Orange Baboon sees an opportunity of financial gain for himself or his extended family of corrupt crooks. Just don't mention Peter Mandelson. The solidity of our support for Ukraine, confirmed by Burnham, tells the world we are reliable and trustworthy partners. The world's instability can even be a win-win situation for us if we convince enough countries that a strong relationship with us would help them counterbalance the toxic fallout of Trump's cowboy diplomacy. Culturally, we are more than Ed Sheeran, and we should actually apologise to the rest of the world for unleashing that talentless wanker on them. I guess the width of British cultural influence is determined by how many people know who the Brontë Sisters were, and its depth by how many know which one wrote Middlemarch. And the true understanding of British culture by how many instantly saw that the previous sentence was sarcasm. Sadly, I have a hunch most contenders on Celebrity Mastermind would have totally missed that and pretended they knew which one did it, so Burnham should also seek ways to enhance the cultural level at home. Just saying.

With our civilisation facing multiplying existential challenges, how quickly stagnation and decline could become a freefall. You don’t need an overactive imagination to ponder the brutal possible consequences.

(Owen Jones, The Guardian, 5 April 2023)

Truly, the prime ministerial honeymoon period is like a one-year-old’s birthday party. All you have to do is stand up and smile, for everyone to clap.

(Zoe Williams, The Guardian, 10 August 2026)

There are many ways the UK government can boost our influence in the world, one of which is international aid. It was the subject of a controversy when Keir Starmer decided to cut it to 0.3% of GNI, and the starmerphobes conveniently forgot to mention it had already been cut from the United Nations standard of 0.7% to 0.5% by Boris Johnson, and nobody batted an eye. It looks like Andy Burnham is bound to cut it again, possibly to just 0.1% of GNI, because we have more pressing needs. This means we can expect a revival of the debate between the moral obligation and the utilitarian justification of aid, which is totally pointless, to be honest. Simply because it is not at the forefront of our concerns, and plausibly never will be. Opinium nevertheless included it in a select sample of issues of international significance, surveying who we think is poised to handle them best. To nobody's surprise, Labour wins against the Rump Tories.

It is quite striking that about half of us are unbelievers, who won't choose between the two rival options. But it is equally revealing that the Conservatives are beaten even on defence, which used to be one of their strong points in earlier epochs. Maybe it's just the Burnham Touch, but it is just as likely that the Realm's population has at last awaken to the reality of fourteen years of Tory neglect of The Forces, which saw the once proud Royal Navy fall behind India, Japan, France and Italy. But will the Tories still be His Majesty's Loyal Opposition after the next election? For all we know, it may even be the LibDems, though Reform are more likely to fill that position. So YouGov had to probe us about the same issues, but with Reform pitted against Labour this time, and the results are devastatingly disastrous for the faux patriots of the New Model British Union of Fascists.

It has obviously not been overlooked by the Sagacious British Public that Reform take their marching orders, and most of their dosh, from hostile foreign powers. Can anyone in their sane mind trust Benito Farage to boost the UK's reputation abroad, when his most pressing urge has always been to fuck off to Trumpistan to demean, insult and smear us? He has done that for all sorts of audiences, from his paid interventions at CPAC to a solicited testimony offered to the United States House of Representatives at the invitation of the Republican Party. How can anyone with a functioning brain trust the Clacton Goebbels with our defence when his core proposal is to increase the manpower of the British Army by 42%, which we don't actually need, without having the first penny to pay for it because of his massive tax cuts for his überwealthy donors? This leaves one more task for Andy Burnham before the next general. Make the whole of Britain, and not just those who would never vote for British Union of Trumputinists, realise that the Bargain Bin Führer is just the monkey to American and Russian organ grinders, and that this vermin only deserve to be crushed back into the pus-filled hole they came from.

It doesn't give me any great joy to be sitting in America and describing the really awful authoritarian situation that we have now sunk into. At what point did we become North Korea?

(Nigel Farage, House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, 2 September 2025)

The Atlantic Treaty is not aggressive. It is purely defensive. Those who attack it as offensive do so from a bad conscience. They take just the same line as the Nazis did when every attempt by the nations to get together was denounced as the encirclement of Germany.

(Clement Attlee, The Times, 11 April 1949)

In the background to all this introspection stands our membership of and commitment to NATO. The organisation has been relentlessly caricatured by the loopy far-left, up to and including Zack Polanski, as a tool of US imperialism, so it is important to set the record straight with some facts. The most obvious one is that NATO attacked a sovereign nation only once, Serbia in 1999, which is considerably less than the aggressively imperialist Russian Reich, and was actually meant to stop Serbian ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, a perfectly acceptable humanitarian goal. The disastrous Iraq War did not involve NATO. Major NATO members like Canada, France and Germany even strongly opposed it. Operations in Afghanistan were the legitimate result of the USA invoking Article 5 of the Treaty after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and later interventions like Libya were undertaken under a United Nations mandate. Fortunately, the Great British Public do not fall for the hysterical anti-NATO propaganda coming from far-left fanatics like Zarah Sultana or Russian agents like Tommy Sheridan, and have a massively favourable view of the organisation, thusly validating our membership of it on the very grounds that Clement Attlee mentioned in 1949.

There is definitely a very wide consensus about NATO, as even a majority of Green voters sees it favourably, which should convince Polanski to tone it down. But he won't because he is just the last in a long line going back to those who claimed that Nazism was just German domestic business, and ending for now with those who claim that Russia is not our enemy, with the frequent add-on that Ukraine asked for it. The underlying message, for over a century, has been the ironically Orwellian discourse that defence is offence, but only when we are the ones defending ourselves. Today, this is exacerbated by the asinine woke Article of Faith that the White White West is responsible for all the sins of humanity, and that all who oppose it are by definition heroes and inspirations, no matter how many abhorrent crimes they have committed. Just remember Judith Butler endorsing the Islamo-Nazi terrorists Hamas as socialist freedom fighters. YouGov then had the obvious follow-up question, about how important we feel NATO is for our defence and national security.

Interestingly, more of us consider NATO important than have a favourable opinion of it. To sum it up, you don't have to like it to acknowledge it matters, which is very fortunate. Because of the self-evident truth that NATO is a defensive alliance, it's written on the tin, and we benefit from our membership of it. Those who have made it their calling to denigrate NATO at all costs with disinformation and fabrications should remember that the only attempt to turn it into an aggressive alliance failed miserably. We are all old enough to remember when it happened, and that Tony Blair, Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage wanted us to be dragged into that fucking mess. It was five months ago, when the Orange Baboon demanded that NATO help him in his asinine aggression of Iran, and all member nations told him to fuck off. Because they all know what defensive means, if the dementia-riddled buffoon and his courtiers don't. This is just the kind of alliance we need to be part of, to alleviate our concerns about the likelihood of a foreign attack.

YouGov asked how we feel about the likelihood of a full scale military attack from a hostile country in the next ten years, which is kind of a scary prospect which should not be brushed aside too lightly, even if only a minority of us believe in it. The New World Order is that we live in times of "hybrid war", which is the politicians' and the mediatariat's NewSpeak to avoid calling it what it is. War, just plain old war. A war that has actually already begun, and is even more insidious and dangerous because our enemies could win it without ever expanding a single ballistic missile on Croydon. Open interference with our democratic elections, which has sadly become a too familiar sight, could do the trick. But this does not mean we should ignore the possibility of a "real" conventional war. After all, the genocidal imperialist Russian Reich invaded Ukraine only after they had proven they would no longer accept Russian rule by proxy and rigged elections. Resistance is not futile, but there could be a price to pay, we must face that reality too, now that the delusions of the happily ever after, the end of history and the dividends of peace have dissipated. This is where we need a strong alliance of like-minded democratic nations more than ever. and the only one we have so far is NATO.

We seek by the pact to gain for the nations a sense of security which they so ardently desire. We seek by the organization of security to make the world safe against aggression and by pooling of strength to reduce the burden of armaments.

(Clement Attlee, The Times, 11 April 1949)

This Pact is a purely defensive arrangement for the common security of the countries who join it, and it is not directed against anyone. No nation innocent of aggressive intentions need have the slightest fear or apprehension about it.

(Ernest Bevin, speech in the House of Commons, 18 March 1949)

Let's just hypothesise now, albeit reluctantly, that the Martians land on Primrose Hill, or the Russians on Clacton Pier, or summat. What we do then? Answer the call-up to serve King and Country? Well, maybe not, as another part of the YouGov poll has found. I do not use their raw findings here, but have tweaked them for improved relevance. I have expunged all those who say they are not eligible for mobilisation on grounds of age or health, and kept only the age brackets that would be more likely to be called. The proportion of spontaneous volunteers may seem ridiculously low, but you have to consider the numbers, not just the percentages. If you single out only the adults between 18 and 44, not barred for reasons of health, that would be about 1.5 million in England only and about 1.8 million UK-wide, which is a fucking huge force by any standards. Of course, they would all be totally untrained, but the basic requirement would be just to shoot in the right direction without hurting themselves, and I guess you wouldn't need much training to do only that. Just consider, for now, that it does indeed show a commendable amount of patriotism and selflessness.

If you add those who would not instantly volunteer, but would serve if called, that's 5.8 million in England and 6.8 million UK-wide, more than we need to make a potential aggressor think twice before venturing onto our shores. This part of the poll would only apply fully if we were left to fight an invasion all by ourselves, but being part of an alliance obviously means that we'll never walk alone. That's what Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty is for, innit? With the usual, and most important, caveat that it does not compel anyone to instantly go to war by our side, but just to taking such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area. The use of brute force is suggested, but not mandatory. So it just boils down to the amount of confidence we have in our allies, which YouGov has also dutifully polled. And it appears to be quite substantial with our European partners and Canada, but not that much with the United States.

Now, seriously, why would we ever trust Trump and what the USA have become under his rule? The Orange Baboon has betrayed everyone and anyone, starting with the people of the United States and his own voters. There isn't one betrayal he would not consider, not one pledge he would not renege on, not one promise he wouldn't break on a whim, for financial gain or ego gratification. The latest example is the deal to manufacture Patriot missiles under licence in Ukraine. He approved and announced it, then backpedalled out of the blue when Lockheed-Martin, one of the missiles' manufacturers, pressured him in the name of their sacrosanct "intellectual property". The Orange Baboon doesn't care that hundreds of Ukrainian civilians die under the Russian Reich's genocidal attacks, so long as he can cosplay Alpha Silverback from the atrociously redecorated Oval Office, and he wouldn't care either if the victims were Estonian, Polish or British. This feeling of disengagement from our erstwhile special friend works both ways, YouGov has found.

A vast majority of us opine that our government should be willing to help one of our European allies if they were attacked by Russia, but significantly fewer feel the same about the USA. I am saying Russia, when the poll mentioned only a generic "hostile power", as we are certainly not talking about Grand Fenwick here. But our view of the situation is obviously influenced by events, dear boy, events that have seen Trumpistan act as the aggressor, not the victim of aggression. The illegal killing of civilians on small boats in the Gulf of Mexico, Venezuela, Iran, you name it, you have it. You don't have to sympathise with post-Marxist autocrats or Islamo-Nazi mass murderers, the default setting of the asinine woke far-left, to know that Trump is the real bogeyman here, which naturally diminishes our willingness to come to his rescue. There is another just as credible situation our pollsters never explore, because they probably consider it too provocative, but it has to be asked. What would Burnham do if the United States landed Marines on Greenland, or the Bahamas, or helped Argentina seize Las Malvinas? At least one of these is just as likely as a Soviet take-over of Narva, so we must get ready for that too.

If we are accused of ganging up against any country or group of countries I should say simply: "Examine the text. There is no secrecy about it, and there are no secret clauses. You will not find in the text any provision which threatens the security or the well-being of any nation".

(Ernest Bevin, speech in the House of Commons, 18 March 1949)

Obvious and complex are not mutually exclusive. More often than not, the more obvious something appears, the more complex it is in reality.

(Professor Florence Cooley, Law & Order, 1995)

There is of course a root cause for the United States having now lost any right to our support, our trust and our respect, and he is sitting in the Oval Office. Or snoozing there, depending on the day. We know that the Orange Baboon is always quick, in his moments of lucidity, to wave the legendary Big Stick of American brute force to the face of every foe, real or imaginary, but he ain't no Teddy Roosevelt. He is obviously just overcompensating for his reportedly subpar penile endowment, a very classic coping mechanism for narcissistic masculinists in this situation. There is a price to pay for this, which YouGov identified. Trumpistan is now seen as the second biggest threat to world peace. after their buddies in the Russian Reich. The feeling is significant and goes far beyond the ranks of the rabidly anti-American brainwashed far-left. Even Conservative voters rank the USA second on the scale of doom, and Reform voters rank them third after Russia and Iran, which says a lot.

Our perception of the United States has changed quite radically since Trump had the Presidential election bought for him by Elon Muck, but it wasn't instant. We probably thought we could give him the benefit of the doubt, despite his disastrous first term, until a series of meetings at the Oval where he visibly took pleasure in demeaning and humiliating foreign leaders. Volodymyr Zelenskyy was just the start, and then Friedrich Merz, Cyril Ramaphosa, Keir Starmer and Sanae Takaichi had to endure the ordeal. Despite all the propaganda and self-serving fake news, the Trump Touch doesn't work any more. I guess YouGov found just the right items to paint an accurate picture of what the United States have become under him. An untrustworthy war-mongering enemy of the UK and the EU, and ally of Russia. If the shoe fits, you must convict, as the saying goes. Or summat.

The real issue is not how many wars the USA cam wage simultaneously, but how many they can win. And the answer, under Mouthy Matamore Trump, is NONE. The Orange Baboon is now in the sane situation as the Kremlin's Nosferatu, embroiled in an endless war that he can't win and pretending it's all going according to plan. It does not and never will, and Iran are now dictating their terms, obviously relishing in their humiliation of the most despised leader on the planet. On our side of the Britannic Ocean, we thought for a wee while that we were riding the moral high horse, in that brief moment when Keir Starmer denied Trump the use of Diego Garcia, Lossiemouth and Fairford for any purpose. Then he bowed to pressure and allowed their use for defensive purposes, as if any attack involving big bombers could be just defensive. Andy Burnham won't repeal the permission, which is a big mistake from any angle. Especially as the Great British Public don't fall for the oxymoronic pretext of "defensive attacks" and remain massively opposed to the use of bases on UK territory by Trumpistan. Remarkably, Tory voters are split down the middle, so only Reform voters approve, albeit not overwhelmingly.

The most disturbing part is Trump's inability to face reality. He has failed to meet any of his war goals, even after changing them repeatedly, capitulated to Iran after bragging he would send them back to the Stone Age, and finally submitted to direct orders from Saudi Arabia to not launch an all-out strike against Iran. He can't start a land war because that would require the whole of the American Army's available fully-trained manpower, and send back thousands of corpses in doggy bags to the USA, which even the most fanatical MAGA would bever forgive. His only achievement. so far, has been making the Strait of Hormuz, a totally free passage for the world's trade until this year, Iran's private playground, where you either submit to the Islamo-Nazi Pasdaran's protection racket or get blown out of the water. It is only going to get worse as South Korea are now openly considering manufacturing their own nuclear weapons, and Japan has stated that possession of nukes is no longer a taboo, because both no longer trust the USA to protect them. The Orange Baboon is making the whole world less safe, just out of egotism, and all the triumphant deepfakes and deranged rants in the world won't make a fucking difference before the midterms.

Sometimes you have to make deals with the devil. Just as long as you don’t get your eyebrows singed.

(Jack McCoy, Law & Order, 1996)

Colourful, eccentric, mercurial, unpredictable. This is not a smear. To a psychiatrist, it’s code for unstable.

(Jack McCoy, Law & Order, 1997)

Our relationship with the USA has certainly become a lot less special and a lot more complicated since Elon Muck elected Donald Trump for a second term. The key problem is that we never know for sure which of the Ornge Baboon's personas will be activated, whether it will be the temperamental psychopath, Berzelius Windrip with dementia, or the failed businessman with shite nouveau riche tastes and an obsessive fixation on personal financial gain. Whichever it is on a given day, he certainly has already left his mark and changed the nature of US influence on world affairs. Of course it looks more like a bear shitting in the middle of the living room than Marcus Aurelius, but it's out there and we have to live with it. YouGov turned that into a question about the Orange Baboon turning the USA into a force for good or a force of evil, and we massively agree he has made them bad. There is some sort of moral or religious undertone to this "good vs evil" approach, which I do not necessarily approve, but it definitely tracks. Let's just say that the practical consequences we infer from this matter more than the verdict itself.

It is perfectly legitimate, and totally devoid of woke revisionism, to ask whether the USA ever were a force for good. John D. Rockefeller, Francisco Franco, Margaret Thatcher and Augusto Pinochet would agree they were, but Sitting Bull, Patrice Lumumba, Salvador Allende and the women of Afghanistan might beg to differ. And where was the force for good at Yalta, when Eastern Europe needed a strong Western voice to protect them from Soviet imperialism? Honestly, mates, anyone who concocted the absurd self-serving myth of Manifest Destiny clearly and unambiguously put themselves on the Dark Side Of The Force. Just read it without rose-tinted glasses, and it's easy to see how and why it pre-emptively justifies white supremacism, and the underlying concepts make it a forerunner of the theorisation of domination in Nazism, Stalinism and Putinism. This is why we cannot treat Trumpism as just a transient phase, even if YouGov tried to bait us into that. But it did not work, and even Reform voters opine that things will not go back to normal after Trump is gone, whatever "normal" means. The sole definition given in the poll is "back to what it used to be", and I could write a 100-page essay on why there wasn't anything "normal" about that.

There will be no New Normal when Trump is gone because Trump did not create American fascism, it predated him by generations, just ask Charles Lindbergh. Its latest organised incarnation was the Tea Party, a racist populist reaction to Barack Hussein Obama's election in 2008. Trumpism added another dimension to the problem, that all the checks and balances Americans love to brag about achieved fuck all against his aggressive power grab and disregard for the rule of law. Just like the Weimar Republic's institutions let the Nazis into power without missing a beat. There was a widespread systemic failure that sends only one message: what the system has allowed to happen once will happen again, it's just a matter of time. So our only sensible option is systematic distrust of the USA, no matter who sits at the White House. They have betrayed us once, they will do it again. They have helped our enemies once, they will do it again. They have openly conspired against our democratic institutions once, they will do it again. Our only valid option is to treat them as hostile, unreliable and untrustworthy forever, just as we treat Russia, because they are just two cheeks of the same arse. Trump is just the symptom, the disease is very alive deep down when polls repeatedly show that a quarter of voting-age Americans self-identify as MAGA, which is just the "in" label for racist Christo-fascism. So let's not be naïve and fall for the delusion of a special relationship ever again.

He can’t relate to others, has low tolerance for frustration, he’s unpredictable. So far, that’s my kid.

(Emil Skoda, Law & Order, 1997)

Ukraine has a historic role, to complete the liberation struggle with our victory. There can be no talk of compromises or concessions. We will achieve victory. Because there is no other way.

(Mykhailo Drapatyi, 3 August 2026)

YouGov obviously could not field this wide-ranging survey without mentioning Ukraine. Which the actually did not. Instead, they took the scenic route round it and probed our opinion of sanctions against the Russian Reich. Not Ukraine's "long-range sanctions", that are wreaking havoc on Russia's war effort and shaking the very foundations of Putin's crime syndicate, but our own diluted economic sanctions that could and should have been made stronger and loophole-free over time. That they haven't is evidence of the appalling number of friends the Kremlin's Nosferatu still has in the West, and not just at the White House, on Wall Street, in Germany or in Slovakia. Also count the self-appointed legal experts in, who keep telling us we can't do this or that because it would violate some obscure footnote in international law. As if it mattered or we should care. Nobody invoked international law when the task at hand was to crush Nazism, and this is the exact sane situation. YouGov just confirmed that we overwhelmingly support sanctions against Russia. Even Reform voters do.

Then YouGov couldn't help relativising our overwhelming support for sanctions, with a follow-up question about a hypothetical trade-off between our own economic well-being and resolute action against genocidal imperialists. They phrased it as some general principle that could just as well apply to Israel too, or even the USA in the proper context, but that was just obfuscation as the obvious target of that line of inquiry was Russia, and Russia only. It is quite telling that only one out of six Brits think we should prioritise our economic well-being over solidarity with a friend and ally under existential threat from a genocidal and imperialist power that is also our enemy, no matter how many on the far-right and far-left are in denial of the obvious. It is quite comforting to see that the vast majority of us remain immune to the Russian propaganda spewed from both ends of the political horseshoe, and remain supportive of the strongest tool we have to put pressure on Russia, short of a direct military intervention that nobody wants. So far.

Our assessment of sanctions, or any other stronger measures, against Russia must factor in the background of increasingly aggressive posturing on their part. First came provocative intrusions into the airspace of Poland or Lithuania, to test the nature and the swiftness of our reactions. Then came the attempt at a terrorist bombing at the German airport of Leipzig-Halle, a key hub for the delivery of our aid to Ukraine, and the failed murder attempt of a US citizen in Warsaw, which would have been enough to declare war under Theodore Roosevelt. The succession of terrorist actions by Russian goons has prompted US intelligence to acknowledge at last that Nosferatu could send his "little green men", the same who started the invasion of Ukraine in Donbas in 2014, to help a fabricated "marginalised and oppressed Russian-speaking minority" in one of the Baltic States. The false-flag Incident At Narva, which may actually have been shelved by the FSB because it is too obvious and they have better options. The Russian Reich still has allies in this ever changing world in which we're living, among those the cretinous woke far-left claims are not our enemies. The most prominent is of course the rogue mass-murdering Islamo-Nazi theocracy of Iran, who happen to have the remote for radicalised terrorist sleeper cells that walk among us. And that would hurt us more, and cost Nosferatu less, than seizing an Estonian city Trump could not find on a map even it it had an XL arrow pointing to it.

Time passes, and under the influence of unpleasant reality, the Russian Federation is forced to gradually reduce its ambitions, because the situation on the battlefield does not allow them to achieve what they originally planned.

(Kyrylo Budanov, 9 August 2026)

Kemi Badenoch may score a win now and then; she’s bound to land the odd blow on Burnham when normal hostilities resume in September.

(Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian, 7 August 2026)

As soon as the clans gather again at their usual watering holes in SW1 two weeks from now, Andy Burnham's first challenge will be to make the tough choices about taxation, which are technically John Healey's mission, bur no Prime Minister worth his salt can delegate the final cut to the Chancellor. The road taken, or not taken, in the construction of the next Budget will set the tone of Burnham's Premiership. Not because he wants it to be so, but because the media do, especially a small clique of pseudo-journalistic activists who are desperate for ammunition to call Burnham a worse traitor then Starmer because he won't endorse Che Polanski's manifesto. Just bear in mind that, according to the OECD's most recent statistics, the "tax burden" in the UK is 34.4% of GDP, just a tiny fraction of a percent above the OECD average. This ranks us 22nd out of 38 OECD member countries or, if you want to make a polanskian point, the 17th least taxed country in OECD. But which changes in tax rules are we ready to swallow? Quite a lot, actually, according to BMG Research's last monthly poll.

Remarkably, all proposals already made by Burnham, or rumoured to be on his mind, attract more support than opposition. Even the property tax, which is likely to be fought tooth and nail by the Rump Tories, gets reluctant popular support. Unfreezing the personal allowance threshold is the most popular of all for obvious reasons, even among people who would not benefit from it. But the most politically significant result is two thirds of the Great British Public supporting a wealth tax, which would open the floodgates to the slippery slope down the road to communism. Not my opinion, mates, just trying to imagine how Benito Farage would describe it if he is still an MP after the second Clacton by-election. Such massive support shows how many of us are aware of, and uncomfortable with, the dogma of protecting wealth at all costs, forced down our throats by Thatcherism and never repudiated by Blairism, Brownism and Starmerism. But we are not yet ready to morph into North Korea or worse, France, as evidenced by an Opinium poll surveying which categories of assets we would agree to include in the basis for wealth taxation.

That's where it becomes quite a conundrum for Burnham, which he would probably toss in Healey's lap. I assume Opinium included cash savings and pensions only as bait for negative replies, as no government in their sane mind would ever consider taxing them as "wealth". The Tories and the Fash would predictably squeal blue murder and double jeopardy if residences and properties were taxed as "wealth" while also submitted to the new property and land tax. Interestingly, such double taxation on real estate exists in France, as a national wealth tax and a local property tax. If you also rule out taxing investments and corporate property, because Kemi Badenough has told The Telegraph it would be bad for jobs and the economy, what do you have left? Wee Ronnie's stamp collection and Aunt Martha's Staffordshire figures, I guess, and you don't plug a budget black hole of billions with that. An autumn of headaches for John Healey, and More In Common has just added to that with a reboot of the proverbially perennial debate between defence and welfare.

Only a sixth of us opine that defence spending should not be increased, which is fortunate as it is not an option among those available to the government, never will be and never should be. Now let's just ignore the faux pacifists and focus on the ways and means to fund the national consensus about a necessary increase of our defence spending. Borrowing more is clearly off the table, and the government should actually renew Rachel Reeves' pledge to borrow solely to fund investment, and explicitly ban borrowing to cover operational expenses. Then a third of us support funding defence through taxation of the wealthy, which strengthens the case for both a 50% super-additional rate of income tax and a wealth tax. A quarter of us would agree to slash welfare to fund defence, and it's difficult to see how this could not be on the table in the autumn. Bear in mind that the additional funding we now need for defence is around £5-8bn per annum, or between 1.5% and 2.5% of the welfare budget for 2026. It is not a massive effort, and does not have to be benefit cuts. Burnham and Healey just have to have the baws to turn their attention to the morbidly obese bureaucracy at DWP and slash their operational expenses. Simples.

But a Keminaissance? For the Tories, it looks like the Dark Ages have a while to run yet.

(Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian, 7 August 2026)

The Ballad Of You And Me And Pooneil © Paul Kantner, 1967

Starship © Paul Kantner, 1969

We are going to get on with the everyday fixes that make life easier and more affordable. As far as I’m concerned, whatever the size, big or small, if it’s a problem for you, it’s a problem for us.

(Andy Burnham, The Guardian, 9 August 2026)

Pollsters usually assume we have but simple minds, so they ask simple questions that can be mapped on a standard XY chart, even if the full understanding of the questions' wording may require a Level 11 in English. But sometimes the pollsters decide to make our lives miserable, or assume we have acquired a Vulcan brain overday, and turn their survey into one of these rounds on Richard Osman's House Of Games where the questions have two answers. That's what Lord Ashcroft did in his last monthly omnibus poll, sending his stormtroopers on the prowl with a dual-carriageway query about whether we approve of some measures that Andy Burnham is proposing, contemplating or rumoured to be contemplating, and whether we think they are affordable in the current state of the Realm's finances. This would be properly represented by sone sort of tower block graph of stacked Venn diagrams, which does not work on a laptop screen. So bear with me as I had to simplify a 3D question into a 2D chart.

So you have to decode a bit here to find out, for example, that 36% of us like the idea of a Number Ten North, but 39% think we can't afford it. Or that 74% approve of a National Care Service, but 41% think we can't afford it. And so on. There are some oddities in this line of questioning, like being asked if new taxes are affordable, which they are by definition. Unless you are smart enough to calculate the second level and third level consequentials of taxation on savings, investment ad tax exile over the next ten years, and have discerned a long-term negative impact nobody else has. If you consider the two matrioshkaed questions separately, it is quite revealing that the most popular proposal is increasing the number of vocational training places and the second most popular is ending rough sleeping, with capping bus fares and suspending VAT on leccy joint thirds, while large-scale building of council houses is considered the most unaffordable and Trident submarines the second most. We do have social priorities including long term goals more than short-term benefit-like measures, but we are also concerned by the viability of the proposals if they end up costing a disproportionate amount, or raise doubt about their cost-benefit ratio.

The good news for Andy Burnham is that, on average, the measures selected by Lord Ashcroft for scrutiny get 59% approval, which is good when you consider that most of this stuff will be the backbone of Burnham's policies into Budget Season and afterwards. The bad news is that, on average, 30% of us think all this stuff is unaffordable. Wherefore, if Andy so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? This is just the kind of doubt that might influence Burnham, and plausibly Healey first, into a more cautious approach to the next Budget. But I have a hunch they could get away with less boldness than we expect of them if they also pledged to drastically slash the amount of red tape and the financial burden impose on businesses by an asininely irresponsible Brexit. Closer ties with the EU, involving fluidification of our trade relations, is obviously already high on Burnham's agenda, and it makes sense to turbocharge and fast-track it no matter how loudly the Rump Tories and the Fash squeal. It is already popular, would boost the economy and plausibly generate a positive ricochet effect of wages, so ignore the naysayers and do it.

Where the government can save people money, remove an unnecessary obstacle or simply make something work better, we should and we will.

(Andy Burnham, The Guardian, 9 August 2026)

If you ask most people in the streets, they would probably say people who take the life of another person in our country should remain behind bars as long as possible, and I don’t think that’s particularly controversial.

(Thames Valley Chief Constable Jason Hogg, The Guardian, 5 August 2026)

There has been quite a frenzied flurry of announcements and new measures from Andy Burnham, which has prompted another speed poll from YouGov. Is The King Of The North entitled to what the Americans would call government by Executive Order, or should he bow down to Parliamentary sovereignty? The dominant opinion is that he should recall Parliament and let them play their usual games, which MPs would totally fucking hate after just three weeks of holidays in the sun. I don't think this poll has much value anyway, because of The Curious Incident Of The Speaker In The Recess, which is exactly what Arthur Conan Doyle described in The Adventure Of Silver Blaze. The curious incident is that the Speaker did nothing. We know that Lindsay Hoyle is a staunch, even hyperbolically obsessive, defender of the dogma of Parliamentary infallibility, and he hasn't reacted. If there had been anything untoward and unbecoming a Prime Minister in Burnham's behaviour, Hoyle would have barked louder than Doyle's proverbial dog, recess or no recess, and demanded Parliament be recalled. He hasn't, so Burnham can do what he wants and the point is moot.

Now Andy Burnham has suffered his fist setback, which the right are jubilantly quick to call a fiasco, with the controversy about Keir Starmer's Early Release Scheme. You can see, through the government's official communication, that it quickly became hugely embarrassing for the Prime Minister and the Justice Secretary Alex Norris. Don't get me wrong. The decision to pause and review the Early Release Scheme, which has all the tells of bureaucratic bean-counting, was sound and fully justified. But Burnham should have factored in that a full repeal was unfeasible, no matter how popular it was, for the very reasons Norris is mentioning now, and not rushed into a blanket announcement that gave many victims false hopes. It's hard to imagine that the relevant info wasn't available to him, and a more cautious communication would have avoided the vocal backlash from the victims and their families. This is especially unfortunate for Burnham as yet another YouGov poll has found that only a small minority wholeheartedly support the Early Release Scheme, and our dominant opinion is that is should be entirely repealed.

It is quite revealing that the public's focus shifted very quickly from the general picture of Burnham's announcement to the specific case of PC Andrew Harper's murder, which is the most obvious example of what was wrong with Starmer's original scheme. This was the very case that led to much harsher sentences for the killing of coppers, EMTs or firemen on duty, under the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022. Nobody asks for the law to be applied retrospectively, but nobody would have objected if the situation of Harper's murderers had been evaluated "as if" they had been sentenced under the new law, leading to denial of early release. Now Burnham is facing legal action from the Police Federation, supported by the Chief Constable of the force where Harper served and a hugely successful online petition, and open rebellion of the Police Chiefs of England and Wales. The manslaughter of emergency workers on duty, including uniformed cops, is not a specific offence in law, only an aggravating factor for the purpose of sentencing, so the only way to keep Harper's murderers in jail is to extend the denial of early release to all those found guilty of manslaughter. This would surely be criticised as summat of a sledgehammer-to-a-fly approach, but who gives a shit when eight out of ten Brits agree that Harper's murderers should be kept behind bars, and would surely agree that it is one of these situations where the end justifies the means?

This controversy has offered more evidence of the Conservative Party's hypocrisy, coupled with their voters' utter lack of memory, or of self-awareness, or probably of both. They're the ones demanding repression, often beyond the limits of reasonable and proportionate punishment, but they supported all these governments who let the prisons decay as fast as the Royal Navy, and are the ones howling loudest at the moon if the government proposes building a new prison in their borough. Fucking eejits. Burnham now has to find a quick and workable solution to the lack of prison space. It should first be noted that there is no actual immediate emergency, as the Early Release Scheme assumed, since 88,862 prison places are available in England and Wales for 86,536 inmates. A headroom of 2,326 as of 10 August 2026, before the implementation of the scheme. So the whole narrative about the abject Victorian-like overcrowding of prisons, platformed again by The Hipstershire Gazette, is just a myth. The situation is unlikely to become really critical for another year, when recent harsher sentencing guidelines take full effect. In the meanwhile, Burnham has an oven-ready option, reusing recently disused British Army barracks before they are demolished or redeveloped for hipster housing. This has already been done in the past, so there is no reason to rule it now, if only as a stop-gap measure.

For God’s sake, why don’t you just start your own country? No cops, no bad guys. Just sweetness and light as far as the eye can see.

(Abbie Carmichael, Law & Order, 1999)

I have been known to wear my Birkenstocks with socks. I’m not sure I should be admitting that.

(Andy Burnham, TikTok, 16 July 2026)

The bright side of polls is that Labour under Burnham has ascended faster than Labour under Starmer had descended in the fall of 2024. The dark side is that Arx Tarpeia Capitoli proxima, as Shakespeare said in Coriolanus, sort of, and the Burnham Bounce is now flatlining around a quarter of the popular vote. This is just a margin of error above the Reform vote, and not the best starting point when an autumn of tough choices lies in wait on the horizon, that will plausibly lead to another winter of our discontent. Fortunately, the Clacton-super-Mare by-election has left Benito Farage exposed, and also evidenced how fucking stupid he is. Benito genuinely thought that the by-election would stop the Standards Commissioner's investigation into his bribes and corruption, when everybody else totally understood that it was just suspended. It has been revived the second after the Clacton declaration, and will obviously bring only bad news for Benito, plausibly enough to make the trends of voting intentions more favourable for Labour again.

One of the interesting facts about the Clacton farce is that Count Binface bagged as many votes as Labour and the Liberal Democrats combined at the regular election in 2024, and his vote share of 26,9% is just 1% below the Conservative vote of two years ago. Farage gained just 1k votes, a clear indication that local Tory voters did not flock to the polling places to lend him their votes. Tory voters had already proved extremely reluctant to boost Reform at the Makerfield by-election, where many voted tactically for Andy Burnham instead, and that's just the kind of tiny encouragement Labour needs, even if it is unlikely to be repeated at a general election. Now YouGov has added two bricks in the electoral landscape, with twin speed-polls probing our appraisal of the State Of The Union, both generally and in our own backyard. The results are quite shocking because they are almost mirror images of each other, concluding that Britain as a whole is shite, but Midsomer is fine.

It's an exact replica of our assessment of immigration, which YouGov already tested in the exact same way. Half of us say that immigration is am issue GB-wide, but only a fifth say it is in their local area. Sane pattern, same explanation. If this does not howl social contagion by media manipulation, I don't know what does. It's an epidemic of cognitive dissonance spreading like Wi-Fi. The narratives about migrants' invasion and national decay come from the same far-right circles that the mediataro-punditarial complex have been cuddling, spewing and spreading for years, because clickbait and doomscroll mean profits while the plain simple truth is boring. We will need a fucking lot of sanitiser, and time, to get rid of the stench of complaisance with the Fash, especially at BBC News. Then Andy Burnham will find reasons to be cheerful in More In Common's last poll, and our opinions about whether or not our politicos are doing a bad job in their current positions. I couldn't miss that one as it is probably the only one that will ever feature Count Binface, and deliver a pretty positive verdict on him too.

I have weeded out the "don't know" here, as the only opinions that matter are those of those who have an opinion, innit? At least, that's how elections work, or half the seats in Commons would be empty because abstentions outnumbered even the most successful candidate. Now there is interesting serious information in here, namely that Kemi Badenoch's apparent popularity, which the right-wind media relentlessly stress, rests on rather shaky ground. This is confirmed by the trends of generic popularity-favourability polling, which show her results split neatly three ways between good, bad and neutral. It is also quite entertaining to see that Zack Polanski gets the worst marks of all, worse than Nigel Farage. I will let you decide if we should also see it as worrying that the Great British Public dislike the Woke more than the Fash. I know I don't, as both are just as abysmally unfit for any position of power. But what will remain engraved in our collective memory to the seventeenth generation is that the 5,900 years old Leader of the Recyclons from Planet Sigma IX, propelled to stratospheric heights of fame by a totally useless by-election, gets better ratings than both the Woke and the Fash, and the Extreme Centrist too, Count Binface in the same league as the Prime Minister and the Leader Of The Opposition, who'd have thunk? And I find that fucking hilarious.

For too long, the country has been held back by football fans who leave the ground before the final whistle. This is not something my government is going to allow to continue.

(Andy Burnham, TikTok, 16 July 2026)

Badenoch has chosen to fight a race to the bottom against Reform, but it is a race she can never win. Farage will always be willing to go further.

(Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian, 7 August 2026)

On many issues, Andy Burnham's most pressing priority is to get all the bad blood left behind by Keir Starmer out of the way, and there is a lot of it, as evidenced by the August instalment of YouGov's Political Trackers. Only a fifth of us are happy bunnies with the government's performance, which is of course mostly Starmer's legacy as Burnham has very little to claim his own so far. We all love paying less for bus trips and leccy, but there's more than that in government. If we're totally honest, we will need another two or three months, until after the Autumn Statement, until we can pass judgment on Whitehallised Manchesterism. We did not allow Starmer that long to prove his worth, but we could feel inclined to cut the New King On The Block some slack thanks to his well-received early announcements. YouGov's item-by-item ratings show there is a lot of lost ground to reclaim, as the dominant verdict is that we think the government has handled the Realm's Great Matters pretty badly.

There is a lot of hard feelings about issues that impact our everyday life directly, and it is difficult to imagine that it could be different when the public's mood is that Starmer was no better than the Conservatives. He was, actually, but we tended to forget the positives when the mediatariat kept hammering how bad he was and how better a stint of homegrown fascism would be. We are unhappy with pretty much everything, but do we ever wonder how much could be mended and taken on a different course in two years, after fourteen years of Conservative rule? I guess we don't, or else we would have paid more attention to Starmer's claim that we needed a ten-year plan. How long are we going to let Burnham have now? The task is reconstruction, just as in 1945, and Burnham is more of an Attlee than Starmer ever was. But how can he expect fair, balanced and honest coverage from the BBC, which openly announced a year ago it would make its output, including the news, more Reform-friendly?

Andy Burnham has every reason to count on his own popularity to make things easier for his government, but surely also clearly knows he will be walking a tightrope over burning quicksand as soon as business as usual restarts two weeks from now. His best case scenario is obviously to see Reform endlessly embroiled in discussions of their dark money, so he will only have to face a Rump Tory Party that is totally devoid of positive proposals the people may embrace. So long as Kemi Badenoch is obsessively fixated on purging the party of dissenters, like Boris Johnson did in the fall of 2019, and suffers backlash from it, Burnham has better opportunities to push his own agenda through Commons. And he will definitely need all of them if he wants to avoid the early-onset disappointment that doomed Keir Starmer. We The People are listening to him, to his pledges to make our lives easier by all means necessary to tackle the cost-of-living crisis, so failure is even less of an option than it ever was.

Westminster has spent too long asking people to wait for life to get better. This government is determined to make it better and to bring back hope.

(Andy Burnham, The Guardian, 9 August 2026)

Yorkshire pudding with Christmas turkey? Where has this come from? It should not be done. And, in fact, if I ever get a position of power to do something, I will pass legislation to ban it.

(Andy Burnham, TikTok, 16 July 2026)

Today's snapshot of Britain's democratically expressed will is the aggregate of the last seven polls, conducted by JL Partners, Trajectory Partnership, Find Out Now, Survation, Opinium, More In Common and YouGov between the 11th and the 17th of August. That's a super-sample of 14,396, 1.612 more than Benito Fromage's majority at the first Clacton by-election of this year, and thusly considered representative of the beliefs and aspirations of the Four Nations. Well, Three Nations, as Northern Ireland is never polled. And it does indeed look quite representative of the Realm's current state of minds, with four out of seven polls finding Labour ahead, and the other three with Reform topping the vote. At the end of the day, it puts Labour 1.2% ahead on the popular vote, and the first party in a hung Parliament.

Today's results and projection are a wee smitch worse for Labour than three weeks ago, but in a way that's well within the polls' margin of error and the prediction algorithms' margin of uncertainty. This time, the hypothetical Lab-Lib Pact would bag only 305 seats, and would still need some peace, love and understanding from The Nats in Scotland and Wales. But the SNP and Plaid Cymru would not have to break a taboo and vote with the government. They would just have to abstain, as the aggregate of all right-wing parties is just 260 seats, too low to be a major threat to a Lab-Lib minority government. Now the question remains, has the Burnham Bounce sprung high enough to shield Labour from the next offensive? The sequence of my seat projections since the last general shows thar Labour's return to the top spot may be precarious. Over the last three weeks, Reform have snatched some seats back from the Conservatives and Scottish Labour conceded some to the SNP. Labour could very well already be on the threshold to the danger zone, as even smallish shifts in voting intentions could fatally jeopardise the Burnham Bounce.

Less than two weeks from now, Commons return from their hard-earned six weeks of taxpayer-subsidised holidays, but for just two meagre weeks before they fuck off again to four weeks of Conference break. MPs being creatures of habit, we can nevertheless expect some fiery exchanges at PMQs, once the Hydra of The Oppositions has rehearsed and fine-tuned its attacks on Labour. Which will zoom on them on three fronts. The Conservatives think they own the country by birthright, a delusion that wasn't even shattered by the LibDems nicking the Home Counties off them. Reform UK think they own the people because they're telling us the best stories, and haven't yet noticed that we all know they're just a fucking pack of lies. The Greens think they own the future, as they are too stupid to realise even Jeremy Corbyn would be ashamed to campaign on stuff so vintage it was already obsolete when Fidel Castro died. Nevertheless, the combination of the three makes for a rather strong anti-Labour bloc, that will benefit from complicities within the mediataro-punditarial complex. The attacks don't even have to be consistent, or even credible. The media destroyed Starmer based on feelings and emotions prompted by his own mistakes, while any objective view of his record shows it wasn't that bad. Andy Burnham is obviously made of stronger stuff, but even the strongest cliffs can be taken down by the slow pounding of the sea.

I am a milk-first man. I don’t know why. I just have a feeling that it softens the teabag a bit and makes it stronger. Might be wrong. I know that will offend a lot of people, but there’ll be no legislation to ban that.

(Andy Burnham, TikTok, 16 July 2026)

In an otherwise quiet August, Reform UK are doing us a favour with some of the best entertainment on offer. Next year they should try the Edinburgh Fringe.

(John Crace, The Guardian, 19 August 2026)

This month's main event in Scotland has to be NatureScot denying the "traditional" guga hunt a license. Not really for the first time in 400 years, as NatureScot did not exist under James VI, but you get the gist. Oddly, what wasn't mentioned either by The Guardian or The Scottish Pravda is that the guga hunt should have been illegal for 45 years now, but always benefited from a licence delivered every year by a Scottish Government quango. No Scottish Government, either Labour or SNP, has had the baws to defy the Neanderthals squealing "tradition" to justify the massacre of defenceless animals, because they fear the power of their lobby. This lot are just as repugnant as the English posh toffs who let their hounds eviscerate a pregnant vixen, and then shoot the hounds in the head when they are no longer "fit" for the hunt. It looks like right now is the right time to make the guga hunt explicitly illegal. The Scottish Parliament has the power to do it, so let's just test our MSPs' courage now. In the meanwhile, the long term trends of Scottish voting intentions since the last general remain awful for Labour and mediocre for the SNP.

The weighted averages of voting intentions and the seat projections over the last four months show that the Burnham Magic isn't really working in Scotland for now. This is a textbook case of chat échaudé craint l'eau froide, as they say in the country of my birth. Scotland voted tactically for Labour two years ago to make sure the Tories were kicked out, and be part of it. Then what was in it for us? Jack shit, as Burnham, just like Starmer before him, seems to be taking his secondary title of Minister for the Union, one of Boris Johnson's inventions, seriously, and is not open to negotiating the framework for a second Independence Referendum. Polls are unstable and the SNP has emerged weaker from the last Holyrood election, so John Swinney does not have the cards Alex Salmond had to strongarm David Cameron in 2012. The current lack of a Burnham Bounce in Scotland, after some polls in July seemed to show one, probably means we are unhappy bunnies with his intransigeance over constitutional matters, but it is safe to assume it won't make him change his mind.

Amusingly, The Scottish Pravda have now embarked on a rear-guard crusade to promote the bourgeois luxury beliefs of the entitled metropolitan middle class again, and incite our Councils to break the law. The Supreme Court ruling about the meaning of sex in the law is not up for debate and cannot be challenged. So their angle of attack is to question the EHRC guidance implementing it, soliciting our Councils to be part of their fake rebellion. I don't remember The National ever raising any concerns about feasibility, practicability or cost when some Councils spent thousands of taxpayers' money converting perfectly viable single-sex spaces into unisex ones à la Ally McBeal. Illegally, by the way, under the exemptions provided by the Equality Act 2010. This is so fucking typical of woke mob who gave progressivism a bad name and caused too many good people to swing to the right. Everlasting shame on them. But The Scottish Pravda have also done something useful, for once, when they ordered a Half Scottish poll from Find Out Now. I don't call it Full Scottish this time because it does not include Holyrood voting intentions, I guess it's still too early for that. But it does include Westminster voting intentions, which are integrated into my August aggregate above, and our views about a second Independence referendum and a hypothetical Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI).

Independence has the same kind of strong support as in most polls fielded this year. Translated into an actual vote, with undecideds removed, that would be a 52-48 Yes victory. I wouldn't want to piss on the parade, but this result is of course totally irrelevant, immaterial and inconsequential as the only vote that counts has already been cast. It's Andy Burnham's and it's an unequivocal, unambiguous and conclusive No. Let's imagine now that somebody at SNP HQ is actually considering UDI, which they obviously aren't. There have been multiple instances of UDI over the last 250 years, from the Thirteen Colonies to Catalunya, and most of them actually failed. The last "successful" ones, in a very relative way, were the fake People's Republics of Luhansk and Donetsk, creations of fascist terrorist militias that were quickly absorbed by the Reboot Soviet Union anyway. That's clearly not the kind of precedent Scottish patriots want to be associated with, and neither is Catalunya, a textbook case of unavoidable oven-ready failure. Before toying with such an explosive concept, akin to tossing a live grenade into a barrel of shit, we should also consider who would recognise Scottish UDI. Not even ourselves, the poll says, and obviously not one EU or UN member state. Except perhaps Russia, North Korea and Iran, just for the fun of pissing off the UK government.

A Scotchman must be a very sturdy moralist, who does not love Scotland better than truth.

(Samuel Johnson, A Journey To The Western Islands Of Scotland, 1775)

I affirm that Welsh nationality is as great a reality as English nationality. I maintain that the Welsh nationality is as true as the nationality of Scotland, to which by blood I exclusively belong.

(William Evart Gladstone, The Times, 6 June 1887)

Unlike Scotland, there was a visible Burnham Bounce in Wales and then, like England, it tended to debounce after a while. Nevertheless, the trends of Welsh voting intentions still show a convergence towards a three-way game between Reform, Plaid Cymru and Labour, with the Conservatives struggling too far in the background to make it a foursome. It is a really bad situation for Plaid Cymru. For a wee while after their resounding victory at the last Senedd election, their Westminster voting intentions aligned with their Senedd vote in some polls, in the same kind of pattern that has worked for the SNP since the 2010s. It no longer looked absurdly far-fetched to predict Plaid Cymru bagging half the Welsh seats in Commons, or even more, but now their Westminster vote has totally drifted apart from their Senedd vote. Ironically, it mostly benefits Reform as Plaid and Labour are both feeding off the same finite reservoir of lefty voters.

Nevertheless, the next steps could plausibly be problematic for Welsh Labour. They are still PTSDed by the loss of the Senedd and Burnham has not offered them any bone to gnaw on or throw at Reform. There is no abhorrent cymrophobia at work here, as Scottish Labour has not been treated better by the King Of The South Of The North. But Welsh Labour surely have to think twice about their electoral strategy, and how to use their diminished resources best. It would make sense for them to leave Plaid Cymru deal with Reform in the vast rural expenses of Northern and Central Wales, and focus just on the Lab-Plaid battlegrounds in the tightly post-industrial packed conurbations of the South. Why waste thousands on petrol in the backwaters of Montgomeryshire and Breconshire when you can prowl through the whole of Cardiff and a dozen neighbouring towns on public transport?

It is plausible that we will continue to see more Welsh seats going to Reform than to Plaid Cymru or Labour in projections from incoming polls, as we see from the aggregate of the August polls, despite the effect of the Burnham Bounce. What we need, for a clearer vision of the situation, is a Full Welsh, but none has been fielded since the Senedd election. All we have now is the concatenation of Welsh subsamples of GB-wide polls, which are the size of Chihuahuas next to the Great Danes of English subsamples. A Full Welsh is pretty much the size of a full month of subsamples, and statistically more reliable, so we definitely have to get one or two before the end of the year. What are you waiting for, pollsters?

Whatever else may come to pass, I do not think that on the Day of Direst Judgement any race other than the Welsh, or any other language, will give answer to the Supreme Judge of all for this small corner of the Earth.

(Gerald of Wales, Descriptio Cambriae, 1194)

The Countryside Alliance are rather angry, ruddy-faced people who look like extras from a Channel 5 presentation of The Mill On the Floss.

(Rod Liddle, The Guardian, 25 September 2002)

Unlike Scotland and Wales, the Burnham Bounce took off in England as soon as bookies started taking bets on which day Burnham would become Prime Minister, so pretty much the afternoon after Keir Starmer's resignation speech. And it kept on growing until the last days of July, and then stalled like everywhere else. Actually, we do know that England always sets the tone, thanks to its weight within Great Britain, so the trendlines of English voting intentions are remarkably similar to what we have GB-wide. The main difference is that England is leaning more to the right than Scotland and Wales, so Reform UK leads Labour there by 1.4%. But the incumbency factor, a key component of which is massive majorities in a high number of seats, favours Labour now so they would end up with more seats across the English regions outwith London. This does not say that the Burnham Bounce has restored some sort of unassailable Labour dominance anywhere. Quite far from that, actually.

Even on Burnham's home turf in the North West, Labour's recovery looks fragile. It is even weaker in the North East, and they are level with the Fash in Yorkshire, so the King Of The North has not yet rallied the whole of the North around his banner. It is even worse in the Midlands, where the Conservatives once pushed Labour aside as the main political force. Now Reform have pushed the Conservatives aside and are still attracting significant support despite the atrocious level of arrogant incompetence they are displaying in the Councils they have snatched there in the last two years. Should we call an exorcist?

One of the interesting paradoxes of current voting patterns is that Labour are doing quite well in the once Blue Leafy South. They are doing better than in 2005 in East Anglia, better than both 1997 and 2001 in the South West, and even more visibly in the South East where they are closest to their all-time high of 2024. The LibDems have already seriously shaken the Tory hold on these regions, and Reform have since buried them deeper. On top of that, it now looks like the Covid Exodus from the overpriced Inner Hipstershire in London to the Outer Commuter Belt is delivering serious dividends. Even the LibDems are gathering some of the benefits, doing better in the South East than in 2024, but losing considerable ground in the South West. Looks like a lot of people like Mister Ed better when he is indulging in clownish aquatic stunts than when he is talking serious in Commons. Go figure.

In my neck of the woods, these people are largely those who own the countryside, or run it, together with a forelock-tugging menagerie of their better-paid servants.

(Rod Liddle, The Guardian, 25 September 2002)

Both left and right have it in for Britain’s capital. But is London a stabby wasteland, a den of faceless bureaucrats, or just a mess of overprivileged wokerati?

(Zoe Williams, The Guardian, 2 August 2026)

Now we have got another poll of the next London Mayoral election. The one for which there should have been a by-election this year, but will be held at the scheduled date on 4 May 2028 because Keir Starmer got legislation passed sur mesure for Sadiq Khan. Well, mostly against Andy Burnham, but it was a favour to Khan too, which banned double jobbing as Mayors for MPs, but kept it legal for peers. Opinium polled that race, probably for no other reason than they had plenty of time on their hands after declining offers to poll the Clacton-super-Mare by-election. But there are some hors d'oeuvre in that poll, before we reach the plat de résistance of voting intentions. First, they polled Khan's job approval after ten years sitting at the atrociously ugly City Hall. that replaced the much better looking previous one at Khan's initiative in 2021. Well, it's five years at each, but you get the badger's drift. IYKYK. And, to nobody's surprise, Khan gets bad marks, and not just from right-wing voters.

The crosstabs with the Mayoral vote of 2024 are obviously more relevant than with the general election vote, showing that only Labour voters give Khan the thumbs up. Even Green and LibDem voters dislike what he has done, and none of the demographics grants him the support of a majority. Even the younger generations are not seduced by his devotion to wokeism and his fake reverse ageism, and women of course intensely dislike him because of his strict observance of the rituals of men-in-womanface supremacism. This has nothing to do with the Fash's asinine propaganda about the Imperial Capital having become a lawless war zone amidst the jungle, which they tend to support mostly with disinformation, but everything to do with Khan's lack of true connection with the public's mood outwith his own ideological comfort zone. Then the Conservatives' choice of a candidate might help him, like it did last time around. Opinium tested two out of a cohort of possibles. James Cleverly, affectionately known as Jimmy Dimly to The Guardian's readers thanks to John Crace, and Festus Akinbusoye, who doesn't have enough name recognition to have earned a witty nickname yet.

Opinium did not handle this as cleverly as they could have done, if you forgive the too obvious pun, as they started with a one-on-one between Candidate A and Candidate B. But they had to provide a description of the two candidates to make the question relevant, so Candidate A's profile was a perfect match for Akinbusoye and Candidate B's for Cleverly. Akinbusoye may have more support among the general population, and be the credible front runner in whichever form the Conservative selection takes, but both would be crushed by Khan in a head-to-head. Total equal opportunity for defeat here, and totally consistent with the voting intentions, which Opinium based on generic party labels and not the candidates' names. Which makes sense as we don't know who will stand, and are not even 100% sure that Khan will. Opinium polled both the first preferences and the second preferences, which is indeed quite helpful.

The first preferences say that the Labour candidate would top the vote and qualify for the runoff, but it's a three-way marginal for the runner-up. You thusly have to count and add the second preferences, as would be the case at a real election, for all three possible combinations. It reveals some odd choices, like LibDem and Green voters giving their second vote to Reform, or Conservative and Reform voters giving it to the Greens. Tactical voting definitely happens with Instant Runoff too, and you even have two opportunities for it. We have learned the hard way, at the Manchester Mayoral by-election, that the two successive counts can push the declaration to 26 hours after polls have closed. And they had only half a million votes to count, while the London election could attract summat like two-and-a-half to three million. Expect a fucking long wait. But it would be worth it for Labour, as their yet-unnamed candidate would hold the seat whoever the runoff contender is, and by pretty similar margins. Now we just have to wait and see what will happen when all the candidates have been selected and we have, like, Dawn Butler vs Sebastian Coe, Zia Yusuf and Zack Polanski. Or whoever. We may even have Russell Brand and Ant Middleton, for fuck's sake.

For those moments when you want to describe a shallow, Mammon-worshipping society, lurching blindly from one shiny, meaningless prize to the next, empty of proper feeling for others or for nature, “London” pretty well covers it.

(Zoe Williams, The Guardian, 2 August 2026)

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Jeremy's Den

20/08/2026

Riding Shotgun In The Sky

Riding Shotgun In The Sky