OldBrexit B-1 and NewBrexit B-15 also 40th Anniversary of James Callaghan's Demise and Neil Kinnock's birthday
You Can't Always Get What You Want 🔊
Historians will probably mark 18 March 2019 as the date when the Westminster System finally entered the Seventh Circle of Chaos when John Bercow's ruling left the English Government in rabbit-in-the-headlights mode for everyone to see. We have seen that one many times over but I can't resist one final rerun before moving on.
And it's a major understatement to say that the Prime Minister of England's speech two days later failed to restore confidence in her because nothing says 'strong and stable' like having 'the dug did it' as your sole talking point. And Jeremy Hunt pleading the Ross Thomson Defence on her behalf did little to help. Being under pressure 🔊 is part of the job description Treeza. Didn't David Cameron tell you this before you signed up? And to make your day even worse a petition to revoke Article 50 gathered over one million signatures in a matter of hours after your statement, more than a dozen times the number required for it to be debated in Parliament.
Over the next weekend, and amidst many frenzied headlines in the Sunday papers, the Night Of The Long Knives finally turned into a Wet Gunpowder Plot and we were back to square one: a weakened Prime Minister still unable to find a way out of the mess she had created. It says a lot anyway about the low level of expectations when Boris Johnson driving without a seat belt and Peter Theodore Alphege Rees-Mogg (or was it Thomas Wentworth Somerset Duncan?) attending a pseudo-Cabinet meeting make headlines, while one million marching in London for a second EU referendum and five million signing an online petition to revoke Article 50 appear as mere footnotes for most of MSM. Fortunately past Guardian frontpages are here to remind us Chaos was not born yesterday.
As Paul Kavanagh pointedly pointed out the other day when discussing the freak alternate reality where Sleekit is the Prime Minister's name, everybody who writes about politics these days is faced with a real risk of being overtaken by events in a matter of hours, and 27 March proved it beyond anyone's wildest expectations. Around lunchtime we had a sixteen-course Brexit-A-La-Carte being potentially debated in Commons and then by suppertime John Bercow cut it down to eight motions that were all defeated though a couple came close to winning. To make a weird day even weirder Theresa May then spoilt everybody's well-earned pink gin break when she announced she would unconditionally resign under one condition: winning a vote that is likely never to happen anyway. So let's sit back for a while and just focus on the usual issue: what does the electorate want this week?
Tumblin' Dice 🔊
Recent GE polls have taken yet another turn, this time against the Conservatives. Even the usually Tory-leaning YouGov polls show it with the Conservative lead shrinking from 11% a month ago to just 3% this week. Which does not mean Labour are doing better. They're not, LibDems and Others are. Note that Others in these polls do not include The Independent Group who are polled in a different sequence. Others' rise is mostly due to UKIP's 'moderate far-right' offshoot The Brexit Party, who are credited with up to 4% of voting intentions.
My current poll of polls includes the six most recent ones, fielded from 14 to 25 March. Super-sample size is 9,568 with a theoretical 0.97% margin of error. It delivers a 2% Conservative lead, slightly down from 2017. But LibDems now projected on 10% and the various shades of New Model Blackshirts also about 10% means that the next GE would not be a carbon-copy of 2017 and a number of upsets are to be expected.
We have been in that sort of uncertain territory before and experience shows we're closer to some variant of Camera Incognita rather than any 'strong and stable' outcome. I seriously doubt that the next Conservative PM, be it Johnson or Gove, would restore his party's credibility but that does not mean Labour would automatically do better. Clearly they have only themselves to blame for failing to gain the upper hand over the worst Tory Government in living memory and then some generations before that. Until they find a way to resolve their contradictions on almost every major issue they don't stand a sporting chance. And rehashing an oft-debunked forty-year-old myth will certainly not help either.
Labour's main problem is that voters don't trust them on the major issue of the day. According to the last YouGov poll, a huge majority (72% to 10%) think that Labour's position on Brexit has been unclear and confusing and (65% to 15%) that Corbyn would not be able to get a better deal than any Tory PM wannabe. Despite all the recent clusterfuck Tories are doing better on both questions: 65% to 19% on 'unclear and confusing', 59% to 18% on 'not getting a better Brexit deal'. And I am quite sure Labstaining on Joanna Cherry's motion that opened the door to revoking Article 50 will harm them more than it will help them, as more voters will be open to switching to LibDems in England, Plaid Cymru in Wales and the SNP in Scotland.
When The Whip Comes Down 🔊
And here is what current polling would deliver. An unmanageable Commons with both main parties losing seats. Even if the DUP were still willing to support the bùrachy English Government the wobbly coalition would still fall 8 seats short of a majority. Not that this is Labour's fault in any way as they would do no better than in 2017. As we have seen already with that sort of close popular vote only the LibDems and the SNP would have reasons to celebrate. Even if neither of them would be in a position to unlock the loser-on-loser stalemate resulting from current voting intentions.
This kind of projected results might also be an incentive for the next Tory Government to bulldoze the 2018 Boundary Review through Commons at the earliest opportunity as the Great Gerrymander would deliver a Tory majority despite them losing votes. Bear in mind that, with Sinn Féin sitting out, the majority on 600 seats is 297 so Tories would end up with a one-seat majority. Which is not really safe but still better than 17 seats short. However unfair and counter-intuitive this may look it actually confirms Martin Baxter's analysis of the 2018 Review and that a close popular vote would maximize the Tories' Gerrymander Bonus.
My understanding of constitutional conventions is that all it takes to implement the proposed new boundaries is an Order in Council as subordinate legislation in pursuance of the Electoral Registration and Administration Act 2013 which amended the original Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act 2011. So the next PM will have motive, means and opportunity to push it through Commons quickly and fight the next GE, snap or not, on the new boundaries.
Time Waits For No One 🔊
On current polling 32 sitting MPs would bite the dust. Math says both Conservatives and Labour would be clear losers while LibDems and SNP would be clear winners. Though you might also count UKIP (or would it be the Brexit Party?) among winners as the oddities of FPTP would allow them to sneak back in in three-way marginal Thurrock.
Labour would indeed have very few reasons to be cheerful 🔊 on Election Night. Only PortiBalls Moment would be Amber Rudd losing Hastings and Rye but probably by less than 100 votes so even that one might fail and be just dust in the wind 🔊.
If such results materialized both main English parties would find themselves in an extremely awkward situation as the current Westminster chaos would be compounded. An interesting side effect would be that any government coming out of such an election would find it difficult to turn down a request for a Section 30 Order. The SNP gaining 10 seats from both Tories and Labour would mean a strongly strengthened mandate to seek Independence that a weak English government could not lightly brush aside. And if they did the Scottish Government would have a strong case to explore other paths to Independence after all options under English law had been exhausted. And, as I explained earlier, there are many.
Hand Of Fate 🔊
But Election Night might deliver some upsets as current polling would result in 71 marginal seats. Only 9 in Scotland, down from 20. But the close popular vote would also deliver a record 8 marginals in Wales due to a sharp decline in Labour vote and another 50 in England outside London.
So here we have one more level of uncertainty as Conservatives could bag another 33 seats or Labour another 26. Reallocating the marginals to the runner up does not make for more likeable scenarios than the average projection. The Conservatives' best case scenario would be somewhat like 'back to 2015'. But circumstances have changed a lot since and a deeply divided party would certainly be a recipe for more self-inflicted disasters brought only by petty parochial politics. At the other end Labour's best case scenario would bring us back to 1910. Which invites either a quick snap election hoping it would deliver something more manageable, which it did not a century ago. Or a dance with the devil 🔊. Uh…. a deal with the SNP, complete with our horns and tails.
To sum it up a snap GE held next week would not solve any problems or heal any wounds. Everything points to the two dominant parties quickly getting over it and back to their old ways. How they would manage with nobody able to form a strong and stable government is anybody's guess but it would be their problem and theirs only. They created the awful mess we're in, so up to them to sort it out.
Doom And Gloom 🔊
Public opinion is full of contradictions. The most recent IPSOS-Mori poll is full of examples. 86% are dissatisfied with the way the Government runs the country including 71% of Conservative voters. 65% are dissatisfied of the way Theresa May handles her job as PM including 32% of Conservative voters. Which triggers one obvious question: how can 39% of Conservative voters be happy with May and at the same time unhappy with the Government? Never mind, Conservatives are not renowned for consistency.
Besides 85% of all respondents think the Government had done a bad job at handling Brexit and 65% think May personally has. While 59% think Brexit will hurt the UK's economy over the next five years and 34% think it will last into the next ten to twenty years. Even worse more are confident Corbyn would get a good Brexit deal (21%) than trust May on it (18%). Yet the same voters who are unhappy with both the PM and the Government (and don't really trust them) are also ready to give them a fourth chance at doing even more harm than they have already done. I won't even try to figure out the ulterior motives here.
On a less gloomy note, the last Opinium poll has an interesting angle on how people see the main political leaders. They crosstabbed leaders' ratings with voting intentions, which tells you how leaders are seen by their own voters. And the results are quite enlightening.
Quite interesting to see that both Corbyn and May score in the low twenties on 'strongly approve' while the sum of all those disapproving more or less strongly roughly matches it. On the other hand Nicola Sturgeon's rating among SNP voters is quite flabbergasting and should put to rest all innuendo about the Great Leader being soon shown the door. Now and all joking aside, the less than stellar ratings of both major parties' leaders are not a good sign. Especially as both do much worse among the electorate as a whole than among their own voters.
The Westminster System has failed the people and the people know it. And having Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab as credible PM wannabes certainly won't help. Neither will the spectre of Sleekit Gove waiting in the wings for the next one to stab in the back.
Play With Fire 🔊
Can the immediate future be even worse than the past few months? Unfortunately it can when both major English parties put partisan interest first, and factional interest within the party on top of that. Neither has proved able to offer credible solutions to the nation's problems. While MPs spend endless sittings voting on the minutiae of alternate Brexits everyone expected to be voted down, the economy is crashlanding and poverty is rising. Next will be another blame game about how could you be stupid enough to waste that much time to achieve nothing? Not really what an anxious and insecure nation needs.
All that happened over the last three years will leave behind deep wounds that will take years to heal if they ever heal at all. And Little England will have only themselves to blame. And the politicians they elected who spent all that time playing with fire and the worst instincts of the electorate with nothing serious and positive to offer. Fortunately Scotland has a way out of this and will go down that road soon. All it takes is us wanting it and making it happen.
Dare to be honest and fear no Labour
© Mick Jagger, Keith Richards 1966
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