Jeremy's Den: July 2021

I am a big believer in human freedom

But you’ve got to remember that the people getting the freedom can be real arseholes

In fact, as soon as you’ve collected a certain number of them together,

And that number is far, far smaller than the current global population,

A large amount of arseholery becomes a copper-bottomed certainty

(David Mitchell, The Guardian, 2021)

The thing that’s supposedly so clever about capitalism is that,

Unlike most other big ideas about how to arrange things,

It doesn’t seek to combat this arseholery

But to harness it for the common good

(David Mitchell, The Guardian, 2021)

Of course The Last Big Thing for anoraks and pundits, if not for the general public, was the Batley and Spen by-election, and I'll come to this on my own time. First, let's rewind to a wee smitch earlier, when some in the Metropolitan media tried to make a Big Thing of the Chesham and Amersham by-election. Well, it wasn't. Of course, the Liberal Democrats gained the seat quite convincingly, but so did they in Brecon and Radnorshire in August 2019, just to lose it back to the Conservatives at the December general election, and just as convincingly. I remember arguing at the time that the Brecon and Radnorshire result was an illusion, and I feel ready to argue the same about Chesham and Amersham. Of course I don't deny the existence of a shaky Blue Wall across the South of England. I have even already argued that the Leafy South has become a danger zone for the Conservatives, because of changes in demographics that have been amplified by the First Great Lockdown. Oddly, the LibDem's success could turn into a victory for the local Conservatives, who oppose Johnson's reform of planning laws, have already succeeded in having it postponed once, and now demand it scrapped once and for all. But there is nothing in recent polls that supports Ed Davey's jubilant claim that the Orange Mallet can take down the Blue Wall, or The Guardian's take that the LibDems could in any way shape Britain's political future. First, the Liberal Democrats have a long history of gaining seats at by-elections and losing them at the next general election. Between 1988 and 2019, they gained 13 seats at by-elections and held only 4 at the general election that followed, a whopping 69% fail rate. Even if you go further back a few years to the SDP-Liberal Alliance, which was quite successful in their early years, it's 24 gains and 8 holds between 1982 and 2019, still a massive 62% fail rate. Then, current polls are not massively good for the LibDems, especially in the South of England, where they are now predicted down 3% on their 2019 result, while Labour would be 7% up and the Greens up 3% up. Not really a massive recovery story, and the trends of voting intentions still show they're below their 2019 result.

The Conservatives' lead in voting intentions polls has been seriously dented, and has dropped to single digit territory, even if it would still deliver a majority. Guess that karma catching up with Door Matt, in a weird way that looks pretty much like nicking Charles Manson over a parking ticket, has had some effect. Then The Saj being appointed Health Secretary for England was generally welcome. It looks like England is still feeling safe in the hands of a Health Secretary who's best talking point is the same as the SNP's, that at least he's not as bad as the other one. And who has links to business and banks with a vested interest in the privatisation of the NHS. Not that Scotland should feel really safer in the hands of one whose first priority is to promote Stonewall's unlawful agenda. We also have had a new Full Scottish poll from Panelbase, to asses changes in the nation's state of mind since the Holyrood election, and whether it's still good enough for the SNP to rely on the "at least, we're not as bad as the other lot" soundbite. It has the SNP down by about 2% on the last pre-election poll, but still high enough to gain a few seats as the Scottish LibDems are still in freefall. The crosstabs of the most recent polls by nation and region definitely support the idea that the LibDems are not benefiting from any surge anywhere. Instead there are strong hints they suffer from tactical voting, mostly towards Labour and partly towards the Greens, and oddly also towards the Conservatives in London. Northern Ireland is not included because there hasn't been any Commons poll there in 18 months, and I wouldn't risk transposing Assembly polls into Commons voting patterns.

But these numbers are not all milk and honey for Labour. They are still below their 2017 vote share everywhere except in South England, and more worryingly below their already lacklustre 2019 vote share in Scotland, Wales and London, and still quite struggling to recover in North England and the Midlands. In wast swathes of England, increased support for the Greens is likely to help the Conservatives by splitting the opposition vote, even in places where you least expect the Greens to score high, like in the post-industrial North. Which will of course help keeping the now proverbial Blue Wall standing, that runs uninterrupted from estuary to estuary from Severn Beach to King's Lynn. Dislike for Boris Johnson might be enough for a runaway by-election victory, but it certainly is not a reliable general election strategy. John Bercow defecting to Labour might not be much of a game changer either, as nobody expects him to stand for Commons ever again. Though he could be persuaded to accept a red ermine, if Keir Starmer asks nicely. It could be a different story if Dominic Grieve defected to the LibDems, as has been rumoured, and stood at the next available by-election anywhere south of the Blue Wall. Grieve was the de facto LibDem candidate already in Beaconsfield in 2019 and did quite well, considering the context. So he might very well prevail in a slightly lighter blue constituency, and without the whole Tory electoral machine out to get his head on a pike. Just for fun, one last wee smitch of useless trivia about by-elections, to further debunk all the fledgling Chesham and Amersham myths. From 1979 to 2019, there have been 65 by-elections where the governing party of the time, Conservatives or Labour, was the incumbent. And they held the seat in 31 of these, a 48% hit rate. So a by-election loss is not such a big deal when you have slightly better than even odds of it happening, is it?

This explains why capitalism irritates many people of generally ideological dispositions

Those who have grappled with the issue of human arseholery

And sought ways to reduce or prevent it

To them, a system that harnesses and rewards such shittiness

Is a shameful capitulation in all of our civilising aims

(David Mitchell, The Guardian, 2021)

I swear to God, it's like intelligence is going backwards, we're in reverse

If it's not the Moon landings or 9/11, it's, I don't know, the Loch Ness monster

The human race is getting more stupid right in front of our eyes

(Daniel Lyons, Years And Years: Episode One, 2019)

Right now, the greatest threat to Boris Johnson is coming from Blue Wall Tories, not the oppositions. And they will achieve nothing as long as public opinion remains supportive of the First Minister of England. The sad truth is that Boris is probably right in thinking that time is on his side, and he can outmanoeuvre his backbenchers. Now some of this may be derailed by Matt Hancock's resignasacking, which Boris managed to fuck up, as he always does when faced with a challenging problem. He obviously thought that it would go away, as these things tend to do since David Cameron's days in office. Then came this absofucking hilarious moment when Bozo claimed credit for something he hadn't done, and thought he would never have to do. Because the lad who got away with Arcuri obviously thought even a dimwit could get away with Coladangelo. So now, England has an Ayn Rand fanboy as their Health Secretary, who will probably not make things any better for them. Only upside is that he won't try and impose an illegal Stonewall-dictated pledge on NHS England's staff. And bets are open on which part he will sell to private interests first. My best educated guess is that safeguards on medicines procurement will go first, and then he will open the market to private health insurance to cover the massive extra costs for the patients. England can't say they haven't been warned. But Boris is still way ahead of Keir Starmer in the Preferred Prime Minister polling. His recent drop in support has only delivered more undecideds, mostly from the center of the political spectrum, not more support for Keir. More worrying for Keir is that Bozo's support still pretty much matches Conservative voting intentions, while his own is below Labour's and dropping.

At the end of June, Boris had what he probably thought was a genius idea to pander to the English Nationalist component of the Tory electorate: the mandatory "One Britain, One Nation" celebration in schools, which is wrong from so many angles I don't even know where to start. First level of flabbergastment is that Gavin Williamson was stupid, incompetent or arrogant enough, or all of the above, to think he could do that and get away with it, without anyone telling him to fuck off and eat sprouts. Level two is that this lad, who wouldn't win the competition for the smartest person on Love Island, thought he could imply the "One England" day also applied in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. The Welsh Government wasted no time reminding him his remit is England only, and has been so for more than twenty years. Moot point actually as he couldn't even be arsed to check when schools closed in the devolved nations, and most Scottish kids were already gone for hols anyway. Mind you though, Private Gavin throwing himself into this mess, with all the grace of a seagull flying into a patio window, might indeed pay dividends with that part of the electorate who love nothing more than made-up culture wars coming out of the darkest blue. And it also quite conveniently pushed back the privatisation of Channel 4 into the shadows, when it is a bigger issue that a shite song promoted by plonkers. But even jingoism, scandals, little lies and big fuckups have limited impact so far on voting intentions, as shown by the current snapshot of the most recent polls.

This is the weighted average of the last four polls, fielded between 9 and 13 July by four different pollsters, so that house effects likely cancel each other out. Super-sample size is 7,313 with a 1.15% theoretical margin of error. We have the Tories still almost 9% ahead, and don't think for one second the disgraceful vote to cut down foreign aid will change that. A recent poll showed that 61% of British voters support the cuts, and they have 82% backing among Conservative voters, so it is actually a vote winner, whether you like it or not. The English Government might in fact suffer more backlash from its inept handling of the racist abuse directed at some of their own footballers, and from the First Minister of England cancelling the party at Number Ten for the England team. Because we live in a world where PR disasters, that will mostly be forgotten in a few months, matter more than being on the wrong side of history again and again. But the political landscape might change again pretty quickly now, and not in the way the Tories would like. The Next Big Thing is of course the predictable and predicted trainwreck that will be Boris Johnson's Freedom Doomsday. The English Government's experts are already taking flak for lending authority to an irresponsible strategy, and you can expect the worst is still to come, like when "herd immunity through mass infection" becomes reality. With that in mind, it's hard to believe that Scotland's "Level 0 2.0" is the right strategy, but the SNP can still shift the blame to Rishi Sunak and the English Treasury phasing out Covid-related support schemes, that the Scottish Government can't afford to extend without injections of Barnett consequentials. But they can also expect some backlash if things go tits up before the end of summer, which they undoubtedly will. Just watch this space in the coming weeks.

It's like we went too far, we imagined too much

We sent all those probes into space and we went to the very edge of the solar system

Built the Hadron Collider and the internet

We painted all those paintings and wrote all those great songs

And then, pop! Whatever we had, we punctured it and now it's all collapsing

Well, nothing we can do, our brains are devolving

(Stephen Lyons, Years And Years: Episode One, 2019)

Things were OK a few years ago, before 2008

We used to think politics was boring, those were the days

But now, I worry about everything, I don't know what to worry about first

Never mind the government, it's the sodding banks, they terrify me

And it's not even them, it's the companies, the brands, the corporations

They treat us like algorithms while they go around poisoning the air

And the temperature and the rain, and don't even start me on ISIS

(Daniel Lyons, Years And Years: Episode One, 2019)

If I was Keir Starmer, I would definitely change spads, or at least fire the one who came up with the genius idea of borrowing Hillary Clinton's campaign slogan from 2016, two weeks before the Batley and Spen by-election. The one that looked so unpredictable that Wee Wokowen Jones felt he had to explain us that, whatever happened, he had predicted it, while getting Kim Leadbeater's name wrong once out of three mentions. Or has Sly Keir already fired the lousy spads in the last but one of many reshuffles of his Ninth Circle, or in the last (so far) one? Never mind, and now let's deal with Batley and Spen, and how the result is a game-changer, or most likely isn't. In the last days before the by-election, like many in the press, and the whole cast of Star Wars at one point or another, I had a bad feeling about this. Not helped by The Guardian making the case that Labour losing it would be a win, and holding it would be a defeat, or something. Or the happily anonymous "senior Labour figures" predicting on Election Eve that their party would lose it. For a start, here is Batley and Spen's electoral history since it was created for the 1983 general election. Two "independents" at the 2016 by-election, that followed Jo Cox's murder, had stood for the Greens and UKIP at council elections, so I allocated their votes to their actual parties. Likewise, the Heavy Woolen District candidate in 2019 was a prominent UKIP figure locally, so I allocated his votes to UKIP for more clarity about the vote changes at the by-election.

First of all, Labour always did pretty well there in the past, even when they lost. It's certainly fair to say the SDP cost them the seat twice in 1983 and 1987, and so did the LibDems in 1992. There was also a not insignificant far-right vote there in the past, even at the 2016 by-election, after Jo Cox's brutal murder by a far-right activist. There is no doubt too than this year's campaign has been highly toxic and divisive, and George Galloway should be held to account for most of the toxicity. Making it a referendum on Keir Starmer, as Catman, Diane Abbott and Owen Jones did, didn't help either and obviously muddied the waters even more than they already were. Of course, the anti-Starmer mantra was always an attempt at a self-fulfilling prophecy, and not really thought through when you consider the alternative is Andy Burnham or Yvette Cooper, neither of whom I see as a general election winner. Then it was quite fun to see all the poundshop prophets proved wrong and backpedaling faster than George Galloway ran oot of Scotland on 7 May. Catman's new humiliation was also a welcome sight, and I confess I would have been mightily miffed if he had succeeded and handed the seat to the Tories. Another interesting point is that the social-liberal Yorkshire Party totally failed to duplicate their unprecedented performance at the West Yorkshire mayoral election. There was certainly tactical voting for Labour here, which is a good thing as they can't now be blamed for Labour losing an iconic seat. Labour can also consider themselves lucky that Matt Hancock's office shag and sackignation happened just days before the election, or else the Conservatives would probably have bagged the 324 votes they needed to defeat Kim Leadbeater. "When in doubt, blame Door Shagger Matt" might be an easily found mantra for disgruntled Tories, but that does not make it wrong. Let's see the bigger picture now, with the results of the latest by-elections compared to what happened in the same constituencies in 2017 and 2019.

Now is there a generic lesson to be learned from the four by-elections that were held during the current term? Methinks not, unlike the couch spads at The Guardian. Everything points to vastly different patterns at work, and each of them being asymptomatic of any real national trend. Of course, you could argue that the ruling party gained a seat at a by-election only twice in twenty years, between 1979 and 2019. And now it has come within 323 votes of happening twice in two months. Which of course happened only because Yorkshire voters wanted to piss off Owen Jones, and make his self-unfulfilling prophecies fall flat on their belly. But Keir Starmer would be wrong to take such a close shave as a ringing endorsement. It's not even close. The only thing Keir has right is that it is a start, but not even him can claim the end in is sight. It will take much more than a narrowly avoided trainwreck to make Labour really attractive for the 2.6 million voters they lost between 2017 and 2019, and the one million they need on top of that to win the next election.

Now we've got America

Never thought I'd be scared of America in a million years

But we've got fake news and false facts

And I don't even know what's true anymore

What sort of world are we in? If it's this bad now,

What's it going to be like in 30 years' time, 10 years, 5 years?

(Daniel Lyons, Years And Years: Episode One, 2019)

We're not stupid, we're not poor, we're not lacking

I'm sorry but we're clever, we could think of something, surely

I'm saying the system is stupid, do you know the people that designed Brexit?

For God's sake, don't tell me we can't outthink them

(Daniel Lyons, Years And Years: Episode Four, 2019)

It's interesting to see so many people ranting about the Red Wall since the last election, as if it had just come tumbling down in front of them. The last time the Red Wall actually stood uninterrupted from coast to coast, from Rhyl to Cleethorpes, was in 2005. Already in 2010, it was holed at several places in the Midlands and in Humberside. The elections that followed just widened the gaps and made it thinner than ever. Is there a foolproof strategy that would deliver a real comeback for Labour? I'm not sure, as some of the avenues they could and should explore are contradictory. A lot has been said after Batley and Spen, about Labour losing the Muslim vote, and I'm not convinced this is the only explanation to Labour's woes. Probably because I'm biased towards class politics and against identity politics. Let's say Labour take a step back and look at the bigger picture, and they will see that their problem is with the working class. The white working class who switched to the Brexit Party, and then came home to the Conservatives in Hartlepool. The Asian working class who felt better understood by George Galloway in Batley and Spen. Both of which were dead ends in terms of class interests, and fortunately there aren't 200 Galloways around to challenge Labour in every constituency. I'm quite convinced that Labour would fare better in polls if they stopped thinking intersectional and again thought global. Which means Starmer should stop mimicking Blair's strategy of triangulation, and that is probably going against his deepest instincts. It also means Keir has to own his mistakes, dropping his well rehearsed two-edged bananas of bullshit, like blaming the farts on the dug, the socialist one, that is.

Current polls still say that the Conservatives would win the next election, whenever it happens. Which will probably not be in 2023, as some in Labour seem to think, but in 2022 while Johnson still thinks he can outfox Starmer. After all, a 60ish-seat majority, as current polls predict, would still be better than what David Cameron got in 2015. If Johnson can be convinced he would get that even without the next round of gerrymandering, I'm quite sure he would gamble it. When fed with the same rolling average of polls, the other projection models available online come pretty close to what I have. As I have already mentioned, this is far from an exact science and differences are to be expected, whatever the source material. Most of them depend on how much you rely on basic uniform national swing, or allow a degree of proportional swing or more sophisticated tweaks in the algorithms. Factoring in the national and regional crosstabs, as I do, also helps catching the mood of some local specifics you unavoidably miss with uniform swing. But in the end a lot of the local variations tend to cancel each other out, and there is some pattern of regression to the mean when you look at the full picture. Which is quite fortunate for the punditariat, as they would definitely be up the loch without a paddle, if different models delivered wildly different results.

The projected breakdown of seats by meta-region hints at quite a number of upsets, and not all of them are good news for Labour. The situation in North England is a mixed bag as Labour are projected to gain back three seats in Yorkshire (Dewsbury, Keighley, Pudsey), which supports the idea that Batley and Spen was not a one-off miracle, but fits with a more widespread Labour recovery in the region. But Labour is also projected to lose three more seats in the North West (Oldham East and Saddleworth, Warrington North, Weaver Vale) and one in the North East (Wansbeck). The Conservatives would also unseat former LibDem leader Tim Farron in Westmoreland and Lonsdale. Then Labour would gain back two seats in the Midlands (Gedling, High Peak), but a higher Green vote share would make both really too close for comfort, as it also says that the Red Wall is still not really growing back in that corner of England. Finally, the most interesting results would come from South England, where the Conservatives are projected to lose fifteen seats to Labour and one (South Cambridgeshire) to the Liberal Democrats, while Labour would lose Bristol West to the Greens. Interestingly, the Tory losses are far from matching the "Shifting Suburbia" pattern, that some though they conclusively saw in Chesham and Amersham. Which, by the way, the LibDems are projected to lose back to the Tories on current polling. No surprise here. Projected Labour gains would in fact stretch from Norfolk (Norwich North) to Cornwall (Truro and Falmouth), and only aboot half can be considered within the Greater London Commuter Belt. No major current government figures are in real danger, though Labour would unseat Chloe Smith in Norwich North and Alok Sharma in Reading West. Plus Brexiteer covidiot Steve Baker in Wycombe, which is like the karmatic icing on the cake here.

Labour obviously have a lot more work to do before the cows come home to roost, even if the current English Government walks and quacks like a headless chicken thrown off a cliff with a lit firework up its arse. I'm not saying I would welcome a Labour government in London, though probably I am saying just that, and I would welcome it. We must come to terms with the idea that there will not be a second Independence referendum as long as Nicola Sturgeon and Boris Johnson are both in charge, and any argument to the contrary is pure delusion. So Scotland's best chance might be Kate Forbes becoming First Minister of Scotland before 2026, or else my tenner is on the SNP losing their bid for a fifth term. Which are the two ways to hit the reset button, one by going up and one by going down, and Kate as FM is definitely my preferred option. A Labour government in London can be part of the general reset, as they would certainly be lither than the Conservatives and more open to the infamously proverbial Section 30 Order. All we need is Labour bagging 297 seats or more in England and Wales, because that's what they would need for a majority on the post-2023 boundaries and with Scotland gone. Seems far-fetched right now but it's far from impossible. The actual threshold is even lower than that, somewhere aboot 285ish, if you factor in Plaid Cymru, the Greens and the LibDems supporting a minority Labour government to get rid of the Tories. Labour actually came very close to this in December 2020 polls, then Boris rolled out the barrels of Oxford Jags and the rest in history.

Do you know what it's like inside the Government? Fucking chaos!

They never expected to get in, they're idiots, mate, and there's no plan

There's nothing, just panic, which is perfect for me, because I clean up their shit

Charge them a fortune! I'm laughing!

(Woody Woodward, Years And Years: Episode Five, 2019)

Personally I think the public are more stoic than we're being told

As Victoria Wood once said, the British would only have a revolution

If they changed the laws on caravanning

(Vivienne Rook, Years And Years: Episode Five, 2019)

I don't know if you paid attention to it, but there were elections in France last month, for their regional and departmental councils (there's no English Wiki for the latter). Which is not what I want to discuss, as I guess you couldn't care less, despite some patterns there that could be duplicated in the UK, but never mind. My point is that France uses a partly proportional system in regional and municipal elections, with different systems to the ones I discussed earlier. In both cases, the first party first receives a "majority bonus", though in most cases it would be more appropriately called a "plurality bonus", and the rest of the seats are allocated on PR using the D'Hondt method. For the regional elections, the bonus is 25% of the seats and 75% are allocated on PR. For the municipal elections, in towns and cities with a population above 1,000, the bonus is 50% and 50% are allocated on PR. So let's see what the 2019 election would have delivered on four French-inspired options: 25% bonus allocated at national/regional level, 25% bonus allocated at UK level, 50% bonus allocated at national/regional level, 50% bonus allocated at UK level, with the PR seats in all cases allocated at national/regional level. Of course the UK-wide bonus hugely favours the Conservatives, as it moves seats from Labour, the DUP and the SNP to the Conservatives. Which is why the second and fourth options are totally unrealistic, but the first and third clearly deserve some more attention. In both cases the Conservatives and the SNP are clearly hurt more by the change of rules, as they massively benefit for FPTP. But, quite counter-intuitively, so does Sinn Féin as FPTP favours the two main players in Northern Ireland, them and the DUP. A bonus system would tilt that towards the DUP as long as they remain the first party, which might not be a done deal right now, but that's another story. The Liberal Democrats would benefit only from the PR component of the system, and Labour would benefit from both sides, as they did end up as the first party in Wales, London, North East England and North West England, which together carry a 55-seat bonus in the 25% option and a 110-seat bonus in the 50% option.

Of course, there is no way any party would ever propose a "majority bonus" system with all the bonus seats allocated at UK level. Best reason for this is that the overall winner at any election will be an English party as long as the UK exists, so a UK-wide bonus would actually decrease the representation of Scotland and Northern Ireland in all plausible election outcomes, and also Wales's representation at every election won by the Conservatives. But a "majority bonus" system implemented by nation and region might find some support, mostly I suppose within Labour, as they would be the main beneficiaries of both options. Now these are systems that open the way for coalitions after the election. Obviously a Conservative Coalition would not include the DUP, after the omnishambolic way the Tories handled Northern Ireland's post-Brexit status. But I count the UUP in, as they have been the Conservative Branch Office in Northern Ireland for generations, and still had a pact with them ten-ish years ago. And I also include Reform UK in it as they basically have the same manifesto as the libertarian nationalist Tories. Labour would have the choice of two options. One would be a Rainbow Max Coalition including everyone from the Greens to the Liberal Democrats. Of course, that would walk and quack more like a Pronounist Alliance than the true Progressive Alliance some still dream of, but never mind. Or Labour might choose to stick to the Bain Principle, and go for a Rainbow Min Coalition, that would not include the SNP. Neither would have been a threat to the Tories with FPTP, but there are some interesting situations with a "majority bonus" system.

The most interesting situation would be with a regional 25% "majority bonus", as the Rainbow Max Coalition would outnumber the Conservative Coalition, and be only two seats shy of a majority. Which would not work with the SNP out, though a Tory minority government might still be repeatedly defeated in Commons. With a regional 50% "majority bonus", the Conservative Coalition would indeed get a majority, even if it would be just a knife-edge one. A result which actually depends on just one region: Yorkshire and the Humber. It is the only region where Labour bagged a majority of seats in 2019 while losing the popular vote to the Conservatives, by 4.2% or 107,589 votes. It is also the region where the Conservatives' lead was the smallest. If Labour had won the popular vote there, it would have moved 3 to 7 seats their way at the 2019 election, far from enough to defeat the Conservatives. But in this scenario, 27 bonus seats would shift from Blue to Red, thus giving the Rainbow Max Coalition a 40-seat majority. Even a Rainbow Min Coalition would then come within shooting range of the Conservative Coalition, 295 seats to 298. Of course, nothing of this will ever happen, as the anti-FPTP campaigners are stuck on just one option: full PR. But it would be a much more interesting and enlightening debate if other options were on the table. And I'm sure even the most vocal supporters of PR would find merit with other systems, if only they gave it an honest second thought. Then I have a hunch this might be asking too much. Their loss, not mine.

The world keeps getting hotter and faster and madder, and we don't pause

We don't think, we don't learn, we just keep racing to the next disaster

And I keep wondering what's next?

Where are we going? When is it ever going to stop?

(Edith Lyons, Years And Years: Episode Two, 2019)

Jeremy's Den

17/07/2021

Sympathy For The Lesser Evil

Welcome To Their Nightmares