Twenty years ago today the Scottish Parliament
reconvened after a 292-year recess
© Bryan Ferry, 1973
The Thrill Of It All 🔊
'So what are we going to have today, Prime Minister?' the maître d' softly asked. 'Dare I suggest larruping for starters? Then a healthy clobbering with a side-order of fresh walloping maybe?' Because this is just how bad the Conservatives' electoral prospects look like right now. And May's own prospects look even bleaker as the swarm of Tory PM-wannabes from Boris Johnson to Rory Stewart (aye, THAT Rory) are sharpening their knives. And my prediction that the 1922 Committee would waive the rules and annul her 12-month reprieve from last December is becoming likelier by the day to become reality. Unless the 1922 Committee don't have the baws for it and backbenchers take matters directly in their own hands no matter the fallout. All it would probably take is 158 Conservative Associations passing a no-confidence motion in May and she would have to go before the end of the current Brextension regardless of her own views on the matter. Unless of course of she is finally strongarmed into an 'amicable termination' to avoid losing face.
Thirteen polls in an inexorable sequence 🔊 since early April have Labour leading by anything from 1% to 10%, with only two predicting a tie. Which, believe it or not, is the longest (almost) uninterrupted sequence of Labour leads since July 2017, and then it was probably just buyer's remorse while now it looks like not just a phase but a true reversal of fortunes. The irony of course is that Labour owe little if anything to themselves but rather to the new kids on the block: Change UK and the Brexit Party. And part of it to the LibDems and the SNP too, like it or not. The most thrilling part is to try and guess how many seats the Brexit Party and Change UK can bag under voting patterns that are starting to look more 2015ish than 2017ish. Change UK will probably learn the hard way that defector is a close synonym to traitor in voters' minds and go down the SDP way, with just two of them surviving and possibly four at most. The Brexit Party on the other hand have nothing to fear and while current polling awards them zero seats, it would take very little for them to better UKIP's 2015 performance and bag two or three seats by surprise.
The two main English parties have little to celebrate as recent polls still have them crashing and burning at both ends 🔊 with their lost votes spread all over the place. But thanks to the magic of FPTP they would still bag 85% of seats on barely 60% of the popular vote so sure they're all right, Jack. Remember this comes just after local elections that saw one councillor elected on 18.7% of the vote in an eight-way contest, the lowest ever vote share on record for a winning candidate since Bede collated the minutiae of Britannia's country life 🔊. So pretty much everything is possible including upsets from some independent candidates as in East Devon (highly likely) or even South West Surrey (still unlikely but who knows who voters will seriously want to send packing?).
Would You Believe? 🔊
So the Local Elections in England and Northern Ireland have come and gone. As expected Conservatives took a massive drubbing and Labour a mild thumping. Fun part is that both Labour's Remainers and Leavers blame the losses on Corbyn's ambiguity on Brexit. While both Tory Remainers and Leavers blame the losses on May's futile attempts to strike an half-arsed deal with Corbyn. Then numbers don't lie (just only when they do, as I said before) and the election results are quite clear. Here's what we got (2014 LE results for Northern Ireland and 2015 LE results for England, as these were the seats up for election this time, and the notional count after boundary changes and some English councils merging):
Clearly there is a message in these results. Yes you get it: nothing shouts 'go on with Brexit As Usual' like Tories losing a quarter of their seats and UKIP four-fifths of theirs while LibDems more than double and Greens more than triple theirs. Or at least that's what Theremy Cormay heard. Never mind they're the only ones who did. They're the ones in charge so they can't be wrong. Or can they?
May and Corbyn have catch-22ed (or should it be caught-22?) themselves into a corner between rock and a hard place with their Mission Impossible Brexit Deal. Half and possibly more of Labour MPs want a permanent customs union and a confirmatory referendum but hardline Tories will have none of either. Then the EU is likely to reject a temporary customs union as implementing it outside the Single Market would create more problems than it would solve, and why the fuck bother with that anyway as it would not last beyond the ever likely snap GE. Besides any Maybyn deal would be voted down by all truly pro-European parties in Commons, a 62-strong voting bloc that would stand in the way of any unlikely compromise.
Voters are rightly puzzled by all this and it shows in the current voting intentions. Polls now have Conservatives in the mid-to-high twenties which would be their worst showing at any general election in like…. forever. I say worstest since 1832 but only because I don't have electoral statistics any earlier that this, and anyway even lower than at the Blairwave elections of 1997 and 2001. Weighted average of the most recent polls has Labour in the low thirties, the kind of vote they bagged in the past only when losing elections, and the lowest for any winning party since…. try a wild guess…. you get it: 1832. Then denial is not just a river in Egypt. Or is it?
In the same 'flabbergasting missteps' category, I can't avoid mentioning three SNP Grandees (aye that's you Stewart, Angus and Alyn) offering Unionists yet another #SNPbad angle of attack on a silver platter, and in an anti-Independence paper to add insult to injury. Whose only excuse was that they dealt with Unionist abuse too. Which you can see for yourself took a whole smallish paragraph at the bottom of ten times as many lines devoted to 'cybernats'. And before I forget, the Herald's writer says he is pro-Independence, guess another 'proud Scot but….'. Could it be too that Our Grandees feared backlash from readers if they had published the same piece in The National? Just as I thought 🔊 things could only get better for the SNP, they might well have scored the own goal that will prove me wrong.
Don't get me wrong here. I don't and will never condone online abuse of any kind and any origin. I just think S, A & A actually did the SNP and the Yes Movement a huge disservice and with the worst possible timing, coming just after the gigantoric AUOB March in Glasgow, which they failed to commend, and on the same day we learned about my MP Joanna Cherry needing police protection after suffering massive misogynistic and homophobic abuse online. And I did not hear A, A & S condemn the very direct abuse from Unionists targeting the AOUB March, and that one was not cyber-anything. After the very positive impact of Nicola Sturgeon's address to the Scottish Parliament A, S & A should have known better than pissing off a number of devoted SNP and Yes supporters well beyond the 'vile cybernat' fringe. So it's a good thing that other prominent party members disavowed them and it was made clear the party as a whole does not share their views, prompting Angus to tone it down quite a few notches, so let's hope Joanna Cherry has the final say and this Cybernat War ends here and now.
The Bob 🔊
Useless (well, actually useful in this case) trivia: 'bob' here stands for 'BoB' as in'Battle of Britain'. Hence the relevancy (sort of) to general election stuff. Simples.
My current Poll'O'Polls includes the six most recent ones fielded from 17 April to 7 May. Super-sample size is 10,995 with a theoretical 0.91% margin of error and it points to Labour leading by 5.7%. Of couse we already know that under current voting patterns, as inherited from the 2017 GE, Labour need more than this 🔊 for a majority. But only one recent poll predicted Labour bagging the double-digit lead they need, and the freshest ones are quite a mixed bag in that respect. For completeness' sake you should be aware that two other polls have surfaced from the same source on Twitter yesterday with some upsetting results, but I will not use them until I have the opportunity to read the full crosstabs directly from the pollsters' sites.
If there is something 🔊 specifically worth highlighting in all the current polling, it's obviously the combined Labour and Conservative voting intentions at their lowest for the last 75 years. Even the peak-LibDem and peak-UKIP elections don't come close. Besides, and unsurprisingly from where I stand, Change UK fail to be the major game-changers they hoped to be and don't stand a sporting chance at upsetting the system the way the Liberal-SDP Alliance almost did in the 1980s. Then of course the Brexit Party might become the year's sensation 🔊 by unfortunately finding themselves in the perfect position to become the upsetters Change UK fail to be.
There are some reasons to take current polling with just the weest pinch of salt. There has been a wave of EU election polling recently and more often than not pollsters include both the EU election and the GE in the same poll. Which I think leads to some amount of cross-pollination between the two sets of answers, possibly leading to overestimation of the Brexit Party in GE voting intentions. This notwithstanding there is still a disturbing similarity between UKIP in 2014 EU results vs 2015 GE results on one side, and Brexit Party in current EU polling vs current GE polling on the other.
Take A Chance With Me 🔊
The current weighted average of voting intentions again delivers a hung Parliament though it's progressively getting better for Labour. Same old 🔊 but we never tire of it, or do we? Main caveat is that polls rely on the assumption that all parties listed in their prompts would field candidates in every constituency. It surely will not be the case for UKIP and the Greens, and possibly neither Change UK nor the Brexit Party will have the required number of candidates or the resources needed for a full-blown UK-wide campaign. Projections also implicitly assume that the main voting patterns have not been disrupted substantially by new parties barging in almost out of the blue 🔊 and already bagging about one fifth of the popular vote. But only an actual election could tell us whether or not voting patterns have really changed, and in what way. So let's just wait and see, and do with what we have for now.
While there is ample evidence that a post-Brexit Tory government would only be driving the country backwards 🔊 to some Victorianish-cum-social-media times, what would happen under a Corbyn Premiership is still far from clear. Corbyn's status changing overnight from The Great Pretender 🔊 to Number Ten's Tenant might be a mixed blessing as he would have first to overcome the various rifts within Labour, and then would undoubtedly struggle to assemble a strong and stable government coalition. The LibDems are at face value the likeliest coalition partners and would certainly make the most of the leverage they would have to extract some major concessions like a second EU referendum that would go beyond confirmatory and be a complete reboot. At least that's what a recent YouGov poll says.
On current polling, again only the LibDems (number of seats up 142%) and the SNP (up 49%) would have a really good time 🔊 on Election Night. But the SNP should not take anything for granted yet, even with voting intentions above 40% and bagging 50+ seats thanks to a more fragmented Unionist vote. The Dundee North East by-election should be taken as a serious warning. It's fine to celebrate gaining back an SNP majority on Dundee Council but it was much more difficult than could possibly be foreseen. The SNP first preference vote fell by almost 7% from the 2017 election, and below 50% for the first time in that ward since STV is used for Council elections.
It is also quite a powerful warning sign that the SNP candidate bagged transfers only at a sluggish pace and failed to clear the quota until Count 5, resulting in the election being decided only on Count 6. Which means that the SNP bagged the seat only thanks to 469 transfers from Labour on the last possible count. Food for thought and reason to treat the upcoming elections, whether EU or snap GE, as challenges rather than opportunities. Because SNP voters have this disturbing thought pattern: it's my party 🔊 and I would do anything for them except perhaps bothering to vote when it looks like it's in the bag already. Don't say I did not warn you.
Your Application's Failed 🔊
Current polling predicts that 102 seats would change hands. Which is quite a feat as out of twelve General Elections held over the last 45 years the 'Hundred Changes' hurdle was cleared at only three and nine 🔊 delivered far fewer shifts, ranging from 27 to 73. The three that topped the current projection: 1997 (185), 2010 (115) and 2015 (111). Of course 2015 is the outlier here with the SNP accounting for 50 of the changes, and remarkably the other two marked the beginning and the end of the New Labour Era. And I don't even mention the all-time record set in 1945 with a massive 279 seats changing hands. Now what we have in store for the next GE is quite a mixed bag and nothing like a tsunamish change as the full breakdown of gains and losses shows.
Labour are still far from the notional 61 gains and actual 69 gains they need for a majority. Apart from the unavoidable losses to the SNP in Scotland, they're not doing too well in Wales and London. In Wales Plaid Cymru is doing better and could gain at least one seat from Labour (Ynys Mon surely, Llanelli next most likely), while the Brexit Party is on the way to becoming a credible threat in a couple of seats with a strong Eurosceptic C2DE electorate (think Neath or Islwyn). There is a different pattern is London where Change UK will quite certainly hold two of their three seats in Corbyn's backyard and LibDems would snatch enough solidly pro-EU votes form Labour to make them lose their surprise 2017 gain in Kensington back to the Tories. But the main thing 🔊 here is that even avoiding the predicted losses in London and Wales would still not hand Labour a majority and some coalition deal would still be necessary with the LibDems having the same strong leverage. Even Labour holding all their Scottish seats would not cut it so maybe they will listen and go after Tories in England rather than after the SNP.
But Labour might find some reasons to celebrate in the full list of predicted losers which again includes quite a number of Tory frontbenchers. Amber Rudd is more than ever predicted to lose her marginal seat in Hastings and by a much larger margin than she held it by in 2017. Then she might want to try her luck in neighbouring Eastbourne where LibDem Brexiter Stephen Lloyd would definitely go down if challenged by an official candidate from his former party. Apart from her, three Ministers of State, the Solicitor General for England and Wales, nine Junior Ministers, four Parliamentary Private Secretaries, four Whips and two Vice-Chairs of the Conservative Party would lose their seats. Not that bad.
Interesting additions to the body count this time would be Graham Brady, yes THAT Graham, the current Chair of the 1922 Committee who took a long time making up his mind on whether he should stab May in the back right now or next week and somehow managed to do both; Steve Baker, the ever petulant Vice Chair of the European Research Group who threatened to vote against May in an upcoming no-confidence vote in Commons once it became clear none would happen again; and finally Craig Mackinlay whom you probably have never heard of but was first Acting Leader and then Deputy Leader of UKIP at the end of the previous millennium before he realized the grass was greener on the Tory side of the fence.
Can't conclude this section without mentioning that our very own Scottish Tories would lose no fewer than three Parliamentary Private Secretaries out of the four swept away in the whirlwind 🔊. Colin Clark, bagboy to Amber Rudd. Luke Graham, bagboy to David Lidington. Andrew Bowie, bagboy to Theresa May and the wannabe Secretary of State for Scotland we're all happy we never had.
Ladytron © Bryan Ferry, 1971
Grey Lagoons © Bryan Ferry, 1973
Could It Happen To Me? 🔊
Current polling would deliver only 54 marginal seats, not a high number compared to previous elections. Which makes it all the more surprising that a few supposedly safe Tory seats now fall into that category. Then this is a configuration where the swingometer has moved deeper into Tory territory, where Labour are predicted to overturn a 6k Tory majority in Dover and LibDems a 15k Tory majority in Yeovil so nothing should be taken for granted or as a complete surprise. My model also says that Brexit Party on 15% average means their lowest constituency vote share would be about 6% and not have that much of an impact, but their highest would be around 30%, still too low to get them a single seat but potentially a real gamechanger, and in most cases this would hit Tories harder than Labour. Meanwhile Change UK, on 4% average, would have a more evenly distributed vote in the 3%-5% range outside constituencies they currently hold, simply because the average predicted vote is too low for differentiating factors to alter it significantly from one seat to another. So let's just have a look at the current list of too-close-to-decisively-call seats.
Interesting Tory names in the close-to-the-woodchipper list include Mark Pawsey, Parliamentary Private Secretary to the First Secretary of State. A neat trick that allows Treeza to have TWO bagboys all to herself, Bowie in her incarnation as PM and Pawsey in her incarnation as FSS. Also Mims Davies, Under-Secretary of State for Civil Society and Loneliness. Naw I kid you not, the position really exists and that's one more MP on the government payroll. Simples. And they're not the only ones close to the exit as a grand total of three Ministers of State, three Junior Ministers and one Bagboy now find themselves in soon-to-be-unsafe seats.
But of course the biggest upset could happen in Rushcliffe, Nottinghamshire. A place you certainly have never heard of unless you're anorak enough to know it's Kenneth Clarke's seat, which he gained from Labour in 1970 and has held ever since without interruption, even bagging outright majorities of the popular vote at the last three GEs. But with the Brexit Party predicted to do extremely well all over the East Midlands he could lose up to a quarter of his voters and come extremely close to being unseated by Labour. If that were to happen he would be the first Father of the House in the whole recorded history of Commons as we know it (that is since 1801) to go for any reason other than death, voluntary retirement or being hermined out to make room for a younger buck. Clarke will be 82 by the time of the next scheduled GE and I don't see him accepting a peerage from the current Government so I guess his best option is retiring, selling his Memoirs to the highest bidder on the promise of some juicy as-yet-unreleased insights into the Thatcher and Cameron premierships (because nobody gives a rat's fuck about any insights into the Major premiership), and letting his party sort out the mess they created that puts even safe seats in jeopardy.
In line for an upset drubbing too would be Welwyn Hatfield, Hertfordshire. And the anoraks have it: Grant Shapps' seat, I heard you shouting it. For some reasons I don't really care to explore, East Anglia is predicted to have the strongest Brexit Party vote of all Little England, and indeed of the whole UK. So all Labour have to do here is sit back, hold on to their third of the vote and wait until the Brexit Party snatches away enough Tory votes to turn a supposedly safe seat into a winnable marginal. Labour might be in an even better position here as they held the seat from 1997 to 2005 so it's not like nobody there remembers what a Labour MP looks like. And I guess some Tories too would not shed a tear at the sight of Shapps going down 🔊.
Re-Make/Re-Model 🔊
The Alternate Commons you get after factoring in where the marginals could go remain favourable to Labour. Their worst case scenario would put them in an possibly awkward situation with the hypothetical Lab-SDLP-Lib coalition nine seats shy of a majority, and Labour cursing those fucking Sweaty Sock Jocks who wouldn't give them back the seats they're entitled to. Then minority governments can and do work and Labour might get away with it as the SNP would never do anything that would allow Tories to stage an unlikely comeback. Labour would still have the option to bring Plaid Cymru, the Greens and Change UK aboard on some sort of confidence and supply or non-agression pact and could thus pass critical legislation on a razor-thin majority. Their choice.
At the other end of the spectrum Labour overperforming polls, which appears to be the most likely scenario, would put them just three seats away from a majority without having to rely on LibDems. And even just one seat away with SDLP and possibly Sylvia Hermon coming to the rescue. Though strictly speaking it might not be Labour overperforming that much, but rather the Brexit Party overperforming to the point they send the Torytanic straight to the bottom for good. Which might very well have been Nigel Farage's Master Plan since the beginning. There is a case to be made that Farage does not need three dozen MPs to exert extreme influence on British politics. All he needs is the Conservative Party weakened to such an extent that he can spin the Brexit Party as the only serious alternative to 'socialist' Labour. Which is what we already see happening, or don't we?
A Song For Europe 🔊
Theresa May might have thought once there were only upsides in kicking the can down the road. But there is one fucking big downside too from her perspective: EU Parliament elections, that once were in doubt, will now happen no matter what and promise to deliver yet another iceberg across the bow of the Torytanic. Conservative voting intentions have fallen by almost two thirds since the first hypothetical EU election polling in January and by half since holding the election became a serious option in March. Of course the dominant trend is Tory votes massively leaking to the Brexit Party whose vote share has tripled since they were first polled in early April. Then why would anyone bother to vote for a party that can't even be bothered to publish a manifesto? 🔊 We have two polls fielded in the first week of May by Comres and YouGov and both point in the same direction, with the Brexit Party coming first and the Conservatives a distant third with LibDems breathing down their neck as the weighted average shows:
But these voting intentions also leave a bitter-sweet 🔊 aftertaste for Labour who would barely do better than in 2014. Seeing the Brexit Party tearing the Conservatives several new ones in Southern Little England is one side of the story, and does not even benefit Labour as the most dedicated pro-Europe voters Doon Sooth choose the LibDems, who would more than regain the votes they lost in these regions between 2009 and 2014, or even Change UK. Labour would also face strong competition from the Brexit Party in the Northern Powerhouse regions, which was to be expected as the Eurosceptic working class vote simply shifted from UKIP to the Brexit Party, and sometimes beyond that, like in the North East where Labour would now finish second in an almost perfect mirror image of the 2014 vote. Outside England, Labour would also lose quite a share of the pro-European vote to Plaid Cymru (up 3% from 2014) and the SNP (up 10% and here part of a wider pattern seen in other polls).
The seat projection based on the regional crosstabs provided in both late April polls shows that the Brexit Party would outperform 2014's UKIP and benefit from both the quirks of the highest averages method and a fragmented pro-European vote even in Remain-leaning areas. Exhibit A is the Greens losing all their three seats though not doing massively less well than in 2014, but simply because the LibDems and Change UK would snatch away enough votes to push Greens out of the allocation of seats, most spectacularly in the South East where Greens would lose half their 2014 votes.
YouGov have also tested the option of a Remain Pact including LibDems, Greens and Change UK, but in England only and ironically using the 'under one banner' catchphrase. Though I guess the irony was kind of lost on them. And they have good reasons not to extend such a dreamworld pact to Scotland and Wales. Under current polling Remainers would have to rally under Plaid Cymru's banner in Wales and that would switch one seat from the Brexit Party to Plaid Cymru. Clearly they would have to rally around the SNP in Scotland, which might be a drawing-and-quartering offence in someone's book, and that would switch one seat from the Brexit Party to the SNP. But of course it's much better to leave these seats with the New Model Blackshirts rather than hand them to those Pesky Nats on a silver platter. You know these people, they would turn that into 'support for Independence'. Fortunately pollsters know what's best for those oiks in the Colonies.
Tous ces moments perdus dans l'enchantement, qui ne reviendront jamais
Pas d'aujourd'hui pour nous, pour nous il n'y a rien à partager sauf le passé
End Of The Line 🔊
Theresa May is certainly a woman of many talents. It is just a shame 🔊 that the only one she definitely lacks is the talent to lead. To quote Our Fearless Leader never in living memory, and then some generations before that, has an English Prime Minister displayed such a perfect blend of dishonesty and incompetence. Yet she will never be held accountable and pay the price. As a reward for her dismal failures and wrecking the Conservative Party, her successor will hermine her into Baroness May of Maidenhead, however weird that sounds.
Whatever she sells 🔊 these days is neither bought by public opinion nor by her own party. A recent poll had a record 92% of respondents thinking the English Government made a dug's breakfast of Brexit, and there is convincing circumstantial evidence of backbenchers engineering a Conservative Associations' uprising to oust her in case the 1922 Committee are not bawsy enough to circumvent the rules and do it themselves.
However close Theresa May be to her political sunset 🔊 we still don't know what shape it will take. The 1922 Committee might finally be convinced that setting a timetable for her departure by mutual consent might be a wiser choice than ousting here right here and now. Not because she might do better in the next few weeks than she did in the past two years but because all other available PM wannabes would be terrible at the job, all nineteen of them. Just try to picture McVey and Barnier in the same room and you get the gist.
So May could very well end up being that unique species of a politician: a lame duck PM by default. Which would probably increase the likelihood of a snap GE happening in the short term. May would probably not be in a position to make it happen but her successor might take the gamble even on unfavourable odds. Snap GE as the root canal of British politics: it will hurt like fuck but let's do this anyway as we can only heal afterwards. Or so they might think….
Events are moving fast again so keep the alarms on and stay tuned for further broadcasts.
Only those who will risk going too far
Can possibly find out how far one can go
Virginia Plain © Bryan Ferry, 1972
Do The Strand, Editions Of You © Bryan Ferry, 1973
All I Want Is You © Bryan Ferry, 1974
Do The Strand, Editions Of You © Bryan Ferry, 1973
All I Want Is You © Bryan Ferry, 1974
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