Jeremy's Den: Is This The Life You Really Want?

I don’t know why but there’s a whole Twitter generation

Of people who just hang around waiting to be offended

(Robbie Coltrane)

I finally realised the future isn't actually on its way

In truth, it's already arrived

(DCI John Barnaby, Midsomer Murders: Last Man Out, 2017)

The British electorate, and the English part of it mostly, are truly strange beasts. They easily forget that fate is not in the stars, but in the choices we make. Which might explain why their choices are volatile and inconsistent over only a short period of time. After the Tory Sleaze shitstorm hit the fans, Conservative voting intentions dropped significantly, until one poll had Labour leading by 6% in the popular vote and predicted to bag 310ish seats. Then the following batch sent a mixed message with four polls predicting Labour ahead by a smallish margin, three predicting the Conservatives ahead by an equally smallish margin, and two predicting a tie. I guess some potential Labour voters might have been startled when they found out Keir's Great Matter was deciding whether or not Jeremy Corbyn could stand again as a Labour candidate, and then undertaking a surprise reshuffle of the Shadow Cabinet behind the back of his Deputy. So the cumulative effect of all these factors is that the wee Labour lead has now vanished, and the dominant trend is pretty much a tie between the two major English parties.

Even that embarrassingly bizarre moment, when Boris Johnson publicly praised Peppa Pig as being fit for the Home Office, Education or Transport, did little to dent his standing with the electorate. Perhaps some of them thought it would be an improvement on the current lot, whose future should be in the past. Though this outburst did infuriate some MPs on the not-yet-fucking-batshit-crazy wing of the Conservative Party. Because, ye ken, nothing says "Get Boris Gone" louder than being the target of an Ant and Dec joke on national TV. Oddly, even when all adults in the room agree that PeppaGate has delivered another massive blow to Johnson's credibility, it still does not fully translate into the Preferred Prime Minister polls. Like last month, and the month before, and..., more people switch from Johnson to Neither or Undecided than switch from Johnson to Starmer. This is England, I guess.

Now Johnson's strongest competitor here is not Starmer, but Rishi Sunak, who is just 1% behind in Redfield and Wilton's last "Preferred First Minister Of England" polling. More and more Conservative MPs are also openly wishing for a leadership challenge. The party's rules say that 54 MPs must send a letter of no confidence in Johnson to the 1922 Committee to trigger one, and reportedly 22 have already been received. The problem now is that the 1922ers reportedly favour Liz Truss as the next PM. Which would be like telling public opinion "see, we give you someone even worse so, six months from now, you'll all regret Boris". With a subtext of "we don't give a fuck if we lose the next election, as long as we do it on a real nutters' manifesto". So I think Liz's chances are actually really slim. Then there's Michael Gove.... The Conservatives may not need a trial run involving a stalking horse this time, but there still might be a dark horse biding his time backstage. Stranger things have happened when the moon's full and the rent's due.

When is a mouse, if it spins? Because the higher it gets, the fewer.

(Anonymous, quoted by Sandi Toksvig)

We must make language accountable to the truths of our experience

(June Jordan)

I'm not sure that Boris Johnson's oven-ready variant of the 'cancel culture' will help him much in the polls, but there's no harm in trying, innit? I wouldn't say that Bozo has lost his ability to read a room, which was a key part of his comedy routines at corporate after-dinner parties, but he's probably just reading the wrong rooms now. Then we might witness more fallout of the HS2 East U-turn, which has left a number of Tory MPs hanged out to dry. This one has the potential to be a can of worms waiting to blow up, and Bozo can probably do little about it, especially with a Transport Secretary who wouldn't qualify for the Welham Green pub quiz team. And that might be just the first act of a new shitstorm involving those same Northern Tory MPs going up in arms against the betrayal of the North and 'leveling up' transmogrifying into 'letting down'. But the sad truth is that the initial impact of the Tory Sleaze Scandal has died down, and something else and equally damaging for the Conservatives would have to happen to swing the polls again. My current Poll'O'Polls shows just that, having swung to a 3% Labour lead two weeks ago to a tie, reflecting the general trends. It includes the last three polls, fielded between 24 and 29 November by Opinium, Savanta Comres and Redfield and Wilton. Super-sample is 6,050 with a 1.26% margin of error.

This is the moment The Guardian has chosen to revive that Loch Ness Monster of British politics, the "progressive alliance", which this time applies only to English seats. The problem with this line of reasoning is that it treats voters pretty much like commodities, and assumes the numbers would add up perfectly as if by magic. The only time it was tried, Unite To Remain in 2019, proved that it just does not work that way. Out of 60 candidates in England and Wales, only 9 won and this meant a net "no change" from the 2017 election as they gained Richmond Park from the Conservatives but lost North Norfolk to them. You could even say it was an actual net loss of two as they also predictably lost back Brecon and Radnorshire to the Conservatives, which had been gained by the Liberal Democrats at a by-election, and Penistone and Stocksbridge also to the Conservatives, where incumbent MP Angela Smith had stood down after defecting from Labour to the Liberal Democrats. Anyway, no matter how often The Guardian lobbies for it, sometimes with arguments bordering on the politically absurd, it won't happen because nobody actually wants it. And there is still no hard evidence that anyone would do better with it, than by simply capitalising on a favourable swing in polls.

The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes

(Arthur Conan Doyle)

There is a point, you know, where treachery is so complete

And unashamed that it becomes statesmanship

(Harry Paget Flashman)

Based on my current Poll'O'Polls and the regional crosstabs available, the seat projection switches from a hung Parliament with Labour as the first party by a hare's breath, as we had two weeks ago, to a hung Parliament with the Conservatives as first party by a more convincing margin. The Conservatives are now projected to lose 73 seats and gain 3. They would lose 58 to Labour and 3 to the Libdems in England outwith London, lose three to the LibDems and gain one from Labour in London, gain two from the SNP (Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock and Gordon) and lose one to the SNP (Moray) in Scotland, lose eight to Labour and one to Plaid Cymru in Wales. The Conservatives would again suffer some high profile losses like Secretaries of State Alok Sharma, George Eustice and Grant Shapps, but on these numbers Dim Dom Raab would save his seat. Some on the lower rungs of the governmental food chain would also be shown the door: Tobias Elwood, Amanda Solloway, Chloe Smith, Iain Stewart, Damien Moore, Robin Walker. Plus, as two weeks ago, AntiMasker Extraordinaire Steve Baker.

Now, you might again wonder why the SNP would end up with fewer seats that their apparent vote share would grant. This is, again, because Scotland is wildly over-represented in the responses considered valid by pollsters. For example, in the last Opinium poll, Scotland accounted for 8.4% of the original sample and 10.2% of valid votes. While the actual figures at the 2019 general election were 8.6% of registered voters and 8.8% of votes cast. So the higher Scottish turnout, which is a reality, is grossly overrepresented in the pollsters' headline results. A headline vote of 5% for the SNP, which would be aboot 50% of the Scottish subsample, would actually be more like 4.4% of GB-wide votes at a real election, if you correct the polls' methodological bias. This technical point being made, let's have a look at the breakdown of seats by nation and region, as the regional crosstabs of the latest batch of polls predict it.

This may explain the twists and turns in Labour's strategy, as they realise that many seats that were once solid heartlands are now out of reach, while the tide is turning slowly against the Conservatives in the formerly reliably blue South. Labour might be trying to rebuild the Red Wall, but they're still missing the last few bricks, as the current projection still has them below their 2017 results in the North and Midlands, despite significant progress in both regions. Meanwhile they would more than double their number of seats in the South, doing better there than at any of the three elections held in the 2010s. In that context, the promotion of Yvette Cooper, David Lammy and Wes Streeting to the frontbench makes sense. The two "elder statespersons" might attract middle-aged middle-class centrist voters in the Outer Commuter Belt who could otherwise be tempted by a LibDem vote. While the openly gay former Head of Education at Stonewall will appeal to the rainbow-socked hipsters, Zoomers and 35yr-old students who migrated from Greater London to the Inner Commuter Belt on the combined pressure of Covid and skyrocketing real estate prices. I have no doubt that the result of the Old Bexley and Sidcup by-election, whichever way it goes, will be read at Labour HQ as validating their strategy and the sharp turn to the right. Just have to wait for it and the first comments in the wee hours of Friday.

It’s better to have loafed and lost than never to have loafed at all

(James Thurber)

This version recorded live at Parque da Bela Vista, Lisbon, Portugal, 2 June 2006

Give everyone a mental age of six, that would make Britain happier

The media are working on that, aren’t they?

(Alan Davies, QI: Happiness, 2010)

The Tory Sleaze Scandal has recently been much less prominently featured in headline news than it was two or three weeks ago. Of course there have been more important issues to deal with since (more on this later), but never underestimate the unlimited supply of squirrels and dead cats the Conservatives have hoarded over the years, that can conveniently be used as spanners in the works at any moment of their choosing. Oddly, the oppositions also seemed willing to let the matter slip under the radars for a while, possibly because a handful of their own had also been mentioned. and the Conservatives were obviously happy with that when the fallout of the initial revelations started hitting too close to home for comfort. But the inability of the oppositions to up their game should not lead the Conservatives to believe they are off the hook, especially now that the Commons Standards Committee has delivered a report advocating stronger measures than the English Government ever proposed. Savanta Comres polled the level of concern the public have about corruption within the UK Government, and the results are merciless.

A massive majority are concerned about corruption in government, and it works pretty much across all demographics, geographics and politics. Only the younger generations and Conservative voters are visibly less concerned about it than the average Brit. The poll's more detailed crosstabs show that the worst offenders here are the Generation-Zers, the 18-24 age bracket in the poll. A startling 27% of the wee wankers don't give a fuck about corruption, more than even Conservative voters. Then there will certainly be more stories and more backlash about this, as the English Government have miserably failed to prove they take the matter seriously enough. Feeble measures, bordering on the non-existent, about MPs' second jobs. Geoffrey Cox still "working" from home when he should have been sitting in Commons. And now the resurfaced case of Philip Hammond, which might very well prove to be more serious and damaging than Owen Paterson's. None of this looks good, and Labour would be well advised to keep the pressure on Boris Johnson about all of it, and make sure it still makes headlines for weeks or more.

We are in trouble as a species, if people refuse to believe

In things they couldn’t actually do themselves

(David Mitchell)

Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results

(Margaret Atwood)

With all the kerfuffle about Cop26 and Tory sleaze, immigration had faded from the headlines for a while. Only to come back when the UK and France announced an agreement that pretty much fits the British hard line about migrants crossing the Channel. This happened as the presidential campaign in France once again put immigration centre stage, though it's not the voters' main concern, with some candidates indulging in the worst far-right rhetoric. In the UK, an Ipsos-Mori poll in October showed immigration ranked 9 out of the electorate's 10 main concerns, with only 10% of Brits mentioning it as their first concern. Far below Brexit, Covid, the economy, climate change and the NHS, all of which were mentioned by more than 20% of respondents. But we know how it can be brought to centre stage again, by some provocative outbursts from the far-right, relayed by the usual fish-wrappers. It has happened in France, and the UK is no better, especially with the background of the so called "migrant crisis" at the Poland-Belarus border. Notwithstanding this, another Ipsos-Mori poll fielded in September for British Future, shows that, with "don't know" excluded, a tiny majority of Brits think immigration has had a positive impact on the UK: 50.4% without rounding.

Clearly there are age, political and geographical divides here. And I guess more detailed data would reveal that the political divide, mostly the Leave/Remain part, is a pretty good predictor of the geographical divide. The rather amusing thing, in hindsight, is that these crosstabs give us quite a precise profile of the individual most reluctant towards immigration: elderly leave-voting working-class man from the Red Wall area. Aye, you've guessed it: the Tories' mythical Workington Man, who won them the 2019 election. Who'd have thunk? Now, despite the globally positive attitude, the British public are far from immune to major contradictions, as other items in the same poll showed. Ipsos-Mori first asked respondents if they think the number of immigrants in the UK should be increased or reduced, and the results are quite different from what you might expect from people with a "positive" opinion of the impact of immigration.

The crosstabs show pretty much the same divides as the first question, but in all cases more people think the number of immigrants should be reduced than have a negative view of immigration in general. Interestingly, Conservative voters are more closely aligned with Leave voters here than on the philosophical question. Again, the Red Wall working class appear more receptive to anti-immigration messages, like the mantra that foreigners are after their jobs. Just the kind of poisonous rhetoric that helps the Conservatives when they propose tougher immigration laws. Then Ipsos-Mori exposed the final contradiction, when they asked their panel if they would support or oppose allowing more immigrants in to fill certain specific jobs.

It would be easy to mash the three sets of answers, and describe the public's general attitude as "we love you, but we don't want more of yous in, unless it's to fill the dirty jobs we don't want". But it would be something of a caricature, as not all answers fit this description. A more positive spin would be like "we don't really want more of yous here, but we admit that we may need you to fill some essential jobs". Also, if you read between the lines, you might see approval of a points-based immigration system, although Ipsos-Mori never asked directly about this. Possibly because it was implemented only recently, and they feared their panel might not be up-to-date on it.

Life, just like the stars, the planets and the galaxies

Is just a temporary structure on the long road from order to disorder

(Brian Cox, the professor one)

The universe is so vast, so incomprehensible, so terrifying that I think

It’s quite natural for us to choose to live out our lives completely oblivious to it

(Brian Cox)

In mid-November, Commons were debating the third and final reading of Priti Patel's Nationality and Borders bill, which includes a controversial provision about "offshoring" asylum seekers, that has attracted criticism even from the Conservative backbenches. Unsurprisingly, Priti Patel chose this moment to politicise and weaponise the terrorist attack in Liverpool, using it to undermine the current asylum legislation. This has again become a hot issue after the tragic death of at least 27 people attempting to cross the Channel, and Priti Patel can't overlook the fact that the British public don't agree with her anti-French rhetoric after it happened. According to a recent YouGov poll, a majority of Brits think that policing the Channel should be a joint responsibility of French and British authorities. Even a tiny plurality of Conservative and Leave voters support this, instead of dumping it all on the French. The massive irony here is that current agreements between the UK and France, namely the Le Touquet Treaty of 2003 and the Sandhurst Treaty of 2018, say the exact opposite. Technically, within the framework of the Le Touquet Treaty, the border is on the French coast at Calais, so the treaty makes it a 100% French responsibility to police the waters and block illegal crossings. Why the French agreed to such an absurdity is beyond my understanding, and they now want to revise the agreements. Their main point is that Brexit has made several key provisions of both treaties inoperable, so they have to be renegotiated to fit with the post-Brexit context. Good luck with that.

After the tragedy, French PM Jean Castex's first public reaction was to say his thoughts were with the victims, and that smugglers should be held accountable. While Priti Patel's knee-jerk reaction was to switch the blame on the French. Old habits die hard. It happened on the same day as Kantar Public published a new poll, where immigration now ranks 10th of the public's 11 main concerns, with only 13% quoting it as their main concern. Which is, allowing for the usual margin of error, basically the same as Ipsos-Mori found a month earlier. In Kantar's poll health care, social care, affordable housing and climate change are among the public's actual main concerns. All areas where the Conservatives have few achievements to brag about, which easily explains their obsession with dragging immigration to the forefront. And they should also have foreseen that adding Twitter diplomacy on top of gunboat diplomacy wouldn't go down well in France. But the Kantar poll also shows that a majority of Brits support Patel's variant of gunboat diplomacy. 57% agree with the idea that the British Border Force should turn back boats crossing the Channel, with only 32% opposing it. There is a clear political divide here. Between Conservatives and Leavers massively supporting it on one side, and Labour, Libdems and Remainers opposing it on the other side, though not as conclusively as the other side support it.

Boris's approach to immigration looks like an ancient Laird pulling up the drawbridge and filling the moat with alligators, and he definitely needs to make contact with the real world again. Boris and The Prittster first have to stop peddling racist porkies, and clearly distance themselves from the far-right talking point that refugees try to enter the UK because of benefits. Which is fucking bollocks because the benefits they could possibly claim, and possibly never get, are higher in France, Germany or the Netherlands. Bozo must also admit than antagonising the French is fucking stupid, as their border control, for all his faults and areas of inefficiency, actually works. And probably would work better if the UK paid the £54m they are committed to contribute to the French border policing, instead of withholding it for some sort of blackmail. At most a third, and probably even just a fourth, of those who try and cross the Channel actually succeed. And fewer make it, at the risk of becoming illegal aliens in some sordid nether region of England, than choose to stay in France or in Germany. Real statistics from the European Union make the point: only 3% of those who enter the Schengen Area use it as a transit zone to the UK. But Johnson and Patel won't let basic facts get in the way of their sabre-rattling narrative, will they? And while they score cheap points with the most xenophobic part of the electorate, more people will face a tragic death in the Channel. As Dominic Cummings once said, "so be it".

How can something not be something?

Something can’t not be not being something, can it?

(Sean Lock, QI: Hoaxes, 2010)

If you’ve created a something, then something has to be that something

Otherwise you haven’t created a something

(Sean Lock, QI: Hoaxes, 2010)

Let's make a detour abroad now, with a few words about the incoming French presidential election, which will be held on 10 April 2022 with the second round on 24 April. At first, it seemed a foregone conclusion, bordering on a self-fulfilling prophecy, that it would be pretty much a reboot of the 2017 election. With incumbent President Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, for the National Rally (Rassemblement National, RN) competing in the second round, with the center-right Les Républicains (LR) watching from the sidelines. And the left-wing vote hopelessly fragmented between the Greens (Europe Ecologie-Les Verts, EELV), the center-left Parti Socialiste (PS) and the radical left La France Insoumise (LFI). Pollsters have naturally tested just this 'classic' scenario and their first round results definitely confirm it could be a repeat of 2017. The major uncertainty here is that LR are still in the middle of a primary and the five contenders have a vastly different appeal with the general public, with voting intentions anywhere between 5% and 15%. Pollsters will be on more solid ground when LR have chosen their candidate, which should happen this Saturday.

Then of course, the best laid schemes... And this one gang aft a-gley, and took a turn for the ugly, as you probably already know, when far-right writer, columnist and TV personality Eric Zemmour joined the competition. Or did not, but was still included in the polls, from early September. Zemmour's variant of a campaign that is not really a campaign relies heavily on his focus on immigration and the controversial Great Replacement theory, that originated in French white supremacist circles, and led to him being dubbed a conspiracist single-issue candidate with little knowledge of or interest in anything else. It worked quite well at first, probably helped by massive media coverage, never seen before for a fringe candidate. His shamelessly far-right, anti-migrants and anti-woke campaigning attracted a significant number of Le Pen's voters and also some from the elderly traditionalist part of LR's electorate, until a number of polls suggested he would qualify for the second round instead of Le Pen. Then the wheels fell off as some of his obsessively xenophobic outbursts were going too far even for some far-right conspiracy theorists, ans polls that include him in their prompts showed a quick fall of his voring intentions. But we have certainly not seen Zemmour's Last Stand yet. Just have to see what the polls make of him now that he is officially an actual candidate, and fair game for all those who chose to ignore him as long as he was just a virtual candidate.

Don't think all this is just some odd variant of French exceptionalism, as you can easily see similar patterns in British politics. LR and most of RN would fit nicely within the Borisian Conservative Party, with some of RN closer to Reform UK and/or UKIP. Marine Le Pen's immigration policy treads the same waters as Priti Patel's, while her views on "sanitary dictatorship" pretty much match those of the libertarian anti-lockdown wing of the Tories. And Eric Zemmour's views, no matter how outlandish they sound, do echo what you hear from the lunatic fringes of Reform UK and UKIP, and most prominently from the murky nether regions of the English conspiratorial far-right. Insert Stephen Yaxley-Lennon and Jayda Fransen here. Not to mention some unsavoury characters from further back in history, like Oswald Mosley, William Joyce or Enoch Powell. It can't happen here? Naw, fucking sure it can, mates. It already has.

There is nothing new under the sun. Above it, on the other hand…

(The Doctor, Doctor Who: The Woman Who Lived, 2015)

This version recorded during the First Great Lockdown, released 18 January 2021

The Government keep saying we’re going to carry on as normal

And normal for us is to do nothing until just before it’s too late and then panic and change

(Ian Hislop, Have I Got News For You?, 2021)

So now there is massive evidence that the fifth wave of Covid has struck, and with it the more dangerous Omicron variant. The majority of countries in continental Europe have either reinstated protection measures that had been discontinued, or come up with new ones to help contain the surge in the pandemic. What the libertarian wing of the Conservative Party and their drinking buddies in the billionaire-owned fishwrapping rags would call "unacceptable breaches of our freedoms". One of the new measures tried abroad is a selective lockdown and/or strictly enforced health passport for the unvaccinated. Or, as renowned epidemiologists Lozza Fox, Tom Harwood and Darren Grimes would call it, "sanitary apartheid". Of course the English government is shying away from any drastic measures for fear of some backbenchers' revolt, or even violent protests like in Austria, the Netherlands and some French overseas territories. So I guess we will have a reboot of last year's stupidity-studded debate over "cancelling Christmas", when we have hard evidence that not cancelling Christmas actually cancelled lives. In that context, the early countermeasures proposed for the UK did look like half-measures. Savanta Comres have fielded a poll about possible measures to contain the pandemic, the first being a selective lockdown of people who haven't yet received at least two jags, which is harsher than selective lockdowns proposed or enforced abroad. Much to my surprise, a convincing plurality of the panel support it, and this view is shared pretty much across all demographics, nations and political opinions. Only the under-35s oppose it significantly, and Conservative voters even support it more than the average Brit, probably because a lot of them are older than the national average.

Another approach has been tried and proved successful: the third jag or booster shot, which is already widely offered all over Europe. Israel went one step further and made it mandatory when the number of new cases reached 10,000 a day. The result was a steep fall of new cases to 1,000-2,000 per day after a massive campaign of booster shots, which is part of the vaccine passport enforced there. Without it you are not under "house arrest", but pretty much barred from all public places, events and gatherings. France went in a similar direction later, with the third jag offered to everyone over 18, instead of only over 40 previously, and five months after the second jag, instead of six. People not getting their third jag before 15 January will forfeit their Covid pass, which has thusly implicitly become a vaccine pass, and a rather efficient means of pressure on the unvaccinated to get their jags. Which is just what Emmanuel Macron wants as a similar strategy, to boost the first and second jags, worked beyond expectations in July. The Savanta Comres poll, fielded before the appearance of the Omicron variant and the emergency measures that followed, showed majority support for reducing the delay between the second and third jags to five months, and crosstabs show similar patterns of support and opposition to those about the selective lockdown.

Now, experts have proposed going even further, and reducing the gap to three months, which is not what Boris Johnson announced. The official view seems to imply that everyone will get a booster by the end of January, which statistically is pretty much a five or six months gap if you consider the dates at which second jags were delivered, and it's not even sure that it is logistically feasible. Furthermore, the delivery will still be staggered by age, instead of a truly general rollout as was adopted in other countries. Interestingly, there is some evidence that three months would be something of an overkill, and would also open the door to a scenario where a fourth jag would become necessary in the short term, which is probably why Bozo remained rather vague about the actual target. Of course, this is an evolving, and often confusing, situation and new measures will certainly be announced over the next few days. Which may, or most likely may not, include stronger protective measures beyond the £200 fine for mask-refusers. Interestingly, SavantaComres also crosstabbed their results with their panel's vaccination status. Which is 90% first dose, 81% second dose and 31% third dose for a panel aged 18 and above. Which fits with the official statistics, which were 88%, 80% and 28% respectively on the day the poll's results were published, but for the eligible population aged 12 and above.

These crosstabs show that only the unvaccinated oppose a selective lockdown, and reducing the gap between the second and third jag. Support for both increases with the number of jags the respondents have received, which is also an interesting perspective on both issues. To sum it up, the more people have already taken steps to contain the pandemic, and protect themselves and others, the more they are ready to go further. While those who didn't give a fuck still don't give a fuck. There's a clear message for the English Government in this poll: stop pandering to all the variants of anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, Covid deniers and poundshop libertarians, even if a third of your MPs are on that side. The public are ready for stronger and even harsher measures, and your own voters are even more supportive of them than average. So doing the right thing also delivers political gain, as this seems to be the only thing that motivates you. There's also a message for the Scottish Government: don't wait until Westminster acts, use your devolved powers to their full extent. SNP voters favour decisive measures more strongly than the average Scot, who already supports them more than the average Brit. It's a win-win situation for you too. Just do it.

So, when I listened to a number of Government Ministers saying

“There is no way there is going to be another lockdown”

I just went out and bought some toilet roll

(Ian Hislop, Have I Got News For You?, 2021)

This version recorded during the First Great Lockdown, released 17 April 2021

Jeremy's Den

01/12/2021

Is This The Life You Really Want?

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We Must Be Dreaming