Jeremy's Den: The Power That Hates People

This world is far more mysterious than we give it credit for

(Victoria Coren-Mitchell, QI: Jargon, 2012)

I set the bar low in life, that’s the secret of happiness, and then consistently miss it

(Andy Hamilton, Richard Osman’s House Of Games, 2021)

December is supposed to be the month of goodwill, kindness and joy, innit? Not that it looks like that this year. Of course there's no better start to the festivities than learning that another Tory MP has just started a second job worth £60k a year, and sees nothing wrong with it. Then came the Old Bexley and Sidcup by-election, that was a massive shocker... for the two Guardian staff writers who had wagered a tenner on Labour gaining it. The local Tories never believed they would lose it, and they were right. And, on the same day, the news that Margaret Hodge would stand down as Likud...oops, sorry... Labour MP for Barking. Which was probably the only good news for Labour that day, as it was also the moment Unite's Sharon Graham announced they would stop funding Labour, as union campaigns are best value for money. I fully expected there would be a lot of pundits punditificating about the OB&S by-election, as if you could draw lessons from it with its 34% turnout. Truth is you can't, so I won't even try, unlike the Guardian staff writers who tried so hard to prove that both the Conservatives and Labour won, or both lost, depending on which paragraph you read first. Meanwhile, back in the real world, the trend of recent polls show that Conservatives are really getting a fucking walloping from voters.

In that context, I'm definitely not sure the Tories should fear a surge of Reform UK more than anything else, as another Guardian columnist suggested. The column itself is based solely on the OB&S by-election, where Reform UK polled 6.6%. But this just proves that they exist there, not that they surged, as they didn't stand in Tory-held seats in December 2019, so you can't measure anything. The same applies to polls, which are explicitly based on the assumption that all parties would stand in all constituencies, while the Brexit Party (as Reform UK was then known) fielded candidates in less than half of the constituencies in 2019 (275 out of 650). So Reform UK being now credited with anything between 2% and 6%, instead of the 2.01% the Brexit Party bagged in 2019, proves nothing. It might just be a basic mathematical effect combined with random sample variations, and is certainly not hard evidence of either a surge or a decline. The progressive metropolitan media have to come up with something else to make their case. The oddest part of all this, though it probably shouldn't come as a surprise, is that Keir Starmer has only just caught up with Bozo in the classic Preferred Prime Minister polling. He is actually still a teeny weeny smitch behind, if only by a bat's whisper now, exactly 0.13% on the 12-point rolling average.

Meanwhile, more and more Conservative MPs are coming to terms with reality. That trying to protect Boris Johnson is like making excuses for your school dropout teenage son, who was caught drink-driving without a license, with his stash of Class-As in the glove compartment. This is definitely not the hill they want to die on right now. Which was bound to happen when media are full of new stories about Boris's interference in the botched withdrawal from Kabul, Dim Dom Raab's conspicuous absence while it happened, and last year's Christmas parties in SW1. Then there is Gavin Williamson's Last Stand. All of SW1 knows that Gavin's life dream now is to hurt Johnson, but even he would never have thunk that the weapon of choice would be his own illegal Christmas party. Interestingly, the English Government's defence is the same in all cases. It did not happen. Then damning evidence surfaces that it did happen. And the reply is: you misread that, it genuinely did not happen because we say it did not. Which again proves that factphobia and truthphobia are not the reserved domain of the gender ideology cultists, but their shared playground with the hard right. These are interesting times indeed, when the rising anger among Tory backbenchers delivers more scathing criticism of the English Government than anything the Labour frontbench come up with at PMQs.

Keir Starmer seems like the first bloke that your mum dates after she gets divorced

(Geoff Norcott, Have I Got News For You?, 2021)

How did you become an expert on what does and doesn’t exist?

(The Doctor, Doctor Who: Last Christmas, 2014)

I know I should have got used to it by now, but I'm still amazed by the number of people ready to vote for a government and a party that so clearly despise them and don't give a fucking shit about peoples' real issues and concerns. And aye, I'm referring to the English Government and the Conservative Party here, my rant about Scotland will come later. When you see a government so hell bent on suppressing any form of judicial review, it should ring a loud alarm. But a third of the electorate chose to turn a deaf ear, even when these steps in the wrong direction clearly threatened them, and not some imaginary enemy created by the right-wing fishwrappers. A fair share of English voters even seem ready to make excuses for the behaviour of their Chosen One, the one who is a hare's breath away from taking his party down with him. The one who will lead the Conservatives to the depths of the electoral Mariana Trench, because he is to Margaret Thatcher what Ed Sheeran is to John Lennon. Amusingly there was quite a polling frenzy over the last days, something of a competition between pollsters over who would come up with the worst result for the Conservatives. The award goes to Opinium, who found them on 32% and Labour leading by 9%, closely followed by YouGov with 32% and 8% respectively. My current Poll'O'Polls includes the last five ones, conducted between 8 and 13 December. Super-sample size is 9,119 with a 1.03% margin of error.

These numbers clearly show the fallout of PartyGate, and new stories about similar events coming to light. But it may go away pretty soon, like Dominic Cummings's escapade to Barnard Castle dropped off the radars. Like the fallout of failed Covid policies in late 2020 was wiped out by the initially successful vaccine rollout. Or it may stay, explaining why the Conservatives seem to have now given up plans for a snap election. More bad PR for the Conservatives may soon come from the Metropolitan Police's policy of not investigating past Covid infractions, no matter how loud the public outrage. This can only fuel the feeling that the Met is a genetically corrupt force hell bent on protecting the SW1 Establishment, and that Commissioner Cressida Dick should resign. Especially when polls show that aboot 70% of Brits want the Met to investigate these matters, including some 60% of Conservative voters. Another factor that steadily remains in the background, but undoubtedly influences the public, is their assessment of Johnson's self-inflicted Magnum Opus: Brexit. YouGov have regularly polled the public's view of how well or badly they think the English Government had handled Brexit, and the result is merciless. There was a brief moment of Brexiphoria in the aftermath of the December 2019 election, and to a lesser extent when Commons at long last passed the Withdrawal Agreement Act, and then the Future Relationship Act, but it did not last. Realisation of what the fucking omnishambles actually entail now has public opinion against the government 2-to-1, which is only fair when you consider what a dog's ear in a pig's breakfast they have made of the whole thing.

With such a damning verdict from the public, it will be interesting to see if Reform UK do better in the next batch of polls or at the North Shropshire by-election. The campaign there does not look good for the Conservatives despite their massive majority in December 2019, and some probably regret having invited gaffe-prone Johnson to make an appearance. The shockwave of PartyGate has added a level of uncertainty to an already quite unpredictable by-election. This will undoubtedly be a test of Conservative voters' residual loyalty to a government hit by recurring shitstorms. The saddest part in all this fucking bùrach is that nobody will listen to what is in The Saj's Covid Plan B for England, the one that was never bound to happen and now is. The snap poll conducted by SavantaComres on 8 December, right on the heels of the first wave of revelations, showed that 29% of Brits were then less likely to follow Covid guidelines, a feeling shared across all demographics and politics, the only conspicuous exception being the 65+ age bracket. And other polls show it's only getting worse as time goes by. More on this later.

I try never to understand, it’s called an open mind

(The Doctor, Doctor Who: The Magician’s Apprentice, 2015)

The reason some portraits don't look true to life

Is that some people make no effort to resemble their pictures

(Salvador Dali)

The seat projection from this Poll'O'Polls is unlikely to raise anyone's spirits at Conservative HQ, where the Christmas Party movie this year is more likely to be Downfall than It's a Wonderful Life. The upside is that it may very well be the last featuring Boris Johnson recycling his after-dinner speeches' jokes. Of course, the projection only reflects a week where Conservative voting intentions went nosediving faster than an overweight seagull aiming for your soggy bag of chips. There's not even the redeeming factor of gaining just one seat anywhere in England, something even Jeremy Corbyn managed to achieve amidst Labour's debacle in 2019. But now everything Boris or any of his Cabinet say has the distinctive smell of a three-day old mackerel, and the electorate have at long last stopped pinching their nose, and voting Tory no matter what because they don't like Angela Rayner's haircut. The massive irony here is that the only place where the Conservatives are still predicted to do well is Scotland, thanks to mediocre polling for the SNP. They would even manage to end up with net gain of one seat North Of The Eyemouth Layby, losing one (Moray) to the SNP but gaining two (Gordon and Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock) from them. Now the overall picture says that Labour would be just 13 seats short of a working majority. Assuming that Sinn Féin still don't take their seats, and Labour already have the SDLP in the bag to support them. A likely coalition with the Liberal Democrats, plus plausible confidence-and-supply agreements with the Greens, Plaid Cymru and the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland, would boost that to an 11-seat coalition majority and a 25-seat majority in votes triggering the C&S deals.

One of the keys is that voters are losing faith in Boris Johnson, even in erstwhile solidly blue Southern seats. This is probably not going to change anytime soon as the English Government have again painted themselves into a dark corner with an Omicron Plan B that smells of improvisation, and is now facing the biggest backbenchers' revolt in two years. The booster jag for all, which is part of that plan when it could and should have been greenlighted weeks ago as in other countries, is not a sure vote winner either, as the primeval vaccine rollout was. Now the booster rollout is having a bumpy start in most parts of England and Scotland, simply because the NHS no longer have the massive emergency resources they had in the first half of the year, and yet are expected to deliver a similar pattern of mass vaccination. Nobody in England seriously believes than Bozo's Christmas target can be met, when there are reports from Land's End to Hadrian's Wall that the NHS is already swamped by massive demand and can't do better than a four or even six-weeks delay. Even Scotland's less ambitious end-of-January target is seen as challenging, and you can't honestly blame the Scottish Government for that. Just consider that France, who started the third jag rollout more than two weeks before the UK, are also having problems meeting their 15 January target date, and basically for the same reasons as England and Scotland. Now let's get back to the main plotline, and look at how seat projections evolved over the year, reflecting the shifting voting intentions.

The wavering line between Red and Blue says it all. This week's is the best result for Labour this year and anywhen since the 2019 election, and pundits even say since 2014. Which is confirmed by polls as the last ones having Labour on 40% or slightly above, as some delivered last week, date back to March 2014. Even the Corbyn Surge of 2017, or Labour's lucky streak in polls between April and June 2019, never came even close. But will it last? Because, ye ken, all good things.... and all the best laid schemes.... The short term problem is that there is fuck all Labour scheme behind all this. It just happened. All they had to do was watch, while the Tories fell to one self-inflicted wound after the other. Some of the episodes even felt like a circle jerk had transmogrified into a circular firing squad. The more serious long term problem is that giving up on a snap election gives the Tories more than enough time to enforce the proposals of the 2023 Periodic Review, that will gerrymander Commons constituencies even more than they already are. Seat by seat analysis of the initial proposals shows that they would increase the Conservatives' working majority from 87 to a notional 113. Add the controversial voter identification bill to the broth, which will undoubtedly pass despite opposition from the relevant Commons Committee, and disfranchisement of mostly Labour-leaning voters will switch a fuckload of marginal seats to the Tories. But that double whammy was the plan all along, wasn't it?

I became a vegan because I just sort of wanted to feel better than people

(Romesh Ranganathan)

By putting the tea in first and stirring as one pours, one can regulate the amount of milk

Whereas one is liable to put in too much milk if one does it the other way

(George Orwell)

All the recent flood of news about sleaze and corruption has brought the work of the Committee on Standards in Public Life (CPSL) into the spotlight, probably for the first time for most of the public. I won't bore you with all the gory details of where it comes from and what it does, as you have it all on the Wikipedia page I linked in the previous sentence. Let's just say that it has been mentioned in the media in relation to the Nolan Principles, officially known as the Seven Principles of Public Life, which everyone involved with public service and government is supposed to uphold. I won't pad this post with the full detail of the definitions, as you also have them on the Wiki page. The importance of this committee is emphasised by the fact that Boris Johnson couldn't resist the urge to appoint a crony to it, which seems to be his squid ink moment every time he senses something coming in the way of him doing what he wants when he wants, and he gives the people the finger. Again. Another position will become vacant in 2022, and two in 2023, so it will be interesting to see who gets the job and on which credentials. Anyway, the reason I mention all this is that Survation conducted a poll in November, on behalf of 38 Degrees, including questions about the Nolan Principles. The question was as close to a Yes-Or-No thing as you can get: Do you think these persons or organisations do or do not uphold the following principles? And the answers are revealing of the public's state of mind after the flood of news about sleaze and corruption.

Unsurprisingly Boris Johnson and the English Government do not emerge from this unscathed. Which is bound to happen when those on the top rung fall into the trap of believing their own press releases, and totally lose touch with real people and their concerns. The people want the powers that be to be more accountable, not less. The people want to raise the bar of the standards of public service, not lower it. The people want those in charge to follow the rules, not ignore them. The people want the government to enforce stronger rules, not make a joke of those that already exist. And anyone who thinks that there is an "us and them", or "the oiks and their betters", is bound to pay the price some day. And if you added transparency to the list, the current English Government would fail that test miserably too. Then there is an amusing lack of significant change in the panel's response, when you switch the focus from the current English Government to the two major English parties.

Quite amusingly, the Conservative Party here do somewhat worse that either Bozo and his Cabinet. Not all rotten apples are in the big bag, are they? More surprisingly Labour, who have been out of power for more then eleven years, don't really do well either. Is there some truth in the classic populist meme that 'they' are all the same? The numbers here quite support that, as the average Brit seems to think that "sure, this lot are fucking bad, but the other lot are not really better". Or it might just be that most of the panel are old enough to remember the Blair years, and how fucking bad New Labour became back then. So they're not ready to cut New New Labour any slack, which is probably not as unfair as it looks. Last, and also most enlightening part, is how people see MPs. The generic undistinguished MP first, and then their own local one.

So the average run-of-the mill MP has roughly the same level of positives as the Conservatives, while the local MP has the same level as Labour, albeit with more neutrals. There's another hint here of what the French call dégagisme, which has no exact equivalent in the English language. Unless you extend the meaning of disestablishmentarianism outwith the confines of the Church of England, and into the murky backwaters of SW1. The numbers here also belie the commonly held belief that people think all MPs are crooks, except their own. Now, if you think that 2021 Britain has turned into some weird mash of 1984, Brave New World and Minority Report, the public see it more as an episode of The X-Files. Where you should trust no one, especially not those who tell you that nothing important happened today, but still bear in mind the comforting thought that the truth is out there and, in the end, all lies lead to the truth. Fingers crossed...

If ants are such busy workers, how come they find time to go to all the picnics?

(Marie Dressler)

Nobody remembers being born and nobody remembers dying

Is that why we always stare into the eye sockets of a skull?

(The Doctor, Doctor Who: Heaven Sent, 2015)

There has been a massive polling frenzy over the last few days. Never before have pollsters surveyed Brits that much on so few days, snap poll after snap poll, on anything from voting intentions to Christmas parties and whatnot, without any client actually commissioning the polls and paying for them. Then I guess the juicy headlines and off-the-cuff punditificating were their own reward. Plus another call for that immortal Loch Ness Monster of British politics, that progressive alliance that only a couple of Guardian columnists actually support. Of course the results directly related to PartyGate are the ones that matter. Survation found that 79% of Brits think the English Government's cavalier attitude has let down the NHS, 83% think they have let down the public in general and those who have lost loved ones to Covid more specifically, and 75% think they have let down politicians, which is probably the least of everybody's worries these days. On the same day, YouGov found that 61% of those who had actually seen the infamous Stratton-Oldfield video, which now has the same cult status as the Zapruder film, felt angry, 47% felt disappointed, 44% felt betrayed and 6% felt confused too. Which would indeed matter if we didn't know already that the fly-by-nights in SW1 don't give a fuck about real people and real life, only about their expenses claims and lining their donor's pockets. Of course the most important part is the impact PartyGate has on the people's state of mind. First of all, would they be more or less likely to abide by Covid regulations, knowing now that entitled SW1ers don't give a flying flamingo about them?

The YouGov results are not fully comparable to the others, as they asked if people were likely or unlikely to follow new rules, not more or less or just as likely. But they still show the level of resistance you can expect to new regulations. No matter what their views on Covid regulations are, the last Opinium poll says that 60% of Brits think that a new lockdown will happen in the next three months, with only 25% thinking it's unlikely. But 68% would still attend their work's Christmas party if one is scheduled, and only 26% would sit it out. So maybe 2021 Britain is not 1984 come true after all, but a reboot of On The Beach. Party till you drop, and fuck it all. Oddly, Brits are actually not opposed to some specific stronger measures, as the three successive SavantaComres polls show. But, as you might expect, there are some enlightening red lines in the sand in there. The most striking result is of course that a majority of Brits are ready and willing to go through another full lockdown, if the spread and potential harm of the Omicron variant demand it. Within four days between the last two polls, the public have also become far more receptive to the more restrictive parts of an hypothetical lockdown. There is still some reluctance to closing down pubs and restaurants, or banning indoors mixing of households, but opposition to both has dramatically gone down. All this clearly says that the public are more concerned about protecting Christmas, even if it means scaling it down, rather than being baited into faux outrage about 'cancelling Christmas'. Poundshop libertarian politicians and keyboard warriors would be well advised to listen and learn. If they only could be arsed....

Interestingly, these results also imply that the 100ish Tory MPs who voted against Johnson's Plan B haven't really read the room, as the public are open to the ideas of vaccine passports, a harsher measure than the Covid passes proposed by the government. But I tend to agree with the idea that the poundshop libertarians are just making daft points for show, instead of genuinely trying to get things done or, in this case, not done. And the English Government's uber-cautious approach, to make sure they won't hurt the Covidiots' feelings, doesn't help and is fucking daft. What's the point of cuddling them when you know beforehand you will get the bulk of Labour votes to help you fend off any mass rebellion on your side? Finally, pollsters asked their panels if anyone more or less involved with the infamous party should be sacked or resign. Mentioning more specifically Downing Street staffers who attended it, anyone in charge of organising it, and of course Boris Johnson himself. Bear in mind though that, after Allegra Stratton was ordered to resign as the sacrificial lamb in the early days of the PartyGate shitstorm, only one Conservative elected official has seen fit to stand down from his position, and he's not even the sharpest and most prominent tool in the box.

Let's just say now that Boris does resign, no matter how remote the possibility. Then the latest Survation poll says that 24% of the general population and 33% of Conservative voters would choose Wunderkind Rishi Sunak as his successor. Liz Truss, allegedly the 1922 Committee's favourite, has the support of only 4% of the general population and 6% of Conservative voters. Jeremy Hunt, Sajid Javid and even Dim Dom Raab, Jake Rees-Mogg and total non-entity Tom Tugendhat have more support in the general population. Jez, The Saj and Tam Tom are not that popular with Conservative voters, but Dim Dom and His Nibs still outperform Liz among the faithful. Which is evidence of the sorry state of the Conservative Party more than of anything else. Obviously none of the possible contenders has "sunlit uplands" tattooed on their forehead, and it would be foolish to expect anything like strong, stable and clean government from any of them. Then I guess we have to hope the next election will be faithful to the polls, and the hoi polloi will have to be content with Angela Rayner becoming the next Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster... No shit.

There are three things I remember from school: Pythagoras, oxbow lakes

And photosynthesis, it's like it's all gone in as osmosis, now that's a fourth

(Jason Manford, QI: Plants, 2018)

If we teach our offspring to expect everything to be provided on demand

We must admit the possibility of sowing the seeds of socialism

(Dr Walter J. Sackett Jr., Bringing Up Babies, 1962)

Redfield and Wilton also recently polled English Zoomers, with a panel of 1,000 aged 16 to 25. First indicator is how they say they voted at the December 2019 general election, with the panel shrunk to only those actually eligible to vote then. I compared the results of this full sub-panel, including those who say they did not vote, and the sub-sub-panel of those actually mentioning their remembered vote. The poll's data show a rather amazing 76% turnout. This in direct contradiction with an election post-mortem study conducted by Ipsos-Mori, and used as evidence on the House of Commons site, which has the turnout of 18-24s on 47%. It also does not fit with all recent polls, which first ask respondents to rate themselves on a 0 (certain not to vote) to 10 (certain to vote) scale. Empirical evidence is that the sum of the 8, 9 and 10 ratings is a fairly good predictor of the turnout at a future election. The last batch of polls thusly have the predicted turnout in the 65-70% range, which is consistent with the 2017 and 2019 elections. But the predicted turnout in the 18-24 age bracket is in the 45-55% range, conclusively lower than average and also close to the 2019 estimate.

So I am bound to conclude that the wee fucks lied to make themselves look better, and more motivated by a general election that they actually are. Ironically, this impacts Labour's vote share negatively, as 2019 post-mortems estimated it between 56 and 62%, and the LibDem vote share even more, as the post-mortems estimated it between 9 and 11%. While boosting the Conservative vote share, which the same post-mortems estimated between 19 and 21%. To sum it up, admittedly a wee smitch caricaturally, Zoomers are prone to lying for self-aggrandisement, which definitely won't come as a surprise to anyone who has observed one in the wild. The right-leaning ones are somewhat more likely to lie, and the Young LibDems are so ashamed of themselves that half of them are willing to lie about their vote. Interestingly the results include some SNP and Plaid Cymru votes, while the regional crosstabs show only respondents from the nine regions of England. Either some of them did live in Scotland and Wales two years ago and have moved since, or they are lying again. Your guess is as good as mine. Redfield and Wilton then asked the wee ones "to what extent they feel political parties listen to and address the concerns of young people". It does not include the SNP, though that would have been interesting and useful information, because the panel is deliberately Anglo-centric. The results are definitely a mixed bag for all the parties, even if Labour emerge better off than anyone else. Let's just say, as neutrally as possible, that the wee attention-seeking brats don't find any party is really paying enough attention to them.

Oddly the Greens, who you would have thought to be the Zoomers' favourites, do marginally better than the Liberal Democrats, and worse than the Conservatives. It's interesting to compare these results with the wee ones' assessment of Boris Johnson. 30% approve of his actions as Prime Minister, 37% disapprove, 30% are neutral and 3% don't know. Which delivers a -7 net rating, in marked contrast with the general population, whose recent net ratings are aboot -30. Then only 10% of the general population have no opinion, three times fewer than the wee ones, and that makes all the difference. So I might try and argue that the Zoomers lack consistency, as this probably comes with maturity. Alas, other polls have already proven beyond reasonable doubt that the older geezers also tend to lack consistency, and have knee-jerk reactions to major events, and then double back at flank speed when something else surfaces in the next news cycle. So, for better or for worse, the wee rainbow-socked wankers are probably no worse overall than their elders. Even them being genetically engineered to believe in Orwellian catchphrases like Bullying Is Kindness, Uniformity Is Diversity, Exclusion Is Inclusion or Belief Is Reality, isn't extravagantly worse than what their Generation X parents fell for at the same age. Anyway the future is totally theirs to ruin, innit? And there's nothing we can do about it, is there? Except wishing for that asteroid.

Everybody is priceless, but what is the point of teenagers?

(Stephen Fry, QI: Human, 2010)

Jeremy's Den

15/12/2021

The Power That Hates People

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