Would have been Brexit 2.0 B+1 but now Hallowexit B-201 and John Swinney's birthday
Also 100th Anniversary of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre
Getting Tighter 🔊
Recent polls have been definitely unkind to the Conservative Party. Even usually Tory-leaning YouGov find the Conservatives only 1% ahead while they had them leading by 11% six weeks ago. The current Tory nosedive started about a month ago but has become clearly visible during the period Commons kept voting and voting on alternative Brexits in some newish dog-chasing-tail configuration. Something is happening but you don't know what it is, do you Ms May? 🔊. Only problem is that Labour are not decisively winning yet, Conservatives are just losing slow.
Trends definitely show we are light years away from the Blairite surge in 1997 that saw Tory voters massively switch to New Labour. We're not even close to the 2017 Corbyn surge as Labour have actually lost votes in the meantime and look goodish only because Tories have lost even more especially over the last few weeks. What polls show now is that the electorate is roughly divided into three thirds of unequal size, which are actually four quarters of equally unequal size: one for Labour, one for Conservatives, one for all other parties combined and one for abstention. Not really a sign of much public interest in the political powerplay, more like a sign of global dissatisfaction.
Another series of polls include The Independent Group (or Change UK or whatever already used name they plagiarized this week) and go pretty much in the same direction: Conservatives definitely down and Labour more or less recovering from previous self-inflicted wounds. I will not yet venture to try and predict how many seats TIG could possibly win. They need to properly register first, which is not a done deal even if they claim it is, and then we need to know how many candidates they would actually field and where.
Until further information is available I stick to my initial assessment of TIG's future: SDPish with a flamboyant start and a dismal crash landing at the next GE. In fact the only way they might have to prove themselves real players in the election game would be a good showing at the 23 May European Parliament election. EU election polls credit them with 4-7% of the vote which might be enough to bag a couple of MEPs. But that's another story and I will explore that one later.
Better Decide Which Side You're On 🔊
My current Poll'O'Polls includes the last six ones fielded between 28 March and 8 April. Super-sample size is 9,475 with a theoretical 0.98% margin of error. And of course the weighted average reflects the recent trends with Labour leading by 2.4%, a mirror image of the 2017 GE when Conservatives led by 2.4% UK-wide and 2.5% in GB. But 20-25% of people polled still are undecided or potential abstainers so public opinion can't be said to have conclusively chosen a side yet.
A few polls now include Nigel Farage's Brexit Party and their vote share here is possibly underestimated. Polls who include them credit them with 4-6%. This would still be far below what's needed to gain even a single Westminster seat but would see them switch a sizeable share of voters previously intending to support UKIP. The disturbing part is that the combined votes of the New Model Blackshirts could reach the same level as UKIP before the EU referendum. And that one is squarely on the Conservatives, thanks to their combination of anti-EU rhetoric and hostile environment policy.
Up Against The Wall 🔊
On these numbers we would have the extremely awkward situation of a hung Parliament with neither of the two major parties anywhere near a workable majority. This time I also (reluctantly) factored in the one Northern Ireland poll we have in store. Projects DUP 9 seats, Sinn Féin 5, UUP 2, SDLP 1 and Sylvia Hermon 1. DUP would lose one to UUP (South Antrim). Sinn Féin would lose one to UUP (Fermanagh and South Tyrone) and one to SDLP (Foyle). Not sure it's totally reliable but it's the only one we have.
We have seen this kind of situation before when there were smallishy and shortishy Labour surges but it usually did not last. But current polling suggests we might be seeing just the beginning of a true reversal of fortunes. One recent poll even has Labour 9% ahead which would be just some thousands of votes away from granting them an outright majority. Future polls will show if the Conservative nosedive is here to stay but Labour's obvious weakness is that what we have now is much more of an anti-Tory protest vote than a strong agreement with Labour's proposals, especially as their stand on Brexit is as muddy as ever.
What polls project now would be the end for the Conservatives as even a Tory-DUP coalition would bag fewer seats than Labour. But it would be quite awkward for Labour too and kind of 1910ish. At the time H.H. Asquith sought and gained support from the Irish Parliamentary Party and a nascent Labour to pass his People's Budget and House of Lords' reform. But of course the Liberals back then were fully committed to delivering Irish Home Rule and support from IPP was kind of a given. PM Corbyn would face a trickier situation now. A Labour-SDLP-LibDem minority coalition would bag only 309 seats and even extending it to Plaid Cymru and the Greens would take it to only 316, still 7 seats shy of a majority.
With the SNP in a much stronger position after gaining 10 seats and woodchipping Scottish Labour, PM Corbyn would have to make the most difficult and most controversial decision of his career: trade SNP support to his Queen's Speech for a Section 30 Order. His only other option would be Groundhog 1974 in the hope the snap GE would take him past the majority line. Good luck with that as it might backfire and turn out to be a Groundhog 1910 with the second GE of the year delivering the same results as the first. And while the second 1910 GE was a victory for Asquith, a repeat hung Parliament would be a blow for Corbyn and wipe out all options but one: Section 30 Order in return for SNP's confidence and supply. Even if that means unleashing a shitestorm that would make the 1912 Home Rule Crisis look like a walk up Calton Hill on a taps-aff day.
Bully For You 🔊
On current polling a massive 66 seats would change hands. In less complex times this would have been more than enough to deliver a clear change of majority provided the Loyal Opposition would have been in a position to snatch that many seats from the Government. The current situation is quite different with gains and losses spread all across the spectrum.
With fifty of their MPs going down, even the Tory frontbenches would be hit hard and provide Corbyn's office walls with a new collection of stuffed-head trophies. Which comes as no surprise at a time when half of Conservative MPs are on the government payroll. Bear in mind that current law allows 109 paid government positions (83 Ministers of any rank, the Chancellor, 3 Law Officers, 22 paid Whips). Up to 12 unpaid junior Ministers on top of this, as allowed by law, and an unlimited number of unpaid Whips and Parliamentary Private Secretaries (basically bag-carriers for a senior Minister and expected to rat on their colleagues). For some reason the full list of PPSs is a closely guarded State Secret but last time the Conservative Party themselves published one it had 45 names on it, and there is every reason to believe the current headcount is roughly the same.
Here Tories would lose one Secretary of State (Rudd), three Ministers of State (Lancaster, Sharma and Goodwill), seven Under-Secretaries, three PPSs and three Whips. On top of this eight former Government members who resigned over various Brexit-related issues would also lose their seats. Hardest hit would be DWP losing its Secretary of State (Rudd), the Minister of State for Universal Credit (Sharma) and Rudd's bag-carrier/rat (Scotland's very own Colin Clark). In contrast Labour would only lose their Shadow Scottish Office (Sweeney and Laird) which would not make much of a difference as they failed to demonstrate any usefulness anyway.
Don't Take No For An Answer 🔊
Right now we would have 57 marginal seats, significantly fewer than after the 2017 GE that delivered 79. This would include only 16 of the seats projected to change hands, with 10 of these in England, meaning the swing in popular vote would be strong enough to put most switching seats out of the immediate Danger Zone.
This does not mean the battleground would have shrunk as it would in fact have grown slightly bigger with another 100 seats falling into the 'Lean' category, for a total of 157 competitive seats compared to 146 in 2017. With 134 fewer safe seats the next GE now has the potential to be more competitive overall, and obviously more hard-fought, than the previous one.
I'm All Right Jack 🔊
Reallocating the marginals to the runner-up confirms that this batch of poll opens new and fresh perspectives for Labour. On a good day and with an additional 2% swing in their direction, they would bag 298 seats and the potential Lab-Lib coalition would have a three-seat majority on 324 seats. A fairly close result that would probably have Labour again claiming that Scotland is the key to the election, as even their best possible result would be a meagre two seats North Of The Wall. Of course they would conveniently forget that the SNP's main achievement in the 'Con Min' scenario would be almost wiping out Scottish Tories and leaving them with just five seats. So 'Vote SNP Get Tories' does not really apply here, no more than it did in the past.
But a similar swing in the opposite direction (2% towards Tories) would see Labour gaining just one seat from their 2017 intake, while the Conservatives would still have a shot at a makeshift minority coalition. So as the saying goes it definitely looks like the election Conservatives can't win but Labour can still lose.
Suits Me Suits You 🔊
The snap GE has now become everybody's favourite way out of the current Westminster clusterfuck. And one where Labour should be more than willing to help as they take the optimistic view of public opinion's state of mind. Question not being 'will snap GE happen?' but 'when at last?'. But getting there might be harder than some think. Bear in mind the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 requires 434 votes for Commons to dissolve themselves. It doesn't say that in as many words but the provision in Section 2, Subsection 1b reads 'if the number of members who vote in favour is equal to or greater than two thirds of the number of seats in the House including vacant seats'. So it doesn't matter how many MPs would coincidentally be holidaying on D-Day to avoid casting a vote because they're still part of the total number of seats.
So the requirement is a solid two thirds of 650 no matter what, you get it: 434. And in this case abstaining is pretty much the same as voting against as only Aye votes count. Section 2, Subsection 1b of the Act was invoked only once to trigger the 2017 snap GE. Back then it passed 512-13 with 105 abstaining, most notably 48 Labour rebels and the SNP. It might not go down that easily this year with already 170 Tory hardliners pledged to vote against holding European Parliament elections, which are more than likely to happen anyway, because the Conservatives might face a heavy defeat. These 170 would probably also oppose a snap GE for the same reasons. Remember that only 635 votes can be cast in divisions (650 minus Sinn Féin, Speaker, Deputy Speakers and Tellers) so 170 against a dissolution would make it a tight vote with 32 abstentions enough to defeat the motion.
May's other choice then might be a self-inflicted vote of no confidence that would require only 318 votes to pass. The DUP could choose to pull the plug and May might go down by just one vote, allowing Dennis Skinner and Kenneth Clarke to share memories of the day James Callaghan went down the same way. Or ToryMax Rebels could turn against her in the name of ideological purity and she goes down by anything between eleven and twenty-seven votes. Then Labour might find it more convenient to avoid a close no confidence vote and instead mercilessly whip their MPs into supporting dissolution. Which would suit everybody: Corbyn would get his long awaited snap GE and May would go without the humiliation of being ousted by her own MPs or having to suffer through a long hot summer 🔊 of backbench rebellions and frontbench resignations. Ball's in their courts, definitely.
Let My People Be 🔊
How long will it take? How long can we wait? Amidst all the Brexit chaos and speculation about either a snap GE or EU Parliament elections happening by accident, the when-and-how of Scottish Independence remains the elephant in the room and is indeed growing huger by the day. It has been established already that the Prime Minister of England demanded 'aggressive whipping' against Nick Boles' 'Common Market 2.0' motion because passing it would have strengthened the case for Scottish Independence. And nobody will believe the elephant walked out of the room when Corbyn and May discussed their failed Common Brexit Plan. So what next?
A lively conversation on Twitter was triggered by an article in The National showing some impatience from their readers at the SNP's perceived lack of action. Replies covered the whole spectrum from 'Patience' and 'Nicola knows what she is doing' to 'Too late' and 'Nicola must go'. Even factoring out the most extreme reactions cannot hide the fact that Yes-leaning people are expecting something solid and want it to happen soon, lest Nicola Sturgeon appears to be kicking the can down the timeline pretty much the same way Theresa May does with Brexit. Something definitely has to happen at the SNP conference next month. Activists can't wait for Brexit 3.0 before things get moving. Hallowexit is bad enough already, Hallowindy would be a fucking disaster.
I think the Leith Walk by-election on Thursday was sort of the sign of the times. You might want to downplay its significance as only 30% of the electorate saw fit to turn ou. But first preferences for pro-Independence parties rose from 54% to 62% in an iconic part of the National Capital, a city that voted 61% No overall at the first IndyRef. I try not to read too much into this but every positive sign, however smallishy, is good news anyway. And one that should be food for thought for Nicola Sturgeon when she makes her big announcement ahead of next month's SNP conference.
If there is no strong and decisive initiative at the conference, the SNP might well face a self-inflicted Spring Of Discontent that would jeopardize the party's electoral prospects. Obviously turning against the SNP now in the name of some make-it-up-off-your-ass-as-you-go ideological purity would be indefensible and irresponsible. But a true grassroot revolt would be a different beast altogether. Some 25k votes at the next Holyrood election will make the difference between a continued pro-Independence majority and an Unionist one. Whatever anyone's issues with the SNP procrastinating, and I do have some of my own, keeping the triple-lock mandate on seeking Independence is a must. Everything that needs sorting out will be sorted out in due course. After Independence.
Looks like things are gonna get more interesting now so stay tuned for further updates.
Let them cant about decorum who have characters to lose
© Tom Robinson, Mark Ambler 1977
No comments:
Post a Comment