Jeremy's Den: Westminster Projection

Snap General Election E-28 and 42th anniversary of Tam Dalyell's first mention of the West Lothian Question
Also Paul McGann's 60th birthday and Michael Dobbs' 71th

Battle For Britain 🔊
© David Bowie, Reeves Gabrels, Mark Plati, 1997

I usually don't do 'I told you so' but every now and then I just can't resist the temptation and it's one of these moments. So I told you that dissolution would certainly open the floodgates to a mass of new polls and it did happen, though it's more like polling of mass obfuscation rather than doing anything to unmuddy the already muddied waters. So we have had twenty-one new GB-wide polls in the two weeks since Commons voted for dissolution, with eleven since Dissolution Day proper. With one Scottish poll predicting the SNP on 42% and 47 to 52 seats depending on where marginals go, a brand new Welsh poll once again predicting Labour down ten seats there, and a brand new London poll predicting Labour will do much better than expected there, losing only seven seats instead of the ten that previous polling predicted. The Scottish poll from YouGov is definitely good news and you can only wonder how come the SNP are not doing even better as they are the only ones who actually care for Scotland's best interests. Just try and look up what is filed under 'Scotland' in the English parties' manifestos and all you will find are empty bags of blank pages. Then this poll is just the continuation and confirmation of a solid trend in Scottish polls over the last seven months. Here is how the full sequence of voting intentions and seat projections looks like, with only real polls with a 1k or above sample size used, no subsample from GB-wide polls:

Now of course this works only if SNP voters get off the fucking couch to vote, and also if pollsters don't totally blow it (more on this later). The recent GB-wide polls paint a far less rosy picture, though the updated trends show some movement over the last two weeks, but not in the directions you might have expected, or what Labour and the LibDems hoped for. The Tory vote is definitely surging while the Labour vote has risen more slowly and after a late start, with both the LibDems and the Brexit Party going down. And there is only one global scenario that fits that: 'soft' Brexit Party voters switching back to the Tories because Johnson's worse-than-May's deal is an acceptable compromise to 'get Brexit done' and they want to support him passing it, while only a smallish number of progressive LibDem voters switch back to Labour. Solidly right-wing LibDem voters switch to the Tories simply because it's the obvious way to keep Corbyn out of Number Ten and they might have been LibDem-Leave in the first place. Or maybe some are simply turned away by Jo Swinson's steadfast refusal to seek appropriate medical help for inflated ego and psychotic delusions, or by her shameless PR stunts (more on some of them just below). Whatever the case PM Jo seems to be up for a reality check on Election Night when she has to face a failure she can't explain.

Interestingly Survation have started polling individual constituencies, which brings back memories of Lord Ashcroft's 2015 English Journey, in which he missed quite a few seats by the way. Most of this micro-polling was commissioned by the Liberal Democrats. So far Survation predict Cambridge and Portsmouth South switching from Labour to the LibDems, Finchley and Golders Green from the Conservatives to the LibDems. But of course the most upsetting so far is what they found in the iconic Rugby League seat of Workington, this time on behalf of the Daily Mail in their unrelenting search for the proverbial Workington Man, who had so far proved more elusive than the Piltdown Man. Workington has been a Labour seat continuously since 1918, except for a short Conservative interlude in 1976-1979 following a by-election. Survation's voting intentions here predict a major upset, not as the result of any Conservatsunami but because Labour would lose a quarter of their voters to the Brexit Party. Which goes totally against the commonly held view that the Brexit Party hurts Conservatives more than Labour. This might be true in the South where the Conservatives are threatened by both the Brexit Party and the LibDems but might not work in the North where working class Leavers would never vote Conservative, or only marginally, but are ready to support the Brexit Party and jeopardize Labour's chances in their historic heartlands where even safe seats are now in the danger zone. Which is, awkwardly enough, the exact talking point Nigel Farage used to brush off criticism that the New Model Blackshirts could enable Jeremy Corbyn to Number Ten, before he caved in and withdrew his strawmen in Tory seats. Farage's previous position is also supported by the polling in Gedling, a Labour-Leave seat in the East Midlands, where the Brexit Party would snatch almost twice as many votes from incumbent Labour MP and Remain supporter Vernon Croaker as from his Conservative challenger.

The Liberal Democrats also used these polls to test the chances of two of their most visible parachuted candidates in their landing spots: Friends of Israel's Labour defector Luciana Berger in Finchley and Golders Green, gay rights' opponent Tory defector Philip Lee in Workingham. So Survation says Berger would win in a somewhat flabbergasting upset, while Lee would lose though turning a solidly Tory seat into a Con-Lib marginal, and feel free to have doubts about that one too. Oddly LibDem Central did not ask Survation to poll PM Jo's East Dunbartonshire seat. Could it be that they feared the natives would have unPMed her? Some sources on the ground hint she is not as popular there as she would like us to think, especially since she spelled it 'Dumbartonshire' on a campaign leaflet. Then they instructed Survation to use some creative polling to demonstrate, among others, that Jacob Rees-Mogg could possibly face a credible challenge from the LibDems in North East Somerset. This is not as outlandish as it looks at first sight, some pollsters even have a name for it: squeezed polling. But it quite obviously failed here, as Jo Swinson became something of a laughing stock even in the usually LibDem-friendly Guardian. Surely the uniquely convoluted wording stretched the boundaries of plausibility, as it basically asked people what they would do if Tories and LibDems were the only real candidates with all others dead in the proverbial ditch. This is the kind of stunt that can only hurt the LibDems' credibility, and unfortunately the pollster's too. The baseline polling points to only one possible LibDem gain in South Cambridgeshire, which in my opinion will only happen if voting patterns for the Council elections and European election are somehow duplicated at the general election, Something I still consider highly unlikely.

Survation also polled a representative sample of voters who identify as Jewish and the results are pretty embarrassing for Labour and Jeremy Corbyn personally, if you overlook the fact that this polling was commissioned by The Jewish Chronicle and the Jewish Leadership Council, not exactly neutral players here. 48% of respondents would never consider voting Labour, 42% would consider it with another leader and only 7% with Corbyn as leader. Even more flabbergasting is respondents massively choosing a No Deal Brexit (78%) over Corbyn becoming Prime Minister (12%), in what is admittedly a deliberately provocative two-way choice. You could also argue that Survation's sample is quite biased against Labour with 67% having voted Conservative in 2017 against 11% for Labour and 6% for the Liberal Democrats. But their current voting intentions show a further swing against Labour with 64% choosing the Conservatives, 24% the Liberal Democrats and 6% Labour. Major factor here is that 87% think Jeremy Corbyn is antisemitic against 6% who think he is not, with Boris Johnson's ratings almost a perfect mirror image with 5% thinking he is antisemitic and 87% thinking he is not. I have no doubt Team Blue will weaponize such results against Team Red, and it's too late anyway for Labour to change the public's feelings, however unfounded they might be. The final blows to Labour's morale being 33% of respondents thinking antisemitism is a more important factor than Brexit when choosing which party to vote for, and 47% seriously considering emigrating if Corbyn became PM. No further comments here…. Except that a similar survey of Muslim voters would be just as relevant and would obviously deliver very different results at a time when Tories pig-headedly refuse to address islamophobia in their own ranks seriously.

Where Are We Now? 🔊
© David Bowie, 2013

We all know history repeats itself. But in the case of English punditariat first time was a farce, second time was a farce and thousandth time will be…. you get the gist. The always obliging Guardian has made it its mission to remind us daily that pundits really don't have a fucking clue what will happen on Election Day, though it's been two weeks since Commons woodchipped themselves and only another four until the election and that's why we're being infused our daily dose of pre-emptive ass-covering. Sorry but having a fucking clue is what you're fucking paid for, ye wankers, not telling us that our educated guess is a good as yours. Punditariat is definitely the only subsample of British population any DWP assessor would find globally unfit for work while they themselves claim they are fit. Notwithstanding expect them to drown us in very assured toldyousos on Election Night because, ye ken, the election did not turn out as predicted ergo it was unpredictable and didn't we just tell you so, oiks? Quod erat demonstrandum and the first time in recorded history a self-fulfilling prophecy self-fulfils because it prophesied fuck all. And now the Guardian even have to hire outside help with fancy job descriptions to hammer home the message because, ye ken, always using the same commentariat-on-retainer to do it would make it…. well…. predictable? Whatever, we got your point the first 37 times and we're ready to stipulate that the Heisenberg Principle has become a core component of psephology. Can we move on now? Please? Like to the current snapshot of voting intentions.

Current Poll'O'Polls includes the six most recent ones, conducted between 6 and 12 November by five different pollsters (ComRes twice, ICM, YouGov, Kantar and Deltapoll) so that potential biases probably cancel each other out. Super-sample size is 10,373 with a theoretical 0.93% margin of error, and has the Conservatives leading by 10.5%, down from 14% twelve days ago. Which of course does not imply that we are seeing the start of a reversal of fortunes that would benefit Labour enough to jeopardize the prospect of a Conservative win and majority. Guess now we will hear daily about what a disgrace Jeremy Corbyn is because he did not attend the Festival of Remembrance while Boris Johnson did. Unless of course the real next big thing is Lee Mead reading the words to Morning Has Broken (which was lifted from a Scottish Gaelic hymn, by the way) from a songbook or Leona Lewis butchering Bridge Over Troubled Water. But any opportunity to trash Corbyn is too good to be missed by the English press, isn't it?. Though I don't expect that one to waste space and airtime for more than a few days or have much impact on the votes, even with the Tory-backing media twisting it into a long-range 'fucking Pinko does not support our troops and will not nuke Bolivia' narrative. Can't wait either for the next 'Churchill white supremacist mass murderer' controversy that should definitely be a mandatory item in any election campaign, unless of course calling Labour wankers proves to be the most efficient campaign soundbite. Then a comparison of current polling with what we had in 2017, in the same timeframe before the election and based on individual polls rather than rolling averages, shows Labour roughly treading the same waters while the Conservatives poll a wee smitch lower and the LibDems a wee smitch higher. And again that does not mean the final result will be the same, as the rules of the game have been changed fundamentally by Brexit and the fallout of the European Parliament election, the one that could have been so easily avoided and showed how fragile traditional party loyalties can be.

On top of the YouGov Scottish poll, I can really picture the punditariat scratching their heads at the news that the SNP is now officially included in the 'access talks' for the first time, meaning that the English Government really take seriously the prospect of the SNP being part of a future governing coalition, because their gains are actually predictable. But the SNP's current success looks like an isolated phenomenon, and there is little prospect of them being part of any variant of a 'progressive coalition' as long as Labour remain in such a weak position in England and Wales. The current breakdown of predicted vote shares shows that Labour have significantly recovered in the North, but the number of bottomless sinkholes there means that marginal seats can still be in the danger zone. Labour have also somewhat recovered in London and marginally in Wales, but the South and Midlands are still massively chanting 'No, Jeremy Corbyn'. The Brexit Party's projected vote shares in the English meta-regions here do not reflect their average 8% in England as predicted by the polls, but have been recalculated to reflect them standing down in the 317 Tory seats of 2017. Of course the Conservative lead has gone down in England in a similar way to the UK-wide trend, from 18% twelve days ago to 13%. But Labour are still more of an underdog there than at any election since 1983, while electoral history proves that a Labour majority can't happen without massive inroads in Southern Little England, which for now remains a strong right-wing heartland.

Labour undoubtedly have a good talking point when they pledge to wipe out all traces of privatization within the NHS. Of course they would have an even better one if they promised to remove all traces of Blair-era privatizations from all sectors, and repeal all Blair-era PFIs that have proved so damaging to Councils and local communities, especially in Scotland. One can dream, can't he? Quite fittingly too, the Guardian call Joseph Stiglitz to the rescue, who strongly makes the point that trickle-down economics is a scam that benefits only the top centile of the population who propagandized it based on fake 'science'. Which is a bit rich coming from the lad who once chaired Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, not exactly a bulwark of resistance against corporate excesses. But I guess being now a member of the Scottish Government's Council of Economic Advisers will earn him some modicum of forgiveness for his past sins. Earth to Stiglitz: very kind of you to tell us this but, ye ken, even us oiks have had it fully figured out and factored in for something like thirty fucking years, we got the memo even before Tony Fucking Blair made it his calling to destroy class identity in Britain. And B'Liar also abundantly made the case for us that unfettered neo-liberalism is a clear and present threat to democracy and a tool of oppression. Oi, now I did sound like a freak Socialist, didn't I?

The Next Day 🔊
© David Bowie, 2013

My projection for Northern Ireland now factors in Independent Unionist Sylvia Hermon standing down after 18 years in Commons. She won the North Down seat in 2001 as a member of the Ulster Unionist Party, left the UUP in 2010 when they went into an electoral alliance with the English Conservatives and sat then as an independent. The DUP are now the front runners for this seat, taking their projected tally to 9 as they are still projected to lose two Belfast seats to the Alliance Party. Otherwise my model now projects current polling into a 42-seat Conservative majority, which might ne taken as a good luck charm as it matches Margaret Thatcher's 43-seat majority in 1979, but is also significantly down from the 80 seats I predicted twelve days ago. Which of course does not mean that the Conservatives are anywhere near the start of a downward spiral. Other prognosticators also predict a Tory majority anywhere between 20 and 100 seats when using the same polling average data as above, and what you see here might differ from their own current headline predictions as these may be based on different batches of polls. Anyway we have a consensus on the headline: five years of Boris Johnson, and a genuinely elected one this time. And of course there would be monumental irony in Labour being taken back to their 1983 result and always crashing in the same car when dubbed 'too extreme' by the Tory-enablers in the English media who never had the slightest hang-up about sucking up to neoliberal extremism all the way through the last four decades.

Of course I guess Flavible's projections should be handled with care now that it has surfaced that some were used by the LibDems in their leaflets and were called 'misleading', including the truly extravagant one that Jeremy Corbyn would lose his seat to the LibDems. Surely Labour are not really doing well in London if YouGov is to be believed, but certainly not that bad. In fact the London situation is a textbook case of why it is risky, and indeed borderline daft, to duplicate national swing on areas where you have relevant local polling. Same applies in Scotland and Wales. And we will probably find that using national swing or any slightly tweaked variant thereof also misrepresents England as it can't possibly account for sub-national variability. Then of course we lack specific regional polls within England, which would be the only way to unsquare the psephologic circle. All this did not deter a number of sites from publishing seat projections all along the campaign. To avoid helplessly cluttering the graph, here are the last ten such projections, published from late October to this week. Just bear in mind that public opinion might have been more exposed to Electoral Calculus's projections as they have seniority as media favourites and also the most frequent updates. Oddly Electoral Calculus's last update on 12 November, based on revised calculations, was even much more Tory-friendly than before especially in Scotland. I have a strong hunch here they highly overestimate the impact of the Brexit Party's withdrawal in Tory seats, and specifically in Scotland, as I fail to see how this alone could switch six predicted SNP gains back to the Tories as Electoral Calculus now predict. This could possibly work only if all predicted Brexit votes went back to the Tories but crosstabs from YouGov's last full Scottish poll show it's more complex than this. Scottish Brexit Party voters come only partly from the Tory electorate, a sizeable number also come from Labour and LibDem ranks and even from the SNP. So the added bonus for the Conservatives would be far below the current 6% voting intentions for the Brexit Party in Scotland, probably more like 2% or 3% and not enough to switch more than one or two seats.

Now there is one scenario that near-uniform-swing projections can't properly process: Conservatives securing a majority while Johnson loses his seat. That would cause quite a stir as this would be the first time ever a sitting Prime Minister would be unseated, and the first time a sitting Leader of the Conservative Party would be unseated since Arthur Balfour in 1906. Johnson can of course still choose to stand in a strongly Conservative open seat and the irony here is that the safest would be seats vacated by retiring Tory Rebels or Johnson's foes within the Conservative Party, like Buckingham, East Surrey, Aylesbury or even his own brother Jo's Orpington if he prefers to stay somewhere in Greater London. Of course that would ruin all the campaign talking points about a landslide win but what can really matter more than self-preservation? And Labour gaining Uxbridge and South Ruislip is kind of a remote possibility anyway as the seat, or its predecessor Uxbridge-Just-Plain-Uxbridge, hasn't had a Labour MP since the days of Harold Wilson. But one can dream, can't he? As usual time will tell but I would certainly not wager a tenner on this one.

Ashes To Ashes 🔊
© David Bowie, 1980

On current polling many a sitting MP will have a lousy Friday on his mind on 13 December, as 103 seats are predicted to change hands, significantly more than in 2017 and quite close to the number we had in 2015. The pattern would be different this year with only 16 of the changes happening in Scotland instead of 2015's historic 50, But there are some similarities in he character of the election, if not in the numbers: a not-too-successful Conservative government solidifying their grip on Westminster while Scotland strongly signal their will to choose another path. So there might be some lessons to learn from the past after all, because you see, the past does matter, it kind of shapes the future if we face it (aye, that's an obscure cultural reference, just try and guess where from). What the breakdown and cartography of seats changing hands show is that the aftermath of Brexit is even more damaging for Labour than the foreplay to Brexit. Labour's worst performance since the very year Jeremy Corbyn first rose from the Bennite ranks to become Islington North's MP at 34 would almost surely signal the death of his political career. Which (and aye, I know I'm repeating myself here) would be Keir Starmer's once-in-a-generation chance at grabbing a leadership position he probably does not actually want, but he would be the optimal compromise candidate for both centrists who will want none of Momentum's Young Turkesses, and Momentumers who won't want Emily Thornberry anywhere near the driver's seat.

The Conservative frontbench would not be too badly damaged by these results as they would lose only Alister Jack, Colin Clark and Zac Goldsmith, who were already on ejector seats anyway long before they were promoted to the Government payroll. On the Labour side, a very symbolic upset on this polling would be Dennis Skinner being unseated in Bolsover, the seat he has represented for all of his 49 years in Commons, by barely 1% when he held it by 11% in 2017. A seat that has been represented by Labour continuously since its creation in 1950 while its predecessor seat Clay Cross had been Labour's since 1922. But of course I'm tempted to say the math does not apply here and The Beast will hold his seat no matter what as even a number of local Tories vote for him on his record as a well-liked and dedicated constituency MP. Other familiar Labour figures going down would include Convenor of the post-Blairite Future Britain Group Darren Jones (now orphaned since Tom Watson retired from politics to spend more time with his Portal 2), Jon Cruddas and Mary Creagh. Most other symbolic losses that were predicted twelve days ago would not happen now, even if by small margins only, except the 2017 ultra-marginal surprise gains that would return to the Tories. Born-again LibDems Antoinette Sandbach, Angela Smith and Sarah Wollaston would also lose their seats while Chuka Umunna, Sam Gyimah and Philip Lee would fail in their attempts to start a new career in a new town. Then of course this snapshot might be totally shattered by new game-changing upsets like the Nessie-like Remain Pact and Leave Alliance, the ones you dimly see in the evening fog but never know for sure if they're real or just a prop. Here is a rough estimate of what sort of Commons such pacts could deliver:

Of course this is basically a theoretical construct and you can't really know the shapes of things to come when dealing with electoral pacts, especially when you haven't the fucking foggiest of what they would actually be made of. All I can say is that statistically a full-fledged Remain Pact including Labour would have the same effect as a full-fledged Leave Alliance and move about 30-40 seats, only in opposite directions. More awkwardly, the Remain Maxi-Alliance would deliver only a hung Parliament and potentially open the door to a Con-Lib post-election bargain to keep Jeremy Stalin and Nicola Krankie way off that fucking nuke button they wouldn't press anyway. Definitely not what Remainers of all shades would have voted for. But a Mini-Remain Pact, basically involving only the LibDems and the LibDems, would have close to no effect and would not change the election's outcome: a Tory majority. Back in the real world, Nigel Farage's announcement that the New Model Blackshirts will stay out of the 317 Tory seats from the 2017 election is not an actual pact, though some 'Undisclosed Number Ten Sources' may actually have worked on it from the shadows. It sounds more like an implicit admission they did not have the candidates or the fuckiest chance of gaining any of these seats anyway. So why bother and lose £158k in deposits when Nige's hard-earned MEP salary can be spent to more effect elsewhere? Then the Unite Remain thing engineered by Swinson Central was pretty much a dead parrot even before it could fly as Welsh Liberals would have nothing to do with those pesky Welshnats. On top of that, a pact that Labour, the SNP and the Scottish Greens won't touch with a sixty-foot cattle-prod is not that much of a pact, or is it?

Wild Is The Wind 🔊
© Dimitri Tiomkin, Ned Washington, 1957

The slight changes in voting intentions now deliver 63 marginal seats, a dozen more than twelve days ago being now squarely in quicksand territory. It is also clear that the main parties fully intend to extend the battleground well beyond this. If you combine all their hit lists, there is something like 300ish seats deemed worth of a good fight, which is quite impressive and probably over-estimated when you factor in that about 300 seats remain safe despite deep changes in voting patterns over the last two years. The slight shift of voting intentions towards Labour also means that a few more Tory seats than Labour seats are potentially in the danger zone. The possible alternate scenarios remain very favourable to the Tories, even if a further swing towards Labour could again create a interesting though chaotic situation, as the ones we had long ago when a hung Parliament was the generally predicted outcome. The current 'Con Min' scenario, which requires no more than a further 2% swing to Labour, would deliver just this, with the added spice that the Con-DUP alliance would now fall four seats short of a majority.

What happens next il a matter of how party leaders would get over personal likes an dislikes and put national interest up front, or not. In this context, I'm really chuffed that Owen Jones has chosen to enlighten the starry-eyed populace about Jo Swinson's real motives, but then Owen just now discovered something that has been a self-evident truth for everybody else for like three months already. Or hasn't it? Anyway it's fair to play all the possible variants a hung Parliament would offer under current polling. Of course some of these combinations can be readily ruled out, unless you think some party leaders would defy logic long enough to actually consider them. But let's just suspend disbelief for a moment and pretend all options are on the table, shall we?

Now just imagine what could happen in the current 'Conservative Minimum' scenario and its various options (based on 642 seats on the basic assumption that Sinn Féin would still not take their predicted seats). A Labour-led Rainbow Max coalition, the kind Gordon Brown briefly fancied could happen in 2010, would enjoy a 4-seat majority over a Conservative-led full-blown Brexit Alliance. Then 'tis this time of the year when the First Law of Ljbdemics fully applies: self-interest is a better guide to Swinsonian decision making than national interest. So expect PM Jo, in that hypothetical situation, to take a deep breath and ponder her options for about as long as it takes to say 'ministerial car' in Kirkintilloch Gaelic. And principledly decide that it is her duty to grudgingly accept becoming just Deputy PM as this is the personal price to pay to mitigate Brexit, protect the NHS from Trump's donors and scrap tuition fees. And isn't it what Nick would have done too? And who other than H.H. Asquith's, Archibald Sinclair's, Jo Grimond's and Charles Kennedy's legitimate heir and successor is in the optimal position to make sure Scotland's voice is never heard again after undevolution turns the whole of it into a Surrey-subsidized Brigadoon?

The Supermen 🔊
© David Bowie, 1970

YouGov recently polled respondents about a number of public figures being or not members of the ruling class, the quintessential English introspection about the Betters and the Oiks, the Warleggans and the Poldarks of this Realm, the Diamond Dogs and the Underdogs. First stage of the poll is quite straightforward as the polled figures are identified by name. Second stage is supposedly more tricky as YouGov thought they could outsmart the respondents by submitting them a list of profiles, which are specific enough to 'coincidentally' match the list of names used first. You can read all the profiles directly on YouGov's report of the results (scroll down to pages 4 and 5) and they are in fact quite transparent. I guess most of you won't have to Google any of the persons involved to find out who's who. Just note that YouGov (perhaps inadvertently) did not list the cast in the same order in both questions: Johnson come first and Corbyn second in the 'by name' question, and it's the reverse in the 'by profile' question. And for some reason YouGov also failed to provide a profile for Elizabeth Windsor and included her only in the 'by name' list. Have to wonder why, haven't we? Or would 'Crowned Jewel of the Benefit Scroungers' have been too strong a wording? Aye, never mind and here we go:

Interestingly 9% of respondents think Elizabeth Regina is not part of the ruling class, which leaves you wondering how they actually define 'ruling class'. And quite oddly only Johnson's ratings match on both questions. Otherwise all 'anonymous' profiles have a higher chance to be considered members of the ruling class than the real persons they represent. Definitely odd. YouGov also asked respondents to rate a number of generic jobs on the same scale and some of the results are quite counter-intuitive. There is some endearing naiveté in a majority thinking MPs are members of the ruling class. Cabinet Ministers may be though they still have to answer to either dosh-heavy corporate donors or member-heavy Union bosses. Junior Ministers barely are and backbenchers definitely ain't, being basically just cannon-fodder expected to follow the instructions from Party Central without a second thought. And I would have rated TV personalities and newspaper editors higher on the rulers' scale though some of them also qualify as members of the drooling class when facing Boris Johnson and letting him get away with bumblingly delivered poorly scripted stump remarks, flat-out lies and lousy jokes even a five-year old would be ashamed of. But never mind, that's just me.

I guess you will find the inclusion of supermarket workers just as humorous as I did. Surely someone at YouGov must have felt snubbed by staff last time they shopped at their local Tesco. YouGov also coincidentally fielded another poll, which strangely has now vanished from their survey results page, about opposition or support to Government raising the tax rate for billionaires, and Government taking action against billionaires avoiding tax. Interesting questions when Johnson likens Corbyn to Stalin on his attitude to the über-doshed, which is quite rich coming from the man who just enacted a Stalinist purge of his own MPs. And also historically untrue as Stalin wanted to eliminate the kulaks and Corbyn wants the over-loaded pretty much alive and kicking so that they can deliver on their moral obligation to society to pay a fair share of taxes. Which wording I did not lift from the Labour Manifesto as it was not yet clause-fived when I typed this. Though they can feel free to use it against a very modest fee. Or has Jeremy Corbyn already done just that? Holy fuck!

So maybe Johnsonistas should do to English Labour what Scottish Labour did to the SNP. First trash their proposals because that's what you're genetically engineered to do, then shamelessly embrace them as yours once you realize they're hugely popular. Simples. And just let James Cleverly do the morning rounds to explain that, good clean fun guaranteed.

In the absence of doubt, there is no change, so with the election just four weeks away this is just as good a moment as any to look back at polls conducted in the run-up to the 2017 election, and how their pish-poor performance back then can influence what we should expect from current polling. Which, at first glance, is about anything save actually predicting the election. Bully for you if you thought this was the polls' purpose. The British polling class are a tightly-knit funny-handshake society self-regulated by only fuzzy loopholistic guidelines, with the Golden Rule being that pollsterus pollsterum fricat, because covering the ass of one is covering the asses of all. So here is what the polls said in 2017 at various points during the campaign. E-30 to E-5 represent individual polls fielded over a period ending that day, hence no decimal paces. E-1 is the weighted average of four 'last day' polls, actually conducted on 6 and 7 June 2017, the last two days before the election, hence the decimal paces. Just below are the seat projections from these polls, based on uniform national swing from the 2015 results.

In fact the pollsters were not that bad. The 'day before' polls got the Conservative and LibDem votes right within 1% of the actual result, which is well within the standard margin of error for standard election polling. And two out of three ain't bad, or so they say. The pollsters' only problem was vastly underestimating the Labour vote and I venture it's fully on them as I'm quite sure there is nothing like a 'shy Labour' voter like there are 'shy Tories'. Of course it directly translates into the seat projections steadily predicting a solid Conservative majority just because they factored in a predicted Tory lead over Labour more than three times bigger than the one we had on Election Day. Simples. Of course any similarity with current polling should not be taken as evidence that history is again repeating itself. Just wait another week for clearer signs. And let's switch to the Scottish polls, even more awful than the GB-wide ones. Only real Scottish polls are included here, no subsamples, with the seat projections also based on uniform national swing from 2015. Here even the 'last day' poll is shitloaded with errors going in every direction. Unfortunately these polls induced some level of weird serenity in the SNP's top brass at the time, some content with only 'moderate' losses (meaning holding 45 seats) while others were chastised as too pessimistic when they warned losses could be higher than expected. And this time the pessimists were right.

There is no way of knowing for sure if Scottish polling will be more reliable this year. One reassuring point is that the European Parliament election polls got the SNP and Conservative vote shares right, which is good as these will be the two major players in the snap GE too. But the EU polls also got the Labour and LibDem votes wrong, totally missing the dramatic Labour collapse and the LibDem surge, and this definitely does not look good. Now those of you who were already anoraked four years ago might remember that Scottish polls were much more accurate in 2015. I distinctly remember that, in the last week before the election, they translated into 53-56 SNP seats. Of course those who got the numbers right also got two of the Unionist seats wrong as the Labour seat was supposed to be Glasgow North East and the Conservative seat was supposed to be Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk. And we would have been freed of Ian Murray and David Mundell already back then. Anyway polls basically got the numbers right and that's all that matters as that's all most people remember. So that's what we should wish for now: 2015ish polls for a 2015ish vote. Can be done, at least the second part. Or can't it?

There are two happy men in England right now: John Bercow and Lindsay Hoyle. Bercow because he is out of the political circus for good and free to spend more time with his family, which in his case was a genuine wish and not a talking point to hide some uncanny ulterior motive. Hoyle because his election as the 158th Speaker, and distant successor to Prolocutor Peter de Montfort, saves him from a periculous and possibly perilous election. His seat of Chorley, Lancashire, has morphed from a relatively strong Labour seat, with a 7.5k majority in 2017, into a marginal and a potential Conservative gain like many semi-rural Labour seats on the fringes of the Northern Powerhouse. So now Sir Lindsay will face competition only from the Greens, who might even not lose their deposit this time, and probably the Brexit Party, who will try to mount as powerful a challenge to him as UKIP did to John Bercow in 2015. Then if voting patterns in Bercow's former seat Buckingham have any predictive value, Hoyle should bag some 60-65% of the vote as Speaker instead of the 40% or so he would have bagged as a Labour candidate in a marginal seat. And a parrot named Boris? Seriously?

On the not-so-happy side we have had Labour warning that a free trade deal with Donald Trump's donors would increase the price of medicines. Which it obviously won't since the NHS if off the table, Boris's honour, or isn't it? And that it would lower food standards, up to and including, but not limited to, maggots in orange juice and rat hairs in paprika. Please Keir Starmer, tell us you made that one up, and why just in paprika anyway? We also have had Jo Swinson throwing a fussy wobbler at ITV and finally getting her way because of course the English media tend to conveniently forget the SNP is the third party, has been for more than four years, and is predicted to be again after the snap GE. Then it's probably a good career choice to accommodate Jo's inflated ego, the one that grows in direct inverse proportion to LibDems' voting intentions. You never know, she might be the next Deputy First Minister of England with a ministerial limo bigger than Nick Clegg's. Meanwhile even once-friendly media have a hard time remaining serious when commenting on PM Jo's repeated claims that she can actually become PM Jo, which of course are bordering on psychopathic delusion. Speaking of psychopaths, thousands of Proud Scots and especially Aberdonians were totally chuffed about Ross Thomson's timely demise. Though in a way I feel for Ross. He's no different from you and I, he'd rather get laid than get laid off, but this time it did not work out thusly. He got the sack before he had any chance to get in the sack. Too bad he fancied himself Gary Gable in Wind In The Willows (obscure cultural reference again) when he's just a bit fucking mental and forgot that going into a twat ain't growing up, it's growing sideways (same obscure cultural reference).

The best part of the farce is that the control freaks at Tory Central were kept out of the loop, and flabbergasted at the impudence of one lowly Conservative Association Chairman from Upper Scotlandshire standing up to his English Betters, as they obviously were under standing orders to keep Thomson on life support do-or-die, and probably gave him assurances to that effect even after soon-to-be-former Glasgow North East Labour MP Paul Sweeney had broken the Parliamentary omerta and outed himself as the Strangers' Bar Serial Groper's latest victim. Further evidence of this is Jackson Carlaw again making a jackass of himself when chuntering fucking porkies that Thomson stood down 'on his own account' when all of Scotland already knew he had been kicked out by his own people. Which was obviously a concerted and prepared move by the Aberdeen City Conservative Association as they announced Council co-leader Douglas Lumsden as their chosen one a matter of minutes after they left Thomson dead in a ditch. And the story does not end here even if Tory Central expected it to be buried under the rug thanks to the incoming election. It won't as the inquiry into the MP's psychopathic malfeasance will survive the MP. Alas poor Ross, his woe is that he can't stand his boozing even in large doses, and drams lead to drama. Ceterum autem censeo Unionem esse delendam. And Tories, English and Scottish alike, are definitely helping.

The campaign will definitely offer some more juicy clown-car-crash moments, so stay tuned for further upsets and updates.

Close up the ranks! Fall in!
Join the great army of the children of the night
Marching to the conquest of the future!
(George Lansbury, Labour MP for Bow and Bromley, 1935 election campaign)

Jeremy's Den

14/11/2019

Westminster Projection - E-28 Update

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