Where Have All The Voters Gone? - A House Of Cards Update

When all the laughter dies in sorrow and the tears have risen to a flood

When all the wars have found a cause in human wisdom and in blood

Do you think they'll cry in sadness?

Do you think the eye will blink?

Do you think they'll curse the madness?

Do you even think they'll think?

When all the great galactic systems sigh to a frozen halt in space

Do you think there will be some remnant of beauty of the human race

Do you think there will be a vestige or a sniffle or a cosmic tear?

Do you think a greater thinking thing will give a damn that man was here?

(Kendrew Lascelles, When All The Laughter Dies In Sorrow, 1971)

© Pete Seeger, Joe Hickerson, 1960

I have a great belief in the people of this country

I think they know the kind of government they want

A government that's firm and fair, a government that is not afraid to govern

I would like to see a bit less ideology and a bit more common sense

A bit more common humanity in our conduct of affairs here and abroad

(Francis Urquhart, House Of Cards, 1990)

It looked quite quiet on the polling front earlier this month with Commons in recess, Boris in Scotland, pollsters trapped on Lanzarote and all that. We were left without a new poll for a whole week, which is a bit like when Hal is cut off from his blood supply in Series Five of Being Human. YouGov were a bit sloppy in publishing their weekly polls on time, but they were busy in Scotland in the meantime, more on that later. Opinium skipped one of their weeklies for The Observer, then came back from the break with a vengeance and a new poll that is just as bad for the Conservatives as the last pre-break one was. Even Redfield and Wilton, a newcomer to the game but working hard to establish themselves as one of the major players, skipped one and took a two-week break, but they were busy in London, more on that one too later. Now the back-to-business general election polling we've had recently remains as puzzling as it was a month or two ago. Of course all pollsters predict that the Conservatives would be ahead but what matters is the size of the lead. Would it be 6%, which could deliver a smaller but still workable Johnson majority? Or just 3%, which would deliver a strongly hung Parliament and trigger a Tory backbenchers' rebellion that would overthrow Johnson? Or as high as 9%, which would almost duplicate last December's result in seats thanks to the LibDems crashing? Right now the trend is somewhat 5-to-6%-ish, which would be just a wee smitch worse than 2015 for the Conservatives and could easily turn again to being as bad as 2017.

Interestingly, the trend of 'Preferred Prime Minister' polling bears a uncanny resemblance to the voting intentions trends. That is when you factor in all polls and not just the more Starmer-friendly Opinium and YouGov as I disingenuously did last time to make another point. Guess it reflects public opinion's perplexity on where Labour actually stand. Which is what happens when Starmer tries to repaint Labour both as Labour Friends of Likud and the Labour Woke Party simultaneously. Another problem is that Labour are busier rewriting their already rewritten recent history than being a convincing opposition, and it's hard to imagine a winner finally emerging from the War of the Narratives, especially when the next battle is due to happen in court. It's also quite enlightening that even The Guardian can't find a truly positive argument in favour of Sly Keir and are basically reduced to portraying him as something like 'best potential PM by default'. A lot of politicians fit the proverbial 'all bark and no bite' profile, but Sly Keir's problem is that he is neither barky nor bitey enough to make a lasting impression on swing voters. The electorate have become bored with his once much-vaunted forensic CPSish act at PMQs and seeing the same script unfold episode after episode, and he actually comes out as bland in many people's minds. But centrists are genetically engineered to be bland, aren't they? Of course Not-Too-Hardy Keir still has some three years to up his game, unless Boris gets thrown overboard by backbenchers and the next First Minister of England decides to gamble it all on yet another snap election. Which is unlikely to be manna from heaven for Labour. As pretty much every character in every Star Wars movie said at least once, I have a bad feeling about this.

Then you have to wonder why Labour and Starmer are not doing better in the polls, when they face a Government that couldn't even be trusted with making sure the neighbourhood's Tube station's vending machines don't run out of fun-size Crunchie bars. Do people really believe than they wouldn't have done better than Boris over the last eight months, even with massive evidence that nobody could have done worse? Of course writing in The Daily Mail urging English parents to send their kids back to school no matter what doesn't help Keir's credibility, especially one week after he challenged the English Government on their 'back to school no matter what' policy. Critics from the left now have all the ammunition they need to paint Sly Keir as the establishment candidate whose forensic approach to opposition has quickly reached its limits, just as I predicted in a couple of earlier articles. The odd part in this polling is that YouGov, once considered for good reasons to be biased in favour of the Conservatives, are the only one who had Starmer ahead of Johnson in the Preferred PM surveys, and even twice in a row. Most pollsters have Starmer's and Johnson's ratings quite close to their parties' voting intentions, while YouGov and also Opinium have Johnson's ratings significantly below Conservative voting intentions. Another unsolved mystery in the pollsterverse. But of course the main mystery remains why so many voters, especially in England, still rate Johnson higher and fail to see his massive backlog of failure, deception and lies. Or do they actually believe he has a world-beating record? Which he definitely has, just not the way he spins it.

You hurt the ones that I love best and cover up the truth with lies

One day you'll be in the ditch, flies buzzin' around your eyes, blood on your saddle

(Bob Dylan, Idiot Wind, 1974)

© John Wetton, Robert Fripp, Richard Palmer-James, 1974

I know a thing or two about prophecies, they’re bullshit and mind games
Seems to me that they only get dangerous when you actually start believing in them
So if you’ve come to tell me about real things in the real world
Then yes, go on and tell me but if this is more nonsense, I think we’re done here
(Annie Sawyer, Being Human: The Graveyard Shift, 2012)

Since my last article, we have also had a brand new London poll, conducted by Redfield and Wilton on 5-7 August, and a brand new Scottish poll, conducted by YouGov on 6-10 August. Both are disastrous for the Conservatives who would lose 3% of the popular vote and five seats in London, 5% of the popular vote and all their six seats in Scotland. Redfield and Wilton's London poll is quite a relief for Labour, as it shows them in a better position than the only other London poll conducted since the snap election, which had them losing votes and a couple of seats to the Conservatives. Then it is not as spectacular an upset as the seat projection would make you believe, as it shows Labour just back to their December share of the popular vote. The main factor here is the Liberal Democrats gaining back projected votes they had lost in the previous poll. Which benefits them directly and Labour by domino effect as these born-again LibDems obviously come from the Conservative side. Then I guess a lot of people beyond Labour and LibDems ranks would love to see this new poll become reality, as it predicts ultra-right poster boy Iain Duncan Smith would lose his seat, with former ministers Theresa Villiers and Stephen Hammond also going down. All it takes is keeping fingers crossed until the next snap election following Boris Johnson being kicked out by angry backbenchers.

YouGov's Scottish poll also doesn't sound like an upset as it just confirms a trend seen in all polls of Scotland since the last election, and is basically just 2015-on-steroids for the SNP. Even Alistair Carmichael and David Mundell, survivors of the 2015 Yellow Wave, losing their seats is not that much of a surprise as the SNP missed unseating them back then by only 817 and 798 votes respectively. Also bear in mind that the Liberal Democrats suffered a significant setback at the 2019 by-election for the Shetland Holyrood seat, and held it with their majority slashed by almost two thirds. The only seat that still sorethumbishly stands out is Edinburgh South where Ian Murray would survive even with his majority cut by half on this poll's projected results. Of course it's not like Ian is anything like a cockroach that would survive an hydrogen bomb coupled with a massive release of sarin gas. He's more like a Tory-backed-and-funded cockroach who would lose it all if the local Tories decided to have a go at the seat and pulled the rug from under him. So nothing can be ruled out even if most SNP supporters have a hard time believing it could actually happen, and Unionists are definitely in denial about their massive rejection by the Scottish electorate. It's an interesting moment when a journalist from the New Statesman seems to have a better understanding of the workings of Scottish politics than the leaders of the Unionist parties in Scotland, even if he still gets it wrong on some points. Then of course and as usual, the next elections are definitely the SNP's to lose if not the Unionists' to win. Fingers crossed here too then.

But of course even the best polls of London and Scotland tell us little of the direction the UK as a whole are taking, and UK-wide polls paint a much less rosy picture. At the next election, the key to victory will again be in Little England outside London, and Labour still need to up their game to regain lost ground and make inroads into Tory territory down there. The subsamples of voting intentions by English region are large enough to offer a reasonably accurate picture and they oddly show Labour doing rather well in the Tory-dominated South where they could even snatch a few seats thanks to the LibDem vote crumbling down, even if they're still far from the level of support New Labour enjoyed down there in 1997 and 2001. But Labour is still struggling in the North and in the Midlands where the Red Wall is far from being rebuilt, and these not-so-good prospects also extend to North Wales where they could even lose another couple of seats. Not really the best situation for Labour and a warning to Sly Keir that he should stop playing the long game, even if that worked for him in the Labour leadership shambles last year, and start playing the man and not the ball if he really wants to score big against Boris Johnson before Tory backbenchers do his work for him and kick Bozo out to save their sorry arses, once he has Got Brexit Terminally Done and outlived his usefulness as the poster man-child for The Dark Side Of The Yoons.

Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness
(Terry Pratchett, Men At Arms, 1993)

© Michael Houser, 1994

When people say things are a lot more complicated than that,
They mean they're getting worried that they won't like the truth.
(Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum, 1998)

My Poll'O'Polls for today includes the last five GB-wide polls, as Northern Ireland is as usual not covered, fielded between 13 and 21 August with a super-sample of 8,745 and a theoretical 1.05% margin of error. A few days old as there is again a wee lull in polling this week. And it's definitely not good for the Conservatives who are leading by barely 4.5% overall and just 9% in England outside London, where the real battleground is. The interesting part here is that the last poll from YouGov, who were labelled as pro-Tory often in the past, shows the Conservatives leading by only 2%, their worst headline performance in two-and-half months. The previous YouGov poll, which is outside the timeframe of this super-sample, had the Tories leading by 9%, so the most recent poll really says something about changes in the electorate's state of mind. The updated seat projections, whichever model you trust most, are worse for the Conservatives than what we had in early July after a wee Tory bounce, and almost as bad as in June when the Cummings Effect struck. The Williamson Effect in England surely explains a lot, after the downgrading debacle that turned out to be far worse and more badly handled in England than its Scottish counterpart just a few day before. The massive irony here is of course that Gavin Williamson would have avoided the worst of the backlash if he had followed in John Swinney's footsteps and acted more quickly and more decisively. But, Good Heavens! God forbid the English Government take their cues from those Pesky Jock Nats. Perish the thought even if it again proves they're just a swarm of gimboid smegheads who couldn't outwit a used teabag.

Current polling drives us squarely into this twilightish zone where some of the competing projection models say the Conservatives would end up a couple of lettuces short of an allotment, while others say they would bag a wee majority that probably wouldn't survive the first year's by-elections, and melt away faster than a whippet would run with a dynamite stick jammed up where only customs men dare to probe. Which can't be spinned (I like the sound of it better than the grammatically correct 'spun') as an encouraging prospect even by the Cummings Team of data manipulators. The alternate scenarios, based on my model only and reallocating marginal seats one way or the other, are also quite unsatisfactory for the Conservatives. Their best case scenario would be slightly worse than Labour's performance in 2005 and we know it did not end well. Then Labour's best case scenario would be quite a dilemma for Keir Starmer. Would he rather give up his opportunity to become Number Ten's tenant than lending an ear to the SNP's peace offerings and proposal for a minimal confidence and supply agreement to kick the Tories out? Or would he stick to his current position that pandering to English exceptionationalism is a better career choice than accepting the inevitability of Scottish Independence? I guess we already know the sad answer to that as Not-So-Sly Keir would rather listen to Ian Murray than to voices of reason within Labour who don't have to be Scottish to get a better grasp on Scotland's state of mind than the Tory-strutted MP for Morningside Polo Club. But of course if you're hell bent on missing a golden opportunity handed to you on a sliver platter, you have to come up with some stunt to make it look marginally rational. Keir's loss, not ours. 

Labour might want now to capitalise more aggressively on the Government's most obvious weaknesses and not just be content with Starmer's increased name recognition, and that includes shifting from 'constructive criticism' to making a case for alternative policies on all matters where the current English Government has failed and displayed nothing but crass incompetence. You definitely know there's something worth trying here when even The Guardian makes the case for it. Starmer has to hit hard after the now unavoidable Autumn Reshuffle where Gavin Williamson is sure to be sacked and Matt Hancock an extremely likely fatality too, both victims of proven incompetence and failed attempts at blame-shifting. Labour will have a golden opportunity then to stress how shallow the talent pool is when Johnson restricts himself only to Vote Leave yea-sayers, and calling Steve Baker back to the frontbench would look like the zenith of audacity in out-of-the-box thinking. Too bad Boris can't get a two-for-the-price-of-one deal with the ERG now that Private Mark Francois is lethally indisposed. Labour should also capitalise on support coming from unlikely areas like the rural South from Hampshire to Sussex, already up in arms against Johnson's proposed reform of planning laws in England, which will benefit only Tory donors in the real estate business. Strange days indeed when Deep Blue Nimbyism works against Whitehall and, next thing you know, the Countryside Alliance rally their troops against them. Naw, just kidding, but don't rule out Winter of Discontent 2.0 just yet. The seeds have been sown and it would take very little to make a Hundred Flowers bloom....

Who's the more foolish? The fool or the fool who follows him?

(Obi-Wan Kenobi, Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope, 1977)

© Pete Seeger, Joe Hickerson, 1960