Jeremy's Den: Anarchy In The Police State

The average IQ in the UK is just 102

Although that does increase when Joey Essex goes away on holiday

(Jimmy Carr, 8 Out Of 10 Cats Does Countdown, 2014)

What’s the point of bring intelligent? I’m not and I’ve done awright

(Joey Essex, 8 Out Of 10 Cats, 2015)

Say what you will about the First Minister of England but he's an expert at PR stunts, legerdemains and squirrels. which he has liberally used all along his career, and also welcomed those that were gifted him on a silver platter. But Oor Boris also knows when to bring down the wrecking ball on the remnants of British democracy. When there's a world beating vaccine rollout granting you record approval, though sometimes, as MacMillan warned, "the events" will come in your way and make you look less grand. Surely there's no better moment to debate the Police State Bill than the day after an out of control police mob waited until one of Royal Family Ltd. had had her photo op, and then brutally manhandled grieving women while trampling underfoot flowers brought to a peaceful vigil, or is there? But never mind. I'm quite sure there are a shitload of shitwanks Doon Sooth who will never say it aloud, but think: "They asked for it, they were breaking Covid regulations after all". Just don't mention the Covidiot March one week later that never had a copper near them because, ye ken, "they're fighting for our freedoms". And the same Leafy Southerners will agree with the Police State Bill because, ye ken, we can't have those pesky wummin, darkies and underage wokos on our streets all the time, can we? And fuck the fucking Travellers too. They should know their fucking place and just stop travelling, we don't go roaming the roads of Ireland all year round, do we? That's just common sense, innit? And only criminals have anything to fear, haven't they? And that's why Boris Johnson's ratings in the Preferred Prime Minister polling are skyrocketing to Covid Honeymoon levels, while Keir Starmer's are crashlanding.

The interesting part about the vote on the Police State Bill's second reading, and that few people may have noticed, is that the DUP sat it out. And if something is too extreme for the DUP to support, that says a lot, doesn't it? Another embarrassing point here is surely that a lot of Johnson's success has to do with overage overweight Leave voters thinking "Holy shitballs, we'll soon be back to the sunlit uplands of Benidorm where we can boak in the streets and piss on the beaches, but always in a Churchillian way, after hacking the neighbour's iPlayer to watch the reruns of 'Fawlty Towers' because there's no way we will pay the fucking licence fee to the fucking lefty woke BBC, and pretend we don't understand a word the fucking natives say, which is actually true as we could never be arsed to learn the fucking language". A proud example of true Englishness making "progress along the road to freedom", as Boris put it just after leading the UK up the garden path to submission. Of course the First Minister of England is still the same brand of mendacious plonker and finagler he was a year ago, but he's got such a herd of lumpsuckers in his wake that it doesn't affect his ratings. And getting his jag of the Oxford vaccine, with the added glee of flipping the EU bureaucrats the bird, did wonders to improve his public image well outwith the reaches of Middle England.

Regional crosstabs from the most recent polls also show that the Tories are giving Labour a run for their money in the North and Midlands. One pollster has even surveyed a selected list of 45 Red-To-Blue Wall seats twice and the results are devastating for Labour. In November 2020 they found a massive swing from the Tories to Labour, predicting 36 out of 45 seats would turn red again. Then in March 2021 they found a strong swing back to the Tories, leaving Labour with no more than a handful of possible gains across the area. Obviously there is still a long way to go before La Reconquista Del Norte works. Part of that may be the old geezers who have got their two AstraZeneca jags and not died of thrombosis, or it might just be Keir Starmer misreading the Northern electorate, just as he misreads Scotland. I guess Sir Keir KCB QC would be within his comfort zone in Marchmont but probably outwith it in The Calders, though probably not as much as in Croydon. Quite surprisingly, the situation is not that good for Labour in Keir's own backyard, even with polls predicting that Sadiq Khan might well be the first Mayor of Labourgravia elected on the first round. But the parliamentary polls are far less satisfying. The Liberal Democrats have been leaking votes from both ends to the Conservatives and Greens over the last two months, which will not only cost them the usually hard-fought Richmond Park, but might also make things tricky for Labour both in the heart of the City and in some of the marginal Auld Middlesex seats. Polls of Wales are quite bad too, with YouGov's last predicting Labour and Conservatives tied on 35% and Plaid Cymru nearly doubling their share on 17%. Which means Labour could lose up to three seats and Plaid Cymru could gain two for an all-time high of six. And the general trends of general election polling just confirm all isn't going smoothly for Labour.

You just have to wonder how Sly Keir would have fared in a normal environment. Like one where Covid never reached the White Cliffs Of Dover, and all of Johnson's record was abject cronyism and mismanagement of taxpayers' dosh. Would Keir have been just Kinnock 2.0 or already Blair 2.0? There's no doubt in my mind than Blair is his role model, but a year on from becoming Leader Of The Opposition, he's not even doing remotely as well as Kinnock. The Hartlepool by-election will be something of a litmus test but I would not hold my breath, as Labour seem to have forgotten that their core target here is Andy Capp and not Owen Jones' wee kid brother. Hartlepool is obviously a dilemma.for New New Labour spads. The one sure way to win it is to snatch more of the 2019 Brexit Party voters than the Conservatives, because there's not a lot of woko students up there, is there? But Labour pandering to Leave voters might lose a significant number to the Northern Independence Party, who challenge them from the left. From a Corbynist perspective, shall we say? The first poll of Hartlepool, though having just a weeish sample and with no background to accurately assess its reliability, definitely looks like Labour's worst nightmare: another historic heartland seat lost. Now, on the quadrinational level, the real benchmark for Sly Keir is Blair's 2005 performance, which was 356 seats. Or 316 without the Scottish seats that will never come back, and would still put Keir in the best position to form a minority government. Even better with case-by-case support from other parties that are not based in Scotland, that lovely arrangement called "confidence and supply" that James Callaghan used, though it did not end well. In that dream timeline, Starmer could be close to Blair 2.0, though he might have to content himself with being just kind of Blair 1.5. But in the real world, you now have the social-liberal Guardian joking that Keir could be no better than José Mourinho 2.0. Holy shitballs, that hurt.

I don’t like people who buy council houses and put them lions up

(Johnny Vegas, 8 Out Of 10 Cats Does Countdown, 2015)

You’ve got to reach for the stars, and you might just touch up a cloud

(Jon Richardson, 8 Out Of 10 Cats Does Countdown, 2015)

The impact of Sly Keir's ratings on Labour's electoral performance is also made painfully obvious by YouGov's latest "Leaders' favourability" poll, which they mercilessly dubbed "Keir Starmer Performance poll". Starmer scores a dismally dire -11% net rating with the general population and a smallish +26% with Labour voters. While Boris Johnson scores -1% with the general population and +64% with Conservative voters. More worrying when facing a possible snap election that nobody except himself has mentioned, is that Keir is less popular than Boris all over England except in London. And even in London, Keir scores just a measly +1%, while Boris scores a more satisfying +12% in the Leafy Blue South. Keir's only consolation could be that he is more popular than Boris in Scotland, inasmuch as a net -9% is actually better than -44%. And it certainly won't help Labour in any election North Of The Wall, when the same poll has Nicola Sturgeon scoring a net +17% with Scottish voters. But of course England is much more of a problem for Labour than Scotland, as current polling shows they still haven't fully recovered Doon Sooth. The aggregate predictions for the three English meta-regions, factoring in the regional crosstabs published by the various pollsters, also show that Labour has recovered more significantly in the South than in the North and Midlands, and quite suprisingly even beyond their 2017 result. One of challenges for Labour is that the Reform UK vote, or Brexit Party as it used to be known, has not fallen as sharply in the North as in other regions. And what little they have lost seems to have migrated fully to the Conservatives. And this is exactly the pattern that spells doom for Labour in Hartlepool.

My current Poll'O'Polls shows how far from an electoral victory Labour are. It's made up of just the last three polls, conducted between 8 and 12 April. Super-sample size is 5,614 with a theoretical margin of error of 1.3%. With Labour 8% behind GB-wide, it's the worst prediction since the days of Johnson's Pandemic Honeymoon eleven months ago. Which was cut short by Dominic Cummings' infamous trip to Barnard Castle. But nothing similar is looming on the horizon right now, with national mourning and all the sycophantic media banter around it providing adequate cover-up for the most embarrassing news. Right now the weighted average says the Conservatives are roughly on the same vote share as in 2019, as these are GB-wide polls that must be compared to the GB-wide results, not the UK-wide ones, with Labour only 3.3% up. This places the Conservatives in a slightly better position than in 2015, the last general election that was held at the scheduled date. We also have the Liberal Democrats massively underperforming on their 2019 result, that had been kind of a wee comeback after being punished for the Coalition twice in 2015 and 2017. But now they're predicted to do worse than at both these elections. Which is not good news for Labour as the lost LibDem voters have switched to the Conservatives in Wales, but also to the Greens and various minor parties and independents in most of England. And Sly Keir has yet to find a convincing way to lure some of them to Labour. This looks like just another iteration of the already seen paradox of some English LibDems fancying themselves more progressive than Labour and changing their vote accordingly, no matter how much of born-again Blairites New New Labour want to rebrand themselves.

I expect some lull in polling for the rest of the week, as all headlines for the duration of the mandatory national mourning have already been reserved for celebrations of Philip Mountbatten on a loop, except The Guardian who are not necessarily the most effective of Starmer's supporters. I guess this will be serendipitously good news for Team Bozo, as outbursts of English nationalism and rallying around the Crown rarely benefit the left. Unless of course being force-fed young Phil, old Phil and cold Phil by the BBC and ITV sorely backfires, but so far it has backfired only against the broadcasters, not the English government that orchestrated it all. Then I can easily picture the swarm of spads in the basement at Conservative HQ, coming up with the best ways of making political gains out of Phil's death. Without even having to actually campaign, as pandering to the deep-running currents of cap-doffing English exceptionalism will obviously be more awkward for Labour, no matter how hard they try, and Keir might be a wee smitch clumsy at handling the pump and circumstance. Just witness the reactions to his comments about "faith in the monarchy" and "the people's love for Prince Philip". Alleged, that is. And now there's a pile on against Keir, with even Wee Owen Jones doing his best to prove David Tennant right, when he commented on "Have I Got News For You" that Sly Keir "successfully brought the party together in thinking that he's not doing a very good job". Holy shitballs, that hurt again. Or not, if you consider it's just Backstabbing Wokowen channeling his inner backstabber again, after performing the same stunt on Jeremy Corbyn. Which does not mean that Keir should feel better about it, does it?

You don’t bury hatchets... only in someone’s head

(Jon Richardson, 8 Out Of 10 Cats Does Countdown, 2015)

Faith is nourishment, but only porridge has slow-release carbohydrates

(Jon Richardson, 8 Out Of 10 Cats Does Countdown, 2015)

As you might expect, the seat projection from the most recent batch of polls is quite dismally dire for Labour. Here I used the patterns of my Poll'O'Polls only for the English seats outside London. We also have recent polls of London, Wales and Scotland which I used to fill in the blanks. So the overall picture is a wee smitch different from what you would get from a simulation on uniform national swing using the Poll'O'Polls' weighted averages. But not by much, and the current projection from Electoral Calculus is actually pretty much the same, give or take a couple. In case you wonder, the two 'Others' here would be an environmentalist independent in East Devon and the Ashfield Independents in Ashfield, Nottinghamshire. The latter walk and quack like closet LibDems, but have actually attracted a large swath of former Labour voters at the 2019 election, turning it into a massive double-whammy humiliation for Labour. Not only did they lose the seat, that they had held since 1918 in two successive incarnations, except for a brief period in 1977-1979 after a by-election. But they also ended up third after losing almost 10k votes to the Ashfield Independents. And the next election could also bring some more upsetting results for Labour, as the projection looks definitely 2015ish, not really what Labour should be aiming for these days. This result would in fact be better for the Conservatives than 2015. After that election, David Cameron and then Theresa May had a 15-seat working majority. The current projection means that Boris Johnson would start his second term with a 35-seat majority. All he has to do then is stay put for five years and avoid another snap election, as those can deliver unpredictable results that even John Curtice wouldn't foresee.

The main point here is that the seat projections in the three meta-regions of England confirm what the predicted vote shares imply. Labour are still not back up to their 2017 results in the North and Midlands, and even further from the 2005 benchmark results that would propel Not-So-Hardy Keir to Number Ten. There are strong hints that the Red-To-Blue-Back-To-Red patterns Labour expected in the North have actually turned out to be more like Red-To-Turquoise-To-Blue, with the Brexit Party vote providing an oven-ready decompression chamber to the Tory vote. And Labour being halfway to their 2017 result in the Midlands can't hide the sobering fact that the Conservatives still bag an outright majority of the popular vote there. But of course the biggest sensation here is Labour's result in the South, where they would not just surpass their 2017 result, but be halfway to their 2005 result. This thanks to regional crosstabs predicting a 6% swing from the Conservatives to Labour there, three times the GB-wide average. The most likely explanation is a significant change in demographics, which YouGov already foresaw in 2018. It certainly helped already at the 2019 election, when Labour's decline had far less impact in the South than in the other regions on their number of seats. There is also circumstantial evidence of this in the projection saying that half of Labour's gains in the South, or a quarter of their gains in England, would be in the South East, the region closest to London. Since then, it has certainly been accelerated by the effects of the First Great Lockdown, especially working from home making living close to work far less attractive, and housing costs within London. Labour would thusly gain 14 seats all over the Leafy South, half their overall gains in England, with some big fish going down: Robert Buckland, Alok Sharma, Chloe Smith and Brexiteer Covidiot-In-Chief Steve Baker. This last one is probably the most remarkable as Baker currently represents Wycombe, an historic seat that has existed since the Model Parliament of 1295, and has been previously held by Labour for only six years in 1945-1951. Two of the other predicted gains (Filton and Bradley Stoke, Truro and Falmouth) exist only since 2010, have never been held by Labour, and don't even have an exact predecessor seat that was ever held by Labour.

Labour would be on more familiar territory in their eleven other Southern gains, all of which they held during most or all of the Blair years, and lost in 2005 or 2010, with only Southampton Itchen remaining in their hands until 2015. Three of these eleven (Ipswich, Peterborough, Stroud) also turned red again briefly between 2017 and 2019. So I definitely think we should have a closer look at the South, and especially the South East, when the next batch of polls are delivered. To try and guess if the major road to Labour's recovery isn't down there rather than in the historic heartlands, which would be quite a turning point in English electoral history. Then on 7 May this year, the eyes of the punditariat will not be trained on the English Councils and probably not even on Scotland, mostly because the results won't be there already, which probably won't prevent some from commenting on them anyway. But the focal point will be Hartlepool, where the by-election will obviously be scrutinised and dissected from all possible angles. Labour HQ belatedly casting doubt on the one poll we have so far does not make it more or less valid. But prevailing trends both GB-wide and specifically in the North East lend some credibility to it. And Labour HQ are obviously worried enough to send a flock of big guns there, though that might not be the miracle cure they hope it can be. The only certainty is that, whatever happens there on 6 May, the media will make a national event of it. They probably already have two versions of their post-mortem: one explaining why losing the seat is a personal disaster for Keir Starmer, and one explaining why holding it is a massive success for the local party. Never mind the bollocks. And before we move back to Scotland for my next article, let's enjoy again David Tennant's Saltire Moment on "Have I Got News For You", joyfully giving all obsessive EngNat flagshaggers the finger. Be seeing you soon.

Don’t confuse us with the American Dream, this is the UK

You work hard here, but you don’t prosper

(Peter Boyd, Waking The Dead: Pieta, 2008)

Jeremy's Den

14/04/2021

Anarchy In The Police State

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