Westminster Projection - Return of Commons Special

Eighty years ago today France, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia declared war on Germany, starting World War Two
Also 361st anniversary of Oliver Cromwell's death and Steve Jones' 64th birthday

© Jon Anderson, Trevor Rabin 1994

Commons reconvened today, Hallowexit D-58, but with only 18 Commons working days at most left until then since Elizabeth Windsor gave Assent to Boris Johnson's coup and the only unknown is whether Parliament will be unplugged on the 9th or the 12th of this month, with the earlier being the likelier. And already we have the first upset of what may be a long series with Tory Remainer Philip Lee spectacularly defecting to the LibDems on live TV. So we have what might be the only true fun moment for a while, with Johnson totally losing it amidst cheers from the LibDem benches and John Bercow hoarsely shouting Oooordeeer!!! And of course the First Minister of England just lost his majority and worse will soon come his way. Too bad this overshadowed Nicola Sturgeon non-surprise announcement that she will definitely seek a Section 30 Order before the end of this year, to hold IndyRef2 some time next year. But this one will surely make headlines in the Scottish press tomorrow. 

Of course you are totally entitled to unbelieve Jacob Rees-Mogg when he states this is standard practice, as standard pre-Queen's Speech prorogations last a week or two, not five. And there was ample time to get Elizabeth's Assent earlier and have prorogation cover only the first week of September with the Queen's Speech scheduled for the 9th or the 10th. Which would also have given John Bercow an opportunity to boost his popularity ratings by cancelling the Conference Recess and giving Parliament more time to take back control of the proceedings as they did in the spring, as you can trust the English Government to flood Commons with 'urgent' post-Queen's Speech legislation to avoid them debating anything else until the B-bomb blows up. Which might become irrelevant if the Scottish Court of Session upholds the currently pending case against prorogation and fast-tracks it to the Supreme Court, but don't hold your breath. Now only the dimmest of wit will believe prorogation has nothing to do with Brexit but only with the NHS and violent crime. If that was the case then it would make sense to have the shortest possible suspension and pass dedicated legislation as a matter of urgency, but never mind.

Prorogation should not have been a surprise to anyone as rumours about it abounded for weeks. But I have a hunch a number of opposition MPs thought that Johnson was more barky than bitey and was bluffing. He was not, and it is a clear warning of how far he is prepared to go to secure his Do-Or-Die Brexit. A lucky break for the oppositions could be prorogation annulled by a court ruling in any of the three ongoing cases, good luck with that. And then gathering enough support from 'moderate' Tories to force a vote on explicitely ruling out No Deal and forcing Government to seek another Brextension. Good luck with that too, and odds are Johnson would find a way around that anyway. Most obvious one being 'notwithstanding' the Fixed Term Parliaments Act (FTPA) and calling a snap GE on Royal Prerogative, tentatively now for early November as he obviously hopes to ride the wave of recent polls predicting a Tory victory is indeed possible. But circumventing FTPA would be a coup within a coup, so might backfire and turn enough voters against him to jeopardize the Tories' electoral prospects, as prorogation is already highly unpopular. Anyway the sequence of polls conducted since the Brecon and Radnorshire by-election have significantly improved the odds of a Tory victory and possibly even a Tory majority at the snap GE, while both Change UK and UKIP have earned extinct species status, regularly bagging a stunning 0% of voting intentions.

There's one lesson Jeremy Corbyn should remember when he writes his Memoirs: in 2019's England, destructive bullshitting works better than constructive ambiguity. Of course only a minority consider a Trumpo-Bolsonaresque poundshop Enoch-Powell-cum-Twitter as the best possible PM, but an amazingly tinier minority consider a bicycle-riding tie-avoiding reformed Bennite would be. And when all the none-of-the-abovers and don't-knowers are counted out, Johnson leads 70-30, even better than May in her best days. Sad but that's what the polls say. Even when Johnson postures as Oliver Crowell Reincarnate, people still like him better than Corbyn and 10-12% would also consider either Jo Swinson or Nigel Farage fit for Number Ten. Seriously?

Prorogation might be a factor in the Conservatives' future electoral prospects as it definitely does not go down well with public opinion and even Conservative voters. YouGov polled it twice, first on an instant online poll on 28 August and it showed 47% opposed and 27% supporting with 27% of Conservative voters opposing it. It was then polled again along a regular voting intentions poll conducted on 28 and 29 August, which delivered 53% opposing it and 31% supporting with again 27% of Conservative voters opposing it. Unsurprisingly Scotland voiced the strongest opposition with 58% opposing and 17% supporting in the first poll, and then 67% opposing and 23% supporting in the second poll, and I guess this has a lot to do with Nicola Sturgeon's warning that the English Government could also shut down Holyrood if they saw any short-term political gain in doing so, pandering to the most extreme fundamentalists among their hardline Britnat supporters. Which uncoincidentally coincides with the SNP bagging 45% of voting intentions and a potential 55 seats according to YouGov's most recent Scottish subsample.

© Trevor Rabin, Chris Squire, Jon Anderson 1983

Of course all the polling and psephologysing make a modicum of sense only if the electorate move their asses out of the couch and get the fuck out to vote. Bear in mind the seemingly unalienable right to vote is a recent innovation as the UK became a fully functional democracy (if it actually is one with dark money and foreign influencers and Cambridge Analytica but let's say for now it is) only at the 1950 General Election, after the Representation Of The People Act of 1948 at long last abolished the last remnants of feudalism (university constituencies, multi-member constituencies and plural voting) and finally made 'one person, one vote' the Law of the Realm. Just bear that in mind and also that, if you can't be bothered to move your fucking fat ass out of the fucking couch and walk to the polling place, you totally forfeit your right to whine about anything any politician does, because this one is not unalienable. Today likelihood to vote is one of key components of pollsters' weighting mechanisms and some do publish their findings along with voting intentions. The most common practice is to rate likelihood to vote on a scale from 0 (definitely not voting) to 10 (definitely fucking sure to vote) which I have aggregated into four levels from Abstainers (ratings 0 to 3) to Solid Voters (ratings 9 and 10) for easier reading.

Based on the most recent published crosstabs, turnout at the next election should be somewhere between 70% and 75% UK-wide. Actual turnout was officially 69% in 2017 and 66% in 2015, quite lower than current surveys deliver. Some sources have expressed doubts about these figures because of multiple inaccuracies in the electoral register that might have overestimated the number of eligible voters and thus underestimated the turnout. I also have a hunch that polls overestimate the potential turnout as people are likely to say they will vote even if they won't, just to look better. Anyway what matters most are the differences between the different categories included in the crosstabs. Fist batch fits with common wisdom: the higher up on the food chain, the likelier to vote; and old farts are more likely to vote than young punks. Hint: right-wingers overall more likely to vote than left-wingers, so you know whom to target in GOTV drives. 

The crosstabs by nation (Northern Ireland again not polled) and current voting intentions also deliver some counter-intuitive results. Note first that it is logical that crosstabs by voting intentions hint at higher turnouts than the average result. Obviously people who have already made the decision to vote for one of the major parties are more likely to show up at their polling place than undecideds or those planning to vote for smaller parties, whose voting intentions appear to be more volatile. Even so I have some doubts about the figures for Scotland and the SNP. Turnout in Scotland was 71% at the 2015 GE and 66% at the 2017 GE, and differential turnout works against the SNP more often than in their favour as the 2017 GE made painfully clear. Then there have been two significant counter-examples this year. First the European Parliament election when turnout in Scotland was 6% higher than in 2014 and 3% higher than the UK average, with some 90% of additional voters voting for the SNP and propelling them to three MEPs. Then the Shetland by-election just days ago with turnout up 4% on the 2016 election and the number of votes for the SNP up 50%, translating into a 9% increase of their vote share. Reasons for the SNP to wish these two elections are not outliers but signal a switch to more favourable voting patterns North Of The Wall.

© Chris Squire, Steve Howe, Alan White, Geoff Downes, Trevor Horn 1980

My current Poll'O'Polls includes the six most recent ones fielded between the 21st and the 31st of August. Super-sample size is 10,945 with a theoretical 0.95% margin of error. Which might be somewhat significant as all six polls point in the same direction with a smaller spread than in previous projections. Three of these polls were conducted before prorogation and three after it. Though voters massively oppose prorogation, this oddly does not show in the voting intentions. Yet. The super-sample is admittedly YouGov-heavy as three out the six most recent polls were conducted by them. But YouGov's alleged pro-Tory bias, which is in fact more of a house effect coming from their weighting methodology, is irrelevant as other pollsters also have Tories in the lead and Labour a distant second. Anyway here is what the weighted average says:

On such numbers Labour would suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous incompetence. They should have remembered that actions speak much louder than words and inaction is the loudest of all. It's not like anybody shoved an AK-47 up their arse and forced them to procrasturbate on Brexit, tango on Scottish Independence and abstain on Torysterity. Two years on from their unexpected 2017 success story, Labour have become inaudible and undecipherable. Polls predicting their lowest share of the popular vote since 1918 are just the natural consequence of this. Conservatives would be wrong to rejoice too loudly though as their predicted 33.2% vote share would be their lowest since the days of Tony Blair, the lowest for any winning party since 1832, and the only the second time in reliably recorded Parliamentary history that any party would be called to form a government on less than one third of the popular vote, the one precedent being Ramsay McDonald's minority government in 1923 (Conservatives actually won the popular vote then on 38% and Labour finished second on 31%) and it did not really end well.

The breakdown of voting intentions by nation and English meta-region is even more distressing for Labour and in many cases also one massive fuck of an upset. This is based on the crosstabs from the six polls in the super-sample, which as usual do not cover Northern Ireland (more news from there just below). Labour down to second party in Wales and tied with the Tories in London is certainly not something anyone expected just months ago, yet the most recent Wales-only and London-only polls showed Labour already losing ground there massively as early as last May. The data for the historic heartland in the Northern Powerhouse are even more striking as they show voters who defected to the Brexit Party have come back home to the Tories but not to Labour, who also fail to gain back Europhile who switched to the Libdems. The worst of both worlds, and quite a recipe for disaster. And it just might get even worse. Of course the main point here is the SNP bagging more than 40% of the Scottish vote and on their way to a 2015ish result, which is also what James Kelly finds on slightly different voting intentions as he relies only on YouGov's Scottish subsamples that are, quite ironically, better for the SNP than other pollsters'.

© Jon Anderson 1997

English pollsters tend to forget Northern Ireland exists and that their MPs (at least some of them) can exert significant influence on UK politics. Last time an English pollster surveyed Northern Ireland was Survation in December 2018 and then only as a subset of a massive UK-wide poll sponsored by Channel 4. And the last before that was like…. uh…. never. Fortunately the Northern Irish press and Belfast-based pollster Lucid Talk fill the blanks. Lucid Talk conducted their last poll in early August and it has only been released now via Electoral Calculus. Disclaimer: Lucid Talk got the 2017 Northern Ireland Assembly election right but don't mention the 2017 GE or the 2019 European election to them as they got both massively wrong. Anyway their poll is the only one we have so far this year and it paints quite a different picture from what we had two years ago:

These results are likely to ruffle a few feathers in Belfast as they show all four main communitarian parties down on the 2017 GE results: Sinn Féin and SDLP by 4% each, UUP by 2% and DUP by 7%. The so called 'non-sectarian' (though non-communitarian or cross-community might be better descriptions) liberal Alliance Party of Northern Ireland (APNI) is the main beneficiary with their vote share up 13%, most likely coming from both sides in equal numbers.  The hardline Unionist TUV are probably up too but the poll has them bundled with the far-left People Before Profit, the left-wing Unionist PUP, UKIP and the Northern Ireland Conservatives as 'Others'. What Lucid Talk found confirms what was seen at the 2019 local elections and the 2019 European election: voters challenging the 2017 duopoly of Sinn Féin and DUP, possibly in part in reaction to the breakdown of the power-sharing agreement at Stormont, with voters of all previous denominations switching to the APNI who did surprisingly well at the locals in Belfast and bagged their first ever MEP just weeks later. If the poll is accurate the APNI could now bag two MPs at the snap GE while they held only one seat briefly in 1973-1974 and then again only one for a full term in 2010-2015.

The projection from this poll and the variants factoring in marginals show that the DUP have the most to lose here. They are predicted to lose Belfast East and Belfast South to the APNI, which does sound about right considering the voting patterns there at the two 2019 elections, but could also lose Belfast North to Sinn Féin, which would be a major upset as this is DUP Commons Leader Nigel Dodds' seat since 2001, which he held by only 4.5% in 2017. Sinn Féin appear to be in a more comfortable position as they are threatened only in marginal Fermanagh and South Tyrone by the UUP, and Foyle by the SDLP. In their best case scenario Sinn Féin could even become the first party, keeping all their current seats and gaining Belfast North while the DUP could possibly also lose South Antrim to the UUP, who already held this seat from 2001 to 2005 and again from 2015 to 2017. Now let's just wait for the next poll to see if these trends hold. 

More importantly in the current context, other questions in the same poll show that 58% of Northern Irish want the backstop with 40% opposed and only 2% undecided. Again the results are clearly split along the communitarian divide with 15% of Unionists and 91% of Nationalists supporting the backstop. So-called 'Neutrals' (cross-community parties) hold the key with 73% supporting the backstop. Also 83% of Northern Irish think the UK is handling Brexit badly and only 13% think they're doing well. Even 60% of DUP voters think the UK Government is making a pig's ear of Brexit. Numbers the First Minister of England should bear in mind next time he talks to EU leaders.

© Chris Squire, Jon Anderson, Trevor Rabin 1983

On current voting intentions, my seat projection is unsurprisingly disastrous for Labour who would go down to slightly below their number of seats after the 1983 GE, the year Jeremy Corbyn was first elected. That would be their worst result since World War Two and obviously the end of Corbyn's career. Doing worse than Michael Foot is certainly not how he would want to be remembered but that's what voters would choose as a parting gift, at least this week. Not that Johnson would have any reason to be overly festive as he would do no better than Theresa May and fall six seats short of a majority. Bear in mind that with Sinn Féin still sitting out the actual number of seats would be 644, so 323 needed for a majority. Which Johnson would get by bribing the DUP another £1bn and thus bagging a six-seat majority, narrower than May's in 2017 with the DUP having lost two seats. The obvious temptation then would be to strike a deal with the Brexit Party, getting a more comfortable eighteen-seat majority.

In such a configuration, Jo Swinson would surely first seek Nick Clegg's advice and then swamp Fiona Bruce with a truckload and a bucket of reasons why this is all Corbyn's fault and she was really ready to support a Labour minority government. Then she might want to come up with something more creative than 'I dislike him because he is an old Marxist' though I would not put it past her to argue just that and blame the defeat on Corbyn's unwillingness to morph into Tony Blair or give way to Tom Watson. But before pulling that sort of stunt, PM Jo should remember what the proverbial Irishman allegedly said: if I were you, I wouldn't start from here.

© Steve Bell, The Guardian 2019

Now just think for a while that on Snap Election Night we might actually be in that alternate timeline where the National Unity Front survived all the internal bickering and kicked out Boris Johnson, with Keir Starmer then becoming the caretaker PM just days ahead of Brexitocalypse and managing to secure an extension just long enough to hold the snap GE and reboot the whole clusterbùrach. Labour members and even the NEC might then remember hypothetical polls fielded before the summer break that predicted Starmer on an unambiguously Europhile manifesto would have much better odds at winning an election than Corbyn and say "now we have Keir already so let's keep him", which would leave Swinson no choice but to support Labour, or could even possibly make her choice irrelevant if Labour got a majority with just the SNP aboard. But of course this is just an alternate universe that will never materialize. Unless….

For completeness' sake, other prediction models deliver different results as usual. You know the technical reasons why already. Interestingly the only thing all have in common is the SNP bagging 51 seats. Then just go back to the seat projections just before the 2017 GE and how almost everybody missed the hung Parliament and predicted a solid majority for Theresa May. Of course the main reason was polls were totally off and predicted a 7% Conservative lead when they actually won by just 2%. But there were also some faults in the models used then, which is why I altered mine to include a small amount of proportional swing. And also why Martin Baxter switched to the current Electoral Calculus Advanced Regression Model. With vastly different results but I guess we will not have to wait too long now to know who was right and who was wrong. Interestingly The National's own prediction is closer to mine and also points to a hung Parliament though they differ on the number of Labour and LibDem seats. 

© Jon Anderson, Trevor Rabin, Alan White 1983

In this projection 110 sitting MPs would be sent packing, including eleven Scottish Tories who surely never expected their parliamentary careers to be over so soon. The number of changes would roughly match the 1880 and 2015 GEs, the former being a decisive Conservative defeat that ended Benjamin Disraeli's last term as PM and the latter a temporary reprieve for David Cameron, and don't say 'David who?'. This year the summary of gains and losses and the full cartography make it look like an indecisive battle that does not make future prospects clearer. Tories would just balance serious losses to the LibDems with serious gains from Labour. So the Boris Bounce would deliver no better than the May Splat two years ago. Karma, bro, karma.

The Conservative Government payroll would lose just one Cabinet member (Oor Alister Union Jack), plus six Junior Ministers, one Whip and two newly-appointed Parliamentary Private Secretaries, all to the LibDems except Oor Colin Clark to the SNP. Which incidentally shows that none of the other eleven Team Ruth MPs found their way into the unpaid payroll, and not even to the mysterious Ministerial Team than once hosted Moray's Absentee Referee Dougie Ross. New Deputy Chair of the Conservative Party Paul Scully would also lose his London seat to the LibDems. An unexpected upset would be Oliver Letwin also losing his seat to the LibDems but in the current climate he might have defected to them anyway before the snap GE, so maybe we should call it a half-loss then. Or whatever. 

The Labour frontbench would lose one Shadow Secretary, Oor Paul Sweeney, and four Shadow Ministers including Oor Second Scottish Shadow Lesley Laird. Madeleine Moon, President of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, would lose her Bridgend seat to the Conservatives, highlighting that Welsh Labour might in just as bad a shape as Scottish Labour right now. Some iconic upset Labour gains from the 2017 GE (Battersea, Kensington, Canterbury, Peterborough,...) would also switch back to the Conservatives. Definitely Nightmare on Victoria Street on Election Night. 

© Jon Anderson, Steve Howe 1972

Current polling would deliver 67 marginal seats, a rather low number compared to most previous elections. This time Labour and Conservatives would have as much to lose from a smallish swing in voting intentions, having roughly the same number of projected marginals. 

The possible alternate election results after reshuffling the marginals also offer some interesting perspectives. An additional slump of the Labour vote would give Johnson his much awaited majority and he would not need anyone to hold his dick while he pees. Unless of course the rest of the week before Commons' Shutdown sees other defections from the Tory benches that would reshuffle the electoral math in an unpredictable way.

The other alternate scenario with Tories doing poorly would be a dilemmatic one for Jo Swinson. Just do the math. 290 Tories + 53 LibDems = 343, so quite a majority. But 225 Labour + 53 LibDems + 53 SNP = 331, a slimmer majority but still enough to propel Jeremy Corbyn to Number Ten. And Jo would still get her hard-earned ministerial car. But of course would have to swallow Corbyn granting a Section 30 Order to hold a second Scottish Independence referendum. So where would Jo's red line be? Quite a momentous choice to make.

© Jon Anderson, Steve Howe 1977

Recent events should have been a wake-up call for the electorate, but the signals they send through polls are far from unambiguous, including the Tories still leading in voting intentions after prorogation. We already know the First Minister of England is a pathological liar of intergalactic proportions who made a career fabricating fake news when he was the Daily Telegraph's correspondent in Brussels, where he quickly became the other correspondents' and true journalists' laughing stock, and again during the Nasty Party leadership campaign when he totally made up the story about the EU-regulated kipper-on-ice from the Isle of Man. Yet enough people seem ready to vote for him to secure a Conservative victory at the snap GE. Meanwhile qualitative polling sheds an interesting light on what people actually think about Brexit and what their priorities are, which is often oddly at odds with the semblance of Tory manifesto that they make up as they go. Kantar recently polled their sample on a number of issues besides voting intentions, and despite predicting Conservatives leading by 14%, the findings from the other questions are much less in line with current Tory strategy. Here are the people's favorite options according to both the Kantar poll and later YouGov that returned only slightly different results and definitely led to the same conclusions.

Again Theresa May's thrice-aborted Withdrawal Agreement is less popular than No Deal and would probably be less popular than the return of the Black Plague if that was an option. Les than a third of respondents supporting the No Deal Crashout again show the English Government has absolutely no mandate to follow their preferred option and are the ones actually betraying the people. Only half of the 2017 Tory voters support No Deal, which is also a clear sign as a lot of them have since switched to the Brexit Party, mostly from the most fundamentalist Brexit-crazy faction. So it's fair to assume that Johnson has now the support of much less than half of his potential voters. Which would also be a warning sign if the Brexit hardliners had any modicum of awareness of what is happening in the real world. Sadly now we're way past the point where they totally lost touch and became totally intoxicated by their own lies and cheap talking points. A strong plurality choosing to remain in the EU whatever the means (Commons revoking Article 50 or a second referendum) also confirms other polls that predict Remain would win if another referendum was held and No Deal was the other option on the ballot. Which won't happen as long as the lunatics hold the keys to the asylum but you never know what might happen just two months from now, as any post-Cummings government would most likely acknowledge the people's unalienable right to change their minds and would act accordingly.

Boris: Gotcha, ye punks. Angela: Really? I despair.

Emmanuel: Enough with that, Boris and up to your room NOW.

Kantar also surveyed what would be the people's priorities if a new withdrawal agreement was negotiated. Which the EU has made perfectly clear is not currently happening as the English Government was again caught shamelessly lying about progress being made. But if there ever were real negotiations the people's majority choices would look a huge fucking lot like Single Market and Customs Union. With a Backstop Plus for Ireland and some modicum of Freedom Of Movement. Which is the fun part here as people are OK with Brits in Benidorm but not really with Frogs in Kent. Not that Frogs would want to invade Kent anyway after it has become the biggest fucking lorry parking lot this side of Pluto. Of course no contribution to the EU budget but you surely don't expect those £350mil a week to come back to the NHS, or do you? And then the UK holds the unalienable right to devise their own rule and regulations, so let's go on with the Kipper-On-Ice from the Isle of Man that the First Minister of England loves so much. Now if Cummings is serious about respecting the people's will he know what to write in to Johnson's next standing orders. And that is definitely not hard borders and ration books after Halloween. But as Bob Dylan once (almost) said, something is happening here but you don't know what it is, do you Mister Johnson? 

One important factor is that Johnson's Tour of Europe and G7's performance have not been the unmitigated success the Tory-friendly press is spinning. He has been forced to back down on his threat to refuse meetings with EU heads of state unless they scrapped the backstop, and has had to concede the burden of proof is now on the English Government to provide workable solutions to the Irish Border impasse. Not that anyone expects much from him as he is not actually negotiating in good faith. Which Dominic Cummings readily admitted when he described the pretendy negotiations as a sham, which is not a smart move. If your game is to gaslight the other party then don't say it aloud before any semblance of talks have started, or else you lend credibility to the widely held belief that Johnson also gaslighted Elizabeth Windsor into granting Assent to prorogation. Even Angela Merkel's infamous '30 days' remark is nothing like media made it to be as the 'blistering timetable' would have been there anyway if final decisions are to be made at the next EU summit in October. Odds still are the EU's 'rhetorical shift' is just that, nothing new will come out of Johnson's gesturing and posturing, and No Deal Crashout will happen, just the outcome 7 in 10 voters don't want. And the EU will be happy to see the last of Johnson as they let the doors be shut upon him, that he may play the fool nowhere but in's own house.

© Chris Squire, Billy Sherwood, Jon Anderson 1997

On an unrelated note, some ten days ago The Guardian published a piece basically praising Jeremy Corbyn for being divisive, which was quite amusing as Guardian darlings English Macronistas are the ones most likely to lambast Corbyn as divisive thrice a day and then again after last call. Coincidentally it was published just a few days before a strongly-worded piece by Owen Jones denouncing 'both-sideism' that The Guardian would surely have dismissed as divisive if they hadn't published it themselves. Then the case against divisiveness is absurd on so many levels I lost count on the way. Politics are divisive and it's indeed their raison d'être because people are divided, sorry to state the obvious. Elections are divisive so maybe we should cancel them altogether and go back to the days of Charles II's Restoration, I guess Jacob Rees-Mogg would support that as a return to the natural order.

Now if you're looking around for who's pointing fingers at whom, what you see is 'moderates' of every shade painting Corbyn as divisive, Leavers calling Remainers divisive or Unionists calling the SNP divisive. Quite a pattern here: the right calling the left divisive because obviously there is nothing divisive in an ERG coup engineered by an unelected Prime Buffoon, denying people their right to change their minds over time, planning to sell the whole country to American Big Business or demonizing everything and everyone who challenges immobilism. We should all embrace divisiveness as it is and as always been the surest path to democratic progress. The only alternative is sanitized and spineless compromise which is consensus in word only because the self-entitled overlords always have their way and fuck the useful idiots and collaborators. This goes hand in hand with my personal core belief that authority should always be challenged and questioned instead of being blindly obeyed. Just look at the last very public example of brainless submission: Sajid Javid's abject self-humiliation sucking both Johnson's and Cummings' dicks after one of his spads was fired for no reason other than instilling a culture of fear in Government circles.

Obviously proneness to challenge authority on a regular basis is not a British trait, let alone an English one. Blame that on centuries of potty-training in believing that society is actually split between The Betters and The Oiks, that 'Upstairs, Downstairs' was a faithful representation of what the order of the universe is meant to be for all of eternity and Jacob Rees-Mogg is a real human being, so that The Betters are genetically entitled to hold positions of authority and abuse them whenever they see fit. As in "we did it for your own good" which truly means "we did it for our own good because we are the overlords and don't give a rat's fuck about you". Boris Johnson is the prime example of this, and how the 'boys will be boys' attitude that goes hand in hand with blind subservience to authority, took him from being a mediocre journalist fabricating fake news to score cheap political points to becoming the First Minister of England. People had been warned, too bad they chose not to listen. Note too that Scots are known to be guided mostly by obedience to the rule of law (exhibits: Nicola Sturgeon's approach to holding IndyRef2, Joanna Cherry's rationale for challenging prorogation in the Court of Session), which is a far far cry from submission to authority, both in its philosophical tenets and its consequences, so there's definitely still hope for us.

© Chris Squire, Steve Howe, Alan White, Geoff Downes, Trevor Horn 1980

Events move fast and time is running out but now we have reached the stage where protracted trench warfare is more likely than nuclear holocaust. The First Minister of England and his spad-sacking spad are definitely better at this game than his opponents so far, because though this be madness, yet there is method in't. Tactics here are abundantly transparent: light as many fires as possible even if they sens conflicting messages and let the oppositions find out which counter-fires of their own they should light. Which delivers a steady influx of news that might be real or might be fake, so what is considered true as I type this might not be true anymore when you read it, let alone tomorrow morning. But there are still moments of comic relief amidst the chaos and I still haven't decided which one was yesterday's best. Could be Jacob Rees-Mogg being called a muppet on live radio. Or a rebel Tory backbencher calling Tory Brexiteers 'English nationalists' (scroll right to the end). He remains unnamed so far but I have a hunch this could very well be Oor Wee Paulie Masterton, the one Scottish Tory MP who defied the whip repeatedly about Brexit, though others say it definitely was the now world-famous Philip Lee.

Part of the English Government's master plan to fuel confusion is Sleekit Gove's Sunday talking point that they could simply ignore legislation passed by Commons that they don't like. Which was a wee smitch heavy-handed, though he probably got Commings' seal of approval, as there are subtler ways to achieve this without bluntly saying this is the actual goal, All the First Minister of England has to do is ask  some Armageddon-friendly Hermined Unelecteds to stage a filibuster in the House of Hermined Unelecteds. This is typically a no-experience-needed assignment as the only requirement is being able to talk and talk and talk. And the ability to resist the urge to pee until Pink Gin Break on the afternoon of the 9th when the Prorogation Bell tolls. Then it's damnatio memoriae for all unfinished Parliamentary business. For all intents and purposes it never existed and has to be restarted from scratch after the debate on the Queen's Speech, which by ritual would last six sitting days, that is until 22 October if the House sits on a Friday or 23 October if they don't. Time definitely flies.

© Ben Jennings, The Guardian 2019

For a short while it looked like the oppositions had hit the reset button after wasting valuable time with the National Unity Government unicorn, agreeing that legislation to avoid No Deal was the priority and any no confidence vote will be tabled later. But the best-laid schemes…. you know the rest and prorogation achieved just that. Only silver lining being than we did not have to listen to Jo Swinson bitching about it anyway as Divisive Corbyn had not yet agreed to let backbenchers lead the dance. Now a vote of no confidence has become the likely Plan A again, though there is still some confusion about what Plan A and Plan B would be, with the distinct possibility of Plan A1 (no confidence vote) and Plan A2 (blocking No Deal) being pursued simultaneously. What is painfully clear is that the oppositions' intentions are unclear. Even Labour Grandees don't agree on whether it's A1 and A2 in parallel, or A before B, or B before A. So far. Which is not exactly a recipe for success.

The First Minister of England should nevertheless worry about his coup backfiring for 'tis the sport to have the enginer hoist with his own petard. First obvious opportunity being to vote down the Queen's Speech, which could definitely happen as Johnson has now officially lost his majority after Philip Lee defected to the LibDems with theatrics specifically designed as a slap to Johnson's face. So now Johnson starts with a two-vote deficit on 316 (309 official Tories minus Justine Greening, Dominic Grieve, Antoinette Sandbach and Guto Bebb, 10 DUP, plus repeat sex-offender Charlie Elphicke) to the oppositions' 318 (320 non-Conservatives minus Charlie Elphicke and Nick Boles). Odds are a handful of Independents and possibly some Labour MPs will abstain so in the end it might be up to Philip Hammond and his Gaukeward Squad of Merry Men to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them, thus turning Johnson's Do-Or-Die bluff into 'Thus Diest Thou'.

A lot now rests on the Tory Rebel Alliance's resolve to go through this though it might be safer not to impone too much on all of them actually going all the way down that road. What might actually convince them to take the plunge is Johnson's threat to bar them from standing for election ever again. Which of course is typical Bullingdon posturing as Johnson certainly has the means to strongarm Conservative Associations into deselecting their sitting MPs but even that could fail to be 100% successful. Then there is no way even Dominic Cummings can bar sitting MPs from calling Johnson's bluff and standing again as Independents or even as candidates for another party. I guess even a career psychopath would balk at the prospect of another two dozen LibDem MPs and two dozen fewer Tory MPs after the snap GE. Which would effectively kill all hopes of a Cumminist majority and enhance the chances for an alternative Government, which would also become more of a realistic option if Corbyn stands down after a walloping and a less divisive leader takes over. Keir Starmer, anyone? Don't dismiss the possibility just yet.

The future ain't what it used to be so stay tuned for further broadcasts

Reality is just a matter of perception, both subjective and malleable
If you can dream a better world, you can make a better world
(Fringe, episode Bad Dream, 2009)

© Trevor Rabin 1987