Jeremy's Den: Change We Must

A kick up the arse is a very pure thing when it goes right.

(Holly Walsh, QI: Post, 2019)

Our flood defences worked really well, right up to the point at which they failed.

(Liz Truss, Environment Secretary, 2014)

Don't forget to click on the images for larger and easier to read versions.

The Conservative Best In Show has not left the headlines this month, and is fortunately coming to a close. Officially, we will know the name of the new First Minister of England on the 5th of September. But there will certainly be leaks as soon as the vote is officially over on the 2nd, and Ruth Davidson has had a glimpse of the postal ballots. The one really entertaining part of the farce has to be Nadine Dorries willingly destroying her political career, or what's left of it, with here tribal allegiance to Boris Johnson and the feral manner she defended his legacy, if any. I guess the next step is Nads standing down from Commons, and returning to writing books that nobody even knows exist, so that Bozo can stand at a by-election in her safe Mid Bedfordshire seat, after he is recalled in Uxbridge over his multiple violations of all existing codes and regulations. In the meanwhile, Ipsos Mori surveyed their panel about their perception of three political leaders, Sunak, Truss and Starmer. I'll come back to the full poll later, but below is what the subsample of Conservative voters had to say about their own wannabe leaders.

The question was 'How likely or unlikely do you think .... would?' and the bars indicate the number of 'likely' answers. The sum is of course higher than 100% because it's an absolute rating, not a 'best at' question. It's interesting to see that there are many items where neither gets a majority of approval, and indeed only a few where both get a majority. It just shows that even the Conservative base are of little faith in the ability of their own Chosen One to be a genuinely effective leader, as the average of all ratings shows. When the clear winner gets a positive ranking from only half her supporters, there is definitely something rotten in the County of Norfolk. Despite this obvious lack of enthusiasm, polls of the Conservative base conclusively show Liz Truss as the favourite. Which is in itself quite worrying, as the next First Minister of England will only be the one considered the least bad by a tiny fraction of the population. Those who think that declaring war on France is a good idea, and even better when you see that the Frogs are not amused.

Conservative Home, Techne and YouGov poll members of the Conservative Party, the ones who make the decision. Redfield & Wilton and Opinium poll Conservative voters, who may not have a vote but have a voice that may influence the Party members. The two definitely go in the same direction, so it does not really matter who exactly got polled. It is also worth remembering that the likely winner was never the party members' first choice in the early stages of the competition. It was initially Ben Wallace, before he thought it through and concluded that the safest option was protecting his career at the MoD. Then it oscillated between Kemi Badenoch, Rishi Sunak and Penny Mordaunt. So the one we're gonna get eventually is the one who was the second choice at best, and often the third or fourth, of her own political base, and the underdog in the MPs' vote. Let that sink in before you boak. Now, in case you missed it, the most hilarious episode of the whole panto has to be John Lydon endorsing Jacob Rees-Mogg as his choice for Prime Minister, and Ye Olde Jake accepting the compliment. Fucking hell.

Whatever women do, they must do it twice as well as men to be thought half as good.

Luckily, that isn’t difficult.

(Charlotte Whitton)

Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn't there

He wasn't there again today, I wish, I wish he'd go away...

(Hughes Mearns, Antigonish, 1899)

The indestructible Michael Ashcroft, the pollster-cum-pundit formerly known as Lord Ashcroft, has also graced us with his personal vision of the contest, based on a GB-wide poll with a 10k sample size. He probably does not really have a dog is this race, though I found myself smelling the weeest whiff of a pro-Truss bias in some of his comments. Coupled with an obvious dose of nostalgia for the glory days of the Johnson Presidency... oops... Premiership. The ghost of Boris will certainly haunt the Conservative Party for many years to come, for better or for worse. Right now, it looks like it is for worse, as both contenders struggle to convincingly reframe themselves as 'something else'. Admittedly, Liz may not want to do it as her supporters brand her as the 'Johnson Continuity' candidate, while advocating undoing pretty much all Bozo did over the last year. While Rishi would love to be seen as a 'Clean Break' candidate, while pledging to go on with policies Bozo pursued. Which explains why voters are a wee smitch confused, as Lord Mike's core question shows. It's a pretty standard one, about whom people trust most to do this or that or whatnot.

There is a surprisingly high level of "don't knows" here, even among Conservative voters. This is certainly a direct fallout of how both contenders conducted their campaign. Rishi Sunak has sailed a pretty straight course, but people just don't like where he's heading. Even Conservative voters acknowledge his veneer of competence, but are otherwise not convinced. Even among the grassroots base, Rishi also appears disconnected from the common people, something that has cost him a lot of favourability in the general population, but also among Conservative voters. On the other hand, Liz Truss has performed so many U-turns that nobody really knows what she stands for. Except for herself, and that's clearly not good enough, even for many Conservative voters. She doesn't get a majority of support on even one item here, which is definitely not hinting at a good start for her Premiership. Lord Mike also indulged in a pollsters' favourite: testing generic voting intentions against alternative scenarios, where the future Conservative leader is named in the question. And the results don't look good for either of the Big Dog Hopefuls.

I didn't use my own model to predict the number of seats, as the poll lacks a lot of the information needed to feed all my algorithms. I used Flavible's seat projection tool instead. The 19 'others' are the Northern Ireland seats and Caroline Lucas. The baseline result is consistent with other polls conducted around the same time, in early August when Labour's lead had conspicuously shrunk. But Lord Mike's alternate scenarios leave me quite sceptical, doubting and unconvinced. It's totally counter-intuitive to have both contenders doing worse than the generic baseline. Unless of course there is another message in there from the electorate. That they're willing to punish both for being embroiled in a dirty civil war that discredits the Conservative Party as a whole. It doesn't enhance Labour's credibility as such, as they too are seen as lacking a proper vision for the future, but proper polls have also seen a Labour surge this month. More on that below a couple of folds.

Last night I saw upon the stair a little man who wasn't there

He wasn't there again today, oh, how I wish he'd go away...

(Hughes Mearns, Antigonish, 1899)

If you gave a Neanderthal man a tracksuit and a haircut,

he would attract no more attention than any of the other nutters on the bus.

(Stephen Fry, QI: Humans, 2010)

All pollsters love to have a go at leaders' ratings, that thing between a beauty pageant and a performance assessment by your HR guy. There's more material here than can be used, so this time I picked up Opinium's last such survey, that has the upside of pitting Sunak, Truss and Starmer side by side, with the same criteria. The panel are asked to rate their opinion of them on the usual scale from 'strongly agree' to 'strongly disagree' with the idea that they possess this or that trait that will make them endearing or able to win an election. Two concepts that are neither mutually exclusive nor fully poecilonymic, but somewhere in between. For an easier comparison, the chart below represents the sum of 'strongly agree' and 'somewhat agree' ratings, what you could translate into the positive ratings for each of the contenders. There is an interesting contradiction in these results. Keir Starmer has a statistically significant lead over Liz Truss, on the average ratings for the nine selected criteria, with Rishi Sunak a distant third. But it transitions into a statistical tie when the panel have to assess which has the most prime-ministerial look.

There is a massive alarm in there for Rishi Sunak, as the panel see him as an aloof character, out of touch with both the people and what they believe in. Which is what you might expect people would think about a man who's rich as creosote, and thinks being born in Southampton makes him Northern. Acknowledgment of his competence and abilities is just not enough to make him the People's PM. It is also evidence that all his PR stunts to convey that very image have massively backfired. Saying that Wunderkind is a man of the people because he once ate at McDo's is just as credible as saying Christmas is a Jewish festival because 'mistletoe' is the Yorkshire pronunciation of 'mazel tov'. Ipsos Mori fielded a similar poll, but removing the personal element. Their questions are not about whom would be the best at this or that, but about which type of government the people would trust to achieve this or that and whatnot. Here again, the ratings are the sum of positive replies for each contender.

At face value, these results are good news for Keir Starmer and Labour, though the average ratings would not deliver a solid majority if they were duplicated as vote shares on Election Day. As you might expect, a Labour government under Sly Keir does well on issues that are generally considered left-wing, like the NHS or public services. But it also does well on other issues that are mostly associated with the right, like foreign policy and immigration. Its only perceived weaknesses are the economy and taxation. Which is a bit ironic when you think that even Rishi Sunak thinks that Liz Truss's plans for the economy and her tax cuts would wreck the British economy beyond the already massive damage the Conservatives have done over the last twelve years. There are simple ways in which Labour could alter the narrative, like stressing that fair taxation is essential for providing efficient public services and a strong NHS. Or that a healthier, more educated and more confident population is a strong foundation for a healthier and stronger economy. But that would require that Keir listen to other people than Peter Mandelson's focus groups. So don't hold your breath.

Nobody is smart enough to throw an IQ test.

(Graham Norton, QI: Genius, 2010)

England is the most class-ridden country under the sun.

It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly.

(George Orwell)

During Boris's Slovenia-cum-Greece Recess, YouGov conducted a poll about the cost-of-energy crisis, on behalf of The Times, who didn't make much fuss about it. The key question was about how their panel will deal with the next rise of the energy price cap. Can they afford it? Or will they have to make the 'tough choices' the English Government can't be arsed to make? There is no need to editorialise for dramatic effect here, as the results are dramatic enough already. A third of Brits just can't afford the rise, no matter what. Almost half will struggle to cope with it, and will have to make sacrifices elsewhere to feed the energy companies' CEOs' next round of bonuses. This is a quite powerful reality check for those who think Ed Miliband is hyperbolising for political gain, when he says that half of Britain will be dragged into fuel poverty in just a few weeks. Spoiler: he isn't. And should bring the two Big Dog Wannabes back to our plane of reality, instead of mantraing that they will do jack shit because a freeze of energy prices does not solve any problem. Spoiler: it does. A lot. Just not for your donors. But of course we're accustomed to both of them performing spectacular handbrake U-turns, so we can only hope they will in this case too.

Some environmentally-minded Conservative MPs have come up with a credible plan to address part of the fuel-poverty issue, while helping meet Net Zero targets. Of course millions of Brits would need much more than that, but even such a small step forward is dismissed by Rishi and Liz. Both of whom belong to the 12% who can afford a massive price hike. YouGov also surveyed their panel about the £400-650 'energy grant' that Rishi Sunak reluctantly authorised before quitting his last job. Public opinion appears split on whether the grant should be universal or means-tested, which would apply only to the basic £400-a-house grant. Interestingly the working-class part of the panel are the least supportive of means-testing here. Probably because they're the ones most likely to have already tested the British benefits system. So they know everything that falls into that black hole instantly triggers a massive deployment of red tape and bureaucratic pernicketing from the DWP. Making the grant universal obviously makes the scheme simpler and that's what will happen anyway. You can also argue that it's better to give away £400 to people who possibly don't need it, than withhold it from people who do need it and more. Which is what the DWP bureaucracy would certainly try and achieve with their multilayered eligibility tests.

The energy crisis is part of a bigger problem, with inflation already reaching double digits in July, worse than the Bank of England's forecast. Obviously it can only get worse before it gets worse, probably ending on 15% or higher by Christmas Eve. The massive increase of energy prices, under Ofgem's reliable protection of the energy companies' financial interests, accounts for about half of this inflation and there are already many proposals on the table to tackle it. If the politicians don't know how, or do but won't, public opinion has fairly clear ideas about what should be done, and I have two polls to prove it. First the tail part of the aforementioned YouGov poll, and then another one from Opinium, that treads pretty much the same waters, but with some exquisitely added spice. Which we are gonna need in these weird times when fossil-fuel corporations run TV ads about how good they are at supplying clean electricity, when people can't even afford the dirty one. More below the fold.

The government, no matter its past failure, or in times to come for that matter,

the government can be a place where people come together, and where no one gets left behind.

(Toby Ziegler, The West Wing: He Shall, From Time to Time…, 2000)

Breatharians claim to live purely off light and air.

I would guess they’re the only people who can bore vegans at dinner parties.

(Sandi Toksvig, QI: Quaffing, 2020)

What people need right now is first and foremost the government taking back control of Ofgem and cancelling all future increases of the energy price cap, pending further investigation. Which Labour has at last realised is not only possible, but necessary, besides being a vote winner. This is just a matter of political will to stand up for the people, and tell the energy lobby to fuck off. France has done that under Macron, who is certainly not a Communist and mostly not even a left-winger. If the UK had the same price cap as France, +4% a year for 2022 and 2023, the Ofgem price cap would be £1,328 next October instead of £3,549, and £1,381 come next April, instead of a predicted £6,823. Which is of course easier to do in France, where the main energy company EDF is state-owned and has been fully renationalised by the Macron government, after previous governments had sold 17% of it to the private sector. The cost was about £15bn, which is obviously a better use of public funds than some bailout of energy companies, that Liz Truss is allegedly contemplating. The YouGov poll has just found that there is massive popular support for a freeze of the energy price cap. Which would of course be at its present level, not the October one, and is supported across all demographics and politics.

I have blended the 'somewhat oppose' and 'strongly oppose' items into just one as there were so few people supporting either. Oddly, Conservative and LibDem voters are more reluctant to support a freeze, probably because it goes against all the neo-liberal 'free market' dogmas. But now looks like exactly the right time to ditch those. There are many ways to deal with the energy crisis and avoid a total collapse of the system. One is certainly not to do what the German government just did, a new tax on gas that is predicted to cost the average household about £400 per year. And is also a not very subtle way to make the average taxpayer subsidise the energy companies. The obvious alternative is a windfall tax, which enjoys even more massive support than the price cap freeze, and again all across the spectrum.

This poll, from an allegedly Tory-friendly pollster, proves that the political choice is not between a price hike freeze and a windfall tax, but must be a combination of the two, which would have strong popular support. Clearly Liz Truss's half-baked proposals, like cancelling the National Insurance hike or indirectly compensating through tax cuts, are not what the people expect, besides being woefully inadequate. So are the current energy grants, and even Boris Johnson agrees with this, conveniently forgetting he is the one who enforced them. Then I guess his defence is something like "it wasn't me, Rishi did it". Of course, any new variant of the windfall tax would have to be a genuine one, not the loopholed-beyond-recognition thing favoured by Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson. Liz Truss and her supporters totally rowing back from a stronger variant is also not what the public want. Clearly, the people don't give a fucking shit about energy companies' balance sheets, especially when billions have been spaffed on CEOs' wages and bonuses or on dividends. Now folks, don't forget it can only get worse before it gets better. If you loved the energy crisis, you're gonna be thrilled by the water crisis. Coming soon to a reservoir near you.

The genes for hibernation already exist in the human body and, ironically, they’re dormant.

(Sandi Toksvig, QI: Night, 2016)

When I was poor and I complained about inequality, they said I was bitter.

Now I’m rich and I complain about inequality, they say I’m a hypocrite.

I’m starting to think they just don’t want to talk about inequality.

(Russell Brand)

Opinium also polled their panel about the solutions to the cost-of-energy crisis, but in a subtly disingenuous way. They used a list of seven options, all taken from proposals Gordon Brown had made some days earlier in a column published by The Guardian. But they did not mention whom the proposals came from, just in case it would have introduced some sort of bias. Only in the follow up question, asking the panel whether they would support all the proposals being enacted at once, did they casually mention that Gordzilla was the author. Quite a smart move, I'd say, so the Conservative-leaning people in their panel wouldn't reject the proposals just because of who had put them on the table. Which some Labour-leaning respondents might also have done, by the way. Not surprsingly, the answers went pretty much in the same direction as in the aforementioned YouGov poll. So let's start with the most consensual, or less divisive parts, including some that are pretty much already implemented.

Even the boldest proposal in this first batch, increasing the energy grant to an amount matching the current energy price cap, received massive support. The wording indicates it would be limited to low-income households, those who will receive the 'augmented' £650 grant under the English Government's current plan. But it's still a massive ideological tectonic shift for believers in free markets opposed to the nanny state, as it says that the government would foot the energy bill in full for about a third of the British population. But surely nobody had the time to do the math in their head while taking the poll, so let's take it as a genuine sign of solidarity, kindness and generosity. Three words, three always, to stress your point. The questioning then moved on to the boldest part of Gordon Brown's proposals, those that can be properly labeled 'left wing'. Meaning those Peter Mandelson will advise Keir Starmer to disregard, because Tony Blair would never had done it. But here again there is a massive level of support, even from Conservative voters.

Ofgem's tweaked energy price cap, which turns out to be an energy price scam, is as unpopular as you might expect, even among Conservative voters. But this ship has now bolted, so the proper question is how strongly people would support rolling back the October hike. Which would certainly be really popular. Support for a genuine windfall tax is also unexpectedly high from all corners of the political spectrum. There is of course some fine print attached to Brown's variant of the windfall tax, which was explained in the actual full wording of the question. That it would be based on profits cashed in by the energy companies and bonuses awarded in the financial services sector. Public opinion obviously doesn't fall for the narrative that it would hurt the economy and stifle investment on Net Zero. They're obviously aware that the UK is already heading into a recession that could possibly match Russia's after the sanctions, and that lack of bold initiative to tackle the cost-of-living disaster can only make matters worse. Even more surprisingly, even nationalisation is not the divisive issue you'd thought it would be. The only caveat here is that Gordon Brown made it only marginally left-wing when he proposed only temporary public ownership. Which is pretty much an euphemism for bailout and socializing only the losses and never the profits. Then the important part is the conclusion: two thirds of Brits supporting enforcing all of Brown's proposals at once. Did the next Labour Manifesto just write itself here, or will Peter Mandelson stand in the way? That's the right moment, and the right issues, for Keir Starmer to show some real leadership.

The greatest hazard of all, losing oneself, can occur very quietly in the world.

Almost as if it were nothing at all.

(Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, 1849)

When you got the law on your side, argue the law.

When you got the facts on your side, argue the facts.

(Josiah Bartlet, The West Wing: Five Votes Down, 1999)

Quite appropriately in the current context, Survation has just conducted a poll, on behalf of We Own It, about the British public's views about public ownership vs privatisation of a number of key sectors. Of course We Own It are vocal supporters of public ownership, but the poll's unusually high sample of 4k is enough to dismiss any suspicion of bias. Which may arise from some circles as the findings of the poll are unambiguous and unequivocal. And this is where words fail me, because that sort of sentence is supposed to include three perfectly synonymous terms for better effect. Anyway, the public's support for public ownership is significant, massive and overwhelming, starting with three sectors that are part of everyday life but not necessarily seen as strategic in the grand scheme of things. Quite remarkably, support for public ownership is shared by all political tribes, as delimited by the respondents' remembered vote in December 2019.

There are lessons for everyone in this poll, first of all the Conservative Party and the Scottish Government. Conservative voters do support public ownership of key sectors, even if by smaller majorities that the general population. And North Of The Wall, not only do SNP voters massively support public ownership, but Scots in general do regardless of their political persuasion. Support for public ownership in the Scottish subsample is 3% to 8% higher than average, depending on the item. 70% of Scots support public ownership of energy services, so the SNP will have some explaining to do about the reasons why they reneged on their manifesto pledge to create a public energy company in Scotland. Just saying.

In the other three sectors, which count as genuinely strategic and tick all the boxes from cost-of-living to national security, public opinion is also unambiguously supporting public ownership. And Conservative voters do not go against the trend, which should send a clear message to the two Big Dog Hopefuls. If you can't or won't read the room, at least read your own corner of the room and do what they want you to do. But don't use the word 'nationalisation', that might scare some of them off. This poll was published on the same day The Guardian published an eye-opening and eye-watering column about the privatisation of English water under Margaret Thatcher. Which was a complete scam akin to highway robbery. And don't tell me Labour would never have done anything as dishonestly vile. They did, they even inherited the basic specifications from John Major, but they were smart enough to give it a coat of red paint and call it PFI, so nobody saw the strings attached. There is a side-story to this in another poll conducted by Survation, this time in Scotland only, with a question about who should lead investment in the energy transition. 34% of Scots say it should be the private sector, 31% the UK government and 25% the Scottish Government. Among SNP voters, the votes go 29%, 22% and 40% respectively. Solid majorities again for the public sector leading the way in the core component of the road to Net Zero 2050. Listen now, Nicola.

There are two things in the world you never want to let people see how you make them.

Laws and sausages.

(Leo McGarry, The West Wing: Five Votes Down, 1999)

What do lawyers and sperm have in common?

One in fifty million has the chance of becoming a human being.

(Stephen Fry, QI: Cheating, 2005)

I have a hunch there will not be a Winter Of Discontent in 2023. Actually we already have a Summer Of Unrest, and then my tenner is on an incoming Autumn Of Discontent, followed by a Winter Of Rebellion. If we go back in time to the early months of 1979, the Conservatives led by 6 to 21% in voting intentions polls, quite an impressive spread, but polls back then were not as reliable as those we have now, were they? The real and massive alarm for Labour was the Liverpool Edge Hill by-election, where they lost a seat they held since 1945 to the Liberals on a 30% swing, on the day after the infamous vote of no confidence that sealed James Callaghan's fate. Adding insult to injury, the Liberals held the seat at the general election six weeks later, not something you see often after a shock by-election. Not saying there is any similarity with the current situation, but even if history never repeats itself, it sometimes stammers. Now the challenge for Labour is to buck the trend that sees their voting intentions first get up, then get down without ever reaching a stable plateau that would guarantee a convincing victory and a majority. By the way, after the Winter Of Discontent in 1979, the Conservatives' lead in the polls did go down a wee smitch. But they still ended up winning the election. Just saying.

Labour voting intentions are on the up again in the most recent batch of polls, but we know this might not last. The Conservatives have been in drier straits already and rebounded. Which is not what should happen, with something akin to a general strike very plausibly looming on the horizon, and the contenders for Conservative leadership talking out of their arse from the far side of Mordor. On top of that, Enoch Powell's infamous rivers of blood have given way to rivers of shit, literally, and the Conservatives can't be arsed to do anything about it. Or about anything at all, for that matter. But something just doesn't click and the pieces don't fall together nicely, when even The Guardian lurches to the left of Labour and praises union leaders. Obviously, the public do sense something fishy with Labour, as if they have somehow interiorised the belief that they're not good enough and won't meet expectations. But, as the saying goes, act as if ye have faith and faith shall be given to ye. Or, in lame man's terms, fake it till you make it. Fail that and all bets are off. Honestly, if Labour don't lose the next election, it isn't gonna be because they didn't try hard enough.

You can’t leave footprints in the sands of time if you’re sitting on your butt.

And who wants to leave butt prints in the sands of time?

(Bob Moawad)

I took some stuff to my local charity shop, some clothes.

And I’ve become increasingly irate I haven’t made the window display yet.

(Josh Widdicombe)

This month, we were graced with two iterations of YouGov's political trackers. Which are actual trackers, as they do track the shifts of public opinion by asking the same questions over and over, and hoping for different results. Which is not a sign of madness here, but rather of a genuine method, as they do get different results every time. The last verdict is pretty harsh on the English Government, who get only 26% approval on average, against a massive 60% disapproval. What sums it up best is the evolution of their net approval rating, which reaches -35 in this delivery, when it was -31 in May and -27 in March. And ironically -36 in July, just before Boris Johnson went AWOL for the balance of his term, except for the last photo-op in Kyiv. So a total absence of government fares slightly better than an active government, which says a lot about the level of discredit this government has earned, all thanks to sloppy work and obfuscation. Their worst performance is, as you might expect, on inflation (down from -51 in March to -75 now) and the economy (down from -35 to -64). Their only perennial positives are on defence, which is surprising as we don't really have one, and terrorism, which admittedly has been almost extinct on UK soil since mid-2017.

In the previous iteration of their trackers, YouGov also asked their panel which party they think would deal best with a number of issues. In the past, they had limited the options to Labour and the Conservatives, but this time they went fishing with a much wider net. I guess that the rationale behind offering more options was that there would be more alternatives to the Conservatives, and Labour's score would thusly be lower. It's what magicians call misdirection, and the common people fucking bullshit. And it kind of worked. On average, Labour still come out first, but with a lower margin than other pollsters found in similar surveys. In some caseq, these results even contradict YouGov's own findings in the aforementioned trackers that were fielded just a week later. But never mind. If the mission was to prove that the Conservatives are not as bad as you'd have thunk, and that it's a matter of optics, then it's accomplished. Even if it does not make Liz Truss's electoral prospects any better.

Despite the bias, this again says that Labour still have a lot of homework to do before they emerge as the public's genuine darlings. Which is why it is always surprising to see them act in the exact opposite way. In the middle of the Bournemouth Recess, we were treated to a long-winded and somewhat word-salady column by Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves in The Guardian. Supposedly about the living wage and Labour's intention to get really fucking serious about it. But they managed to never mention a specific amount, which is actually party policy, feart as they are it might be used against them at a later date. So what's it gonna be? £12? £15, as proposed by the TUC? People don't need to be lectured on how hard times are, or how badly the Conservatives suck. They know. It's more than time now for Labour to get past the stage of discourse about good intentions, and plainly state what they stand for, down to the fine print of specific details. Because, if they don't tell right away, they're gonna be asked anyway. And it'd better be sexier than just being all for winning the next election and against losing it.

Never give a gift you’ve been given to a charity shop. That will go in the window

and your friend who gave it to you will pass it, buy it and give it to you again.

And so the whirligig of time brings in its revenges.

(Stephen Fry)

These dudes in the House of Commons, they’re so sexually repressed.

They see an ankle and their dick explodes like a bottle of Sprite on a plane.

(Katherine Ryan, 8 Out Of 10 Cats, 2020)

Ipsos-Mori too have their own variant of trackers, sort of. Not actually trackers as, unlike YouGov, they don't field them at regular intervals, using the same array of questions. But they do field what you could call 'qualitative polling' every now and then, outwith the confines of the raw maths of voting intentions. About stuff that might indeed influence the aforementioned voting intentions at a later date. They did so this month, testing the public's level of trust in the two dominant English parties about two key issues that will surface during the next campaign. Management of taxes and public spending, handling of the cost-of-living debacle. With lots of crosstabs attached for the people's demographics, politics and geographics. I have extracted only the panel-wide result and the crosstabs for Conservative and Labour voters. And what we have here is both enlightening and lightly entertaining.

First of all, there is not a massive level of trust in either party on either issue, quite the opposite actually. Doubt and disillusion quite clearly take their toll, after years of both Labour and Conservatives telling us we should have more faith in the Invisible Hand Of The Market. The one that's so invisible nobody has ever seen it do what experts in Darwinomics say it does. Anyway, the general population here show both a healthy dose of doubt, and slightly more faith in Labour, even on the tax-and-spend stuff that is usually supposed to be a Conservative forte and a liability for Labour. The entertaining part if that Labour voters trust their own party massively more than Conservative voters trust theirs. This is quite spectacular in ratings about the cost-of-living issue. A majority of Conservative voters don't trust their own party to deal with it, and more Conservative voters trust Labour to address it than Labour voters trust the Conservatives. That's just one more of those low-intensity signals bouncing around the pollstersphere, that don't bode well at all for the incoming temporary Prime Minister. And all the TrussSpeak in the world won't make a fucking difference.

The Commons dress code is exclusionary, they can’t all dress like Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Who looks like he owns a Victorian slave ship?

(Katherine Ryan, 8 Out Of 10 Cats, 2020)

Eton is a sort of Hogwarts for wankers, where you get taught Latin and tax avoidance

whilst wearing full evening dress. These people have never spoken to a real person n their life.

Apart from perhaps their chauffeur.

(Jonathan Pie)

There has been a scarcity of election polling this month, due to the Lyme Regis Beach Break. Or have the pollsters moved to the safer waters of Cumbria, now that the Channel is covered in English sewage down to the Normandy Landing Beaches? Anyway, my Poll'O'Polls for this episode is made of the last for polls fielded by People Polling, YouGov and Redfield & Wilton (again twice) between the 22nd and the 28th of August. Super-sample size is 6,742 with a theoretical margin of error of 1.2%. Now we have Labour leading by almost 10%, which is better than three weeks ago and almost as good as six weeks ago. But it says a lot about Labour's attractivity, or lack thereof, that millions have been screwed with their pants on and still intend to vote Conservative. On a similar turnout to 2019, 31% of the popular vote is 10 million votes, give or take. A lot of whom most probably have many reasons to not trust the Conservatives anymore, but can't bring themselves to switch to Labour.. Labour HQ are even putting themselves on tender hooks, with leaked internals suggesting that Liz Truss could enjoy something of a 'honeymoon bounce' in polls next month. Which won't happen if Rishi Sunak has his way and chooses to stay outside the tent pouring petrol in. Don't expect these two to live in harmony any time soon.

Even Labour's PR strategy leaves you wondering. I fail to see how Gordon Brown's Seventeenth Coming, as a comedy double-act with Matt Forde, can boost New New Labour's chances at the next election. Nice try, though, even if it felt more Banquo than Malcolm. Instead of sending The Gordzilla on all sorts of futile missions, Keir Starmer would benefit from re-reading, if he ever actually read it in the first place, The Road To Wigan Pier, an 85yr-old book by a middle-class socialist, that is more relevant to today's world than anything that came out over the last two years from a New New Labour obsessively kowtowing to the politically-illiterate Articles Of Faith of intersectionalist groupthink. But there are fun moments too, like Andy Burnham again trolling Keir Starmer about his leadership ambitions, or lack thereof, or not, or maybe. There is no doubt Andy would have no problem reclaiming his old seat of Leigh at the next election, that Labour lost by barely 2,000 votes in 2019 after nearly a century holding it continuously. Andy will be 54 when the next election is held, eight years younger that Sir Keir, so don't rule him out just yet as the alternative if Labour fuck up the election. From an Aristotelian perspective, that's just an improbable possibility, no longer a probable impossibility.

A syllogism is: all men have bollocks, all men can talk, therefore all men talk bollocks.

(Jo Brand)

I’m going to throw this notion out on the stoop and see if the cat licks it up.

(Donna Moss, The West Wing: Game On, 2002)

Part of Andy Burnham's strategy to outflank Keir Starmer from the left is his support for the Enough Is Enough movement. The movement itself is young, having been founded just weeks ago by trade union leaders, including the most famous of them, RMT's Mick Lynch. Its aims are to fight the cost-of-living crisis with five demands: a real pay rise for all, slashing energy bills, ending food poverty, decent homes for all, taxing the rich. Basically everything the Labour Party should stand for, although Sly Keir might balk at the fifth demand, and convene a focus group to come out with a working definition of 'rich' before acting. In the meanwhile, Enough Is Enough is gaining momentum, or pace, as The Guardian puts it to avoid offending its more sensitive Starmerite readers. Several Labour MPs, mostly to the left of Rachel Reeves, have already signed up for it. There is no doubt their demands would make good policy under a left-wing government, and good politics until then, as their popular support is in the hundreds of thousands and rising quickly. Survation have tested their panel on the Five Demands, and here's what they found.

Survation used a five-degree scale from 'strongly agree' to 'strongly disagree', but the number of disagreeers was quite tiny, so I grouped them in just one category. First the three demands in the middle of the list, which are at the first glance the least politically controversial. It's quite amazing that you nevertheless have 3-4% of the panel who oppose these goals, which could be endorsed by pretty much every charity in the UK. Then I will give those who 'neither agree nor disagree' the benefit of the doubt, as they might be wondering about the practicalities. For example, offering everybody a decent home implies a massive construction programme, far above what has been done over the last twenty or thirty years. There are obviously many hurdles in the way, starting with councils refusing planning permissions because they fear alienating their nimby constituents. And don't even get me started on the overall cost. That's me on devil's advocate settings here, because that's the kind of objections you're likely to hear, especially in political circles and from self-appointed economy experts. The lot who have been wrong on every issue since the Great Depression. The 1873 one. Let's move on to the other two demands now.

This is the tougher part of Enough Is Enough's five demands, which quite cleverly bookend the list. Here's where Keir Starmer takes a deep breath and asks Peter Mandelson for some triangulation and feedback from the focus groups. The only problem here is that both demands are massively approved all across the political spectrum, including Conservative voters. The objections to such measures are quite predictable. Talk about substantial pay rises and you will hear the oven-ready soundbites about the wages-prices spiral, which has been debunked as a fabrication no less than fifty years ago by no less than Milton Friedman, the Founding Father of monetarist neo-liberalism. Talk about higher taxes and you will hear endless horrific tales about England's Best fleeing to the nearest tax haven. Which would be either the Isle of Man or the Republic of Ireland, and the bulk of their dosh is already stashed in tax havens anyway, so what the fuck? Hard times call for bold actions, politicians reframing their thoughts in terms of a new new world, like when one emerged from the devastation of the Second World War, instead of endlessly refurbishing ye olde one. So Keir Starmer should channel his inner Attlee. Even his inner Wilson would do. Or let Andy Burnham have his day. What would we have to lose?

German thinker Max Weber said that politics is “the slow boring of hard boards, and

anyone who seeks to do it must risk his own soul”. It means that change comes in

excruciating increments to those who want it. You try to move mountains, it takes lifetimes.

(Josiah Bartlet, The West Wing: Privateer, 2003)

We’ve heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could

produce the complete works of William Shakespeare.

Now, thanks to the internet, we know that this is not true.

(Robert Wilensky)

Then we had The Curious Incident Of Angela At The Fringe, when Labour's deputy leader Angela Rayner claimed that Scottish Independence would condemn the rest of the UK to Conservative governments for the rest of eternity. Which was quite amazing as an admission that New New Labour are so shit they can't get a majority in England and Wales alone. I guess Keir Starmer hated Angela showing so little confidence in her own party. But it's also demonstrably fucking porkies, and there are several ways to prove it. Let's try the easy one first. With 650 seats in Commons, the majority is 326, if we set aside Sinn Féin's abstentionism for the moment. Labour bagged 202 in 2019, so they need 124 gains to clear the hurdle. If Scotland becomes independent, the number of seats in Commons falls to 591 and the majority to 296. Labour bagged 201 seats outwith Scotland in 2019, so they would now need 95 gains to clear the hurdle. Winning the election would actually be easier for Labour without Scotland. So there, Angela.

You can also take the scenic route here, the more convoluted one relying on evidence from historical data. We know how many seats there were in Commons since 1945, that's 625 to 659, depending on the year. We know how many seats Labour won, from 202 in 2019 to 418 in 1997. We also know how many seats were allocated to Scotland, that's 71 from 1945 to 1979, 72 from 1983 to 2001, and 59 since 2005. And of course how many Scottish seats were won by Labour. From 34 in 1955, the very last time the Conservatives bagged a majority of Scottish seats, to 56 in 1997 and 2001. So it's like primary school maths to calculate what the majority was at every election, or would have been without Scotland in the UK. Then how many seats Labour would have bagged without their Scottish seats. And finally by how many seats Labour were above or below the majority, both in the real world and in the alternate reality without Scotland. Read this twice and you will find out it's not even one tenth as complicated as it looks. And the results are quite clear. Just look at the gap between the red line and the blue line. There is definitely a pattern here.

Every time Labour were above the majority threshold in the real world, they would still be without Scotland, albeit by generally fewer seats. Every time they were below the threshold, they would still be below, and not necessarily by more seats. At the last three elections, when they did really badly in Scotland, they would have lost by fewer seats. Admittedly, there are three borderline cases, in the twilight zone between one side and the other, which do not necessarily invalidate the general conclusion. In 1950, there would have been an exact tie instead of Labour two seats above the magic number. In 1964 and October 1974, Labour would have been 6 and 5 seats shy of a majority respectively, instead of one above the magic number in both cases. Then I genuinely don't think this would have altered the political realities of the moment. Attlee would still have limped on for another year and lost. Wilson would have had to enact a Lab-Lib pact before its time in 1964, to outnumber the Conservatives, which would not have changed the political realities much, as he already had opposition from within Labour to his more ambitious policies, and there would still have been rationale for a snap election in 1966. Then he could have risked a minority government in October 1974, as the combined forces of the Conservatives and Liberals represented fewer seats than Labour, thanks to the SNP winning an unprecedented 11. The key point is that Labour would never have lost an election in a Scotland-less world, that they won in the real world. Simples.

If a tree falls down and there’s no one to see it, it should still be upright.

(Johnny Vegas, QI: Hypothetical, 2010)

Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.

(Arthur Eddington)

The current seat projection only confirms that twelve years of omnishambles are finally boomeranging the Conservatives in the arse. It predicts the same number of seats for Labour as six weeks ago, which was already their peak performance since the last election. It's even a wee smitch better as the Conservatives are predicted to bag fewer seats, their worst performance since the last election. Interestingly, this is the result of the SNP somewhat recovering from recent lows, and nuking he Scottish Tories, but we'll deal with that one a few pages down. Even if the election was held on the gerrymandered boundaries proposed by the 2023 Review, it wouldn't alter the overall picture much. Labour would still win a substantial majority and, for once, the Liberal Democrats would not be unreasonably hurt. Thanks to the ever moving distribution of the votes between the regions of England, which makes their potential gains safer this time. A lot more on that later too.

Now the 'progressive' punditariat, in The Guardian, is pretty much putting pressure on Liz Truss to call a snap general election. This definitely sounds like one of those 'what could possibly go fucking wrong?' ideas, though it could easily turn into a 'how the fuck did it go fucking wrong?' situation. Just fancy that Labour's lead falls into the low single digits, which is neither impossible nor improbable nor implausible, no matter how unthinkable it sounds right now. Then we have this truly unmanageable situation of a very well hung Parliament, with Labour and the Conservatives tied on seats, and no outcome outwith a minority coalition government. Either something like Con-DUP or an extended variant of a Lab-Lib pact. The punditariat would love that, as they are such drama queens who love nothing more than the sound of their own voices, and such a mess would allow them weeks and possibly months of punditificating about what is, what should have been, and what should never be. But there is jack shit anyone can do about it, as Liz Truss is the only one who possibly already knows when the election will be held. Unless she hasn't made up her mind yet, or reserves the right to change it, as she reliably does all the time.

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

(Sandi Toksvig, QI: Ridiculous, 2020)

There is no idea and no fact that could not be vulgarised or shown in a ridiculous light.

(Fyodor Dostoevsky)

Let's go back in time now, and look at the history of my projections since the last general election. Or, more accurately, since May 2020, when polling restarted after the punditariat had gotten over the shellshock of the election results, and then the First Great Lockdown. Boris's Covid Bounce did not last long, and already in June, the Tories had lost ground considerably. Only to enjoy the combination of a Brexit Done Bounce and a Vaccine Bounce early in 2021, as the rollout of the Full English vaccine pretty much coincided with the end of the implementation period included in the Withdrawal Agreement Act of 2020. But Boris Johnson's shenanigans and the never ending story of Partygate caught up with the Conservatives soon. Labour's fortunes have ebbed and flowed, but they have come out as the first party in every projection since December 2021. But they're in a more secure position, above 300 projected seats, only since April 2022. And have cleared the majority hurdle only twice, six weeks ago and right here, right now.

I have drawn two lines for the majority threshold here, as there are actually two definitions. One is to base it on the total number of seats, so 650 seats say that the mathematical majority is 326. That's the one commonly used by the pundits and the BBC, as it saves them the bother to mansplain you why there is another definition of the majority. Which acknowledges the Sinn Féin Factor, them not taking their seats because they don't believe in the divine nature of the English Colonial Empire. So that reduces the number of seats actually taken, currently to 643, and the working majority to 322. To make it even more obscure, there is this weird concept of the 'government majority'. Which is actually not a majority, but a margin, as the formula is [number of government seats - number of opposition seats]. And here again there are two definitions. Depending on... you guessed it... the Sinn Féin Factor. If your mathematical majority/margin is 𝑥, then your working majority/margin is [𝑥 + number of Sinn Féin seats]. Which is how pundits could say that Boris Johnson's majority after the 2019 election was 80, or it was 87. And both were right. Simples.

There is only one absolutely sure-fire medical way of stopping hiccups.

That is digital rectal massage, putting a finger up a bottom and having a wiggle.

(Stephen Fry, QI: Health And Safety, 2010)

We hope that, when the insects do take over the world, they will

remember with gratitude how we took them along on our picnics.

(William J. Vaughn)

Quite unsurprisingly, we have recently heard more calls to enforce proportional representation (PR) instead of the current First Past The Post (FPTP) voting system. Mostly on the grounds that FPTP does not achieve a 'fair representation' of the people's will. Let's debunk that first. The parties who bagged at least one MP at the 2019 election accounted for 96% of votes cast UK-wide. 98% in Scotland, 97% in England, 87% in Wales and 85% in Northern Ireland. Those left 'unrepresented' were the Liberal Democrats in Wales, who must feel represented anyway by their English or Scottish MPs, and the UUP in Northern Ireland, but they surely feel represented by the English Conservatives, with whom they had many an electoral pact in the past. What the compulsive whining about FPTP's 'unfairness' actually means is that it does not give minority parties the power the exert undue influence on the governing parties, way beyond their electoral significance. Which is indeed good news from any rational perspective. Now let's just see what PR would have delivered from 1983 to 2019. The maths is easy to do as the D'Hondt method is pretty basic and can be handled even by a 10yr-old. The simulation is based on separate national list votes for all four nations, acknowledging different political realities. It also does not include a threshold for representation.

Full PR without a threshold is used in many countries, mostly where the political landscape is highly fragmented and there is a price to pay for it: offering a soapbox to really fringe parties. That's why Israel thought twice about it, enforced a threshold and raised it twice. In the UK, the lack of a threshold would have granted representation to the British National Party twice, in 2005 and 2010. I guess the mostly left-wing supporters of PR would find it a reason to think the whole thing through. Otherwise, the most striking result is the massive weight of the Liberal Democrats for most of the period, well above their representation under FPTP. Now you have to wonder what the LibDems would have done. Probably always agreed to a coalition with the first party, to 'respect the will of the people', and because it's in their nature to always side with the winner. So we would have got Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May and Johnson anyway. And Brexit too, as UKIP would have been in a position to blackmail the English Government with their 81 MPs in 2015. Nothing that even remotely sounds like a fairer democracy, more like a deeper chaos. Then I also simulated what would have happened if the electoral law had included a 5% threshold.

There is an element of massive karmatic irony here. The only party who do get representation under FPTP, but would get none under PR with a 5% threshold, are the Greens, usually the most vociferous proponents of PR. Then the far-right fringe parties would also have lost all representation, or seen it vastly reduced. Except for UKIP in 2015, because they bagged almost 13% of the popular vote, and a threshold mechanically adds seats to all parties who clear it. Thusly, adding some sort of ironic insult to the pre-existing injury, UKIP would have bagged some extra seats that would otherwise have gone to the Greens. Which again leads me to the one existential question about PR. If you're not good enough to convince 5% of the electorate that you deserve representation in Commons, what makes you think you deserve it at all? Just like the bastardised variant we have in Scotland, PR is the lifeline for election losers. And I don't even need to mention the in-built inefficacy of coalitions of opposites, that are the most likely result of PR. Been there, done that already, haven't I?

One does not keep a dog and bark oneself.

(Agatha Christie)

The whole tartan business is very recent, it’s not an ancient clan thing.

It was only in the 19th century when the Highlands became the playground

of the Royal Family, in Balmoral and places like this.

(Stephen Fry, QI: Highs And Lows, 2010)

After a pause of almost two months, we had more Full Scottish polling a few days ago. Panelbase did it, with a rather odd perspective on the incoming second Independence referendum. They started with the standard Yes-or-No question, which is the benchmark of changes in public opinion, and it delivered a weak No lead. Then they had three follow-up questions, reframing the Yes-or-No by specifying who would be the hypothetical First Minister of England at the time of the hypothetical referendum. Probably because of the subliminal guilty pleasure in seeing Liz Truss emerge as a disaster for the Precious Union, compounded by similar polls in Wales and Northern Ireland. All three Scottish options would deliver a Yes lead, but that's the wrong way to deal with the issues, making it something of a side-issue of partisan politics, rather than the constitutional question it has always been. This is the same mistake made by Nicola Sturgeon, when reframing the next general election as a 'plebiscite election' on independence. This is an existential issue, not one you can decide on which party you like best, or on who is in charge in SW1. Odds are too, that such results are only a fleeting blip on the radars, even if they make good clickbait headlines for the Scottish Pravda.

After the incidents at the Conservative hustings in Perth, and all the Twittersphere kerfuffle about them, asking which side the SNP is on is no longer a gratuitous jibe. It has become a legitimate question, and the responsibility for that is theirs and theirs alone. They're dithering, shaffling and futzing about just as the badly as the Conservatives in SW1. So a majority of Scots don't believe that the Supreme Court will rule in favour of the Scottish Government, and quite rightly so, or at least quite realistically so. The way the case has been handled so far hasn't helped, quite the opposite in fact. The Advocate General for Scotland arguing that the Scottish Government's case has no merit and shouldn't even be heard by the Supreme Court came as no surprise, and his arguments were pretty predictable too. We already heard all of this when Martin Keatings lost his case, and we would have saved a lot of time and taxpayers' money if the Scottish Government had sided with Martin back then, instead of sabotaging him and helping the English Government bankrupt him. But, of course, getting a ruling back then would have deprived Nicola of her 19-October stunt, and that would have been a shame. In the meanwhile, and even when Panelbase's three exotic scenarios are added to the broth, the trend of voting intentions is barely moving.

There is quite clearly frustration rising in the Yes camp, and also some odd Westminster-targeting paranoia. Evidence of this is the curious incident of the Great Boris Canal in the news. It was first mentioned by The Guardian in 2013, and was just one of many grandiose projects Boris Johnson came up with while serving his time as Mayor of London, none of which ever came to fruition despite costing millions in taxpayers' dosh. Then it reared its ugly head again in The Scotsman in 2014. In an abridged version that nevertheless mentioned a £14bn price tag, which you might want to keep in mind as it plays a part in the most recent episodes. Which were on display in the usually low-profile London Economic, whose target readership are 'young London professionals', probably a euphemism for hipster banksters, just after breakfast on the 16th of August. And finally on the same day at lunchtime in The Scottish Pravda. It's not the meeting of the minds you'd think it is at first glance, as The National cut-pasted a lot of The London Economic's column verbatim without mentioning the source, and added some outraged reactions from minor Scottish politicians to the broth. I'm not saying there is smoke without fire here, as there are indeed proposals to carry water North to South through England and Wales. But the furthest North they reach is Kielder Water in Northumberland, which happens to have the Cheviot Hills between it and the Border. I'm not saying it's against the laws of physics to take Scottish water to the mountain and then down again, but it's certainly not the most cost-effective scheme you can think of. Which is why I see the whole thing more as part of the cucumber-time that is an end-of-August ritual every year, rather than an actual cast-in-stone official project. Pending hard evidence that would prove me wrong.

Tartans were never related to families, it wasn’t “We’re in Glencoe and we’re

MacDonald’s, so this is ours”. That all happened much much later

and was an invention of the tartan-selling cloth merchants of the Royal Mile.

(Stephen Fry, QI: Highs And Lows, 2010)

In Edinburgh they have salt and sauce.

In Glasgow we have salt and vinegar because we're classy.

(Susan Calman)

Panelbase also surveyed voting intentions for the next Scottish Parliament election. They haven't yet disclosed the full results, but we got a preview from their client the Sunday Times, and also in the Scottish Pravda, whose journalistic skills seem to have withered down to copy-paste-edit in recent weeks. It is quite amusing to see the usually Tory-friendly Times rejoicing at the thought that Boris Johnson's resignation has boosted the Conservatives in Scotland. Then you can only imagine which heights they would skyrocket to if Douglas Ross resigned too. But we're not there yet, and Panelbase's findings are not a ringing endorsement of the Yellow-Green Axis, and surprisingly also quite a disappointment for Labour. Panelbase's Scottish polling is generally less Labour-friendly than Savanta Comres and Survation, but in the same league as YouGov or Opinium. So I guess we shouldn't read too much into this, as it is probably more the result of methodological differences, or random variations, than of actual bias. And their poll, pretty much like a lot of others before, does not predict a tectonic shift one way or the other, but some sort of status quo.

There are musical chairs here within the Unionist camp, weakening the Conservatives in a way that was already predicted earlier. And also strengthening the Liberal Democrats more visibly, as they would gain back Big Boy status in the next Parliament, and possibly overtake the Greens for the fourth party slot. According to my model, the SNP would gain Aberdeenshire West form the Conservatives, but lose Caithness, Sutherland and Ross to the Liberal Democrats. Labour would gain three seats from the SNP: Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse, Uddingston and Belshill, East Lothian. Which means the Scottish Government would lose their Minister for Equalities Christina McKelvie. Not sure I would shed a tear over this, as she is a prominent member of the SNP's Be-Kind-To-Maniacs Brigade. The SNP's lacklustre results on the list vote mean they would not compensate the constituency losses with gains of list seats, just holding the ones they already have in Highlands and Islands and South Scotland. On a lighter note, political sideshows at Edinburgh Fringe have been full of surprises this year. If you had 'Liz Truss asks Nicola Sturgeon how to get into Vogue' on your 2022 Bingo Card, you definitely deserve free tickets for next year's shows. Or you might think the First Minister of Scotland would make better use of her time and our money, if she focused on making the case for independence rather than on photo-ops and PR stunts. Just saying.

I love the Highland Games because they do exactly what it says on the tin.

“Weight over the bar” is one of them, and you throw a weight over a bar.

They have “sheaf toss”, you take a sheaf and you toss it.

(Sandi Toksvig, QI: Highs And Lows, 2010)

The fact is, it was perfectly normal to say England for all of Britain up until

the 1930s, when Scottish nationalism arose and they got rather offended by it.

I’m not saying it was right, but it’s just as it was, there you are.

(Stephen Fry, QI: England, 2007)

Panelbase also polled the incoming snap general election in Scotland, their first such Full Scottish poll since the day after Nicola Sturgeon's Big Announcement. In that previous poll, Panelbase had massively tweaked the wording, with a quite heavy-handed reference to the 'plebiscite on independence'. Even so, it delivered only 46.8% of voting intentions for the SNP, not even close to the majority hurdle. It hasn't got any better almost two months later, with the SNP vote going down and the Conservative vote up. Again the pro-independence vote would not even scratch the hurdle, with the combined SNP-Green vote reaching just 46.9%. Then some SNP zealots said that we must also count the 30% or so of Labour voters who would vote Yes to independence. Which is of course just fucking bullshit, as this is not how a general election works, and everybody knows it, first and foremost Nicola herself. This poll would deliver a net gain of two or three seats for the SNP, but only because of the fall in the Conservative and LibDem votes, on top of a surprisingly mediocre performance for Labour. Definitely nothing to brag about.

What we have here says that the very concept of a 'plebiscite election', for or against independence, definitely falls into the 'looked like a good idea at the time' box. After two months and further scrutiny, it doesn't look that good, because it doesn't work.I guess the SNP can only blame themselves for these mediocre results, largely due to their incoherent messaging, when they can argue both sides of the Schrödinger's vote depending on which way they want the wind to blow, that a vote for the SNP is not a vote for independence when Holyrood seats are at stake, but a vote for the SNP is a vote for independence when Westminster seats are at stake. Then I have a hunch that the SNP will have their Bad Godesberg Moment some time soon, or the Scottish reboot of New Labour rewriting Clause IV. It took the SPD 84 years to get there, and Labour only 77 years. Something similar happening in Scottish politics is, in an odd way, long overdue. Anyway, back to the present day and age, let's have another look at the trend of Scottish voting intentions since January 2020. It still doesn't point, despite some better polling recently, to a massive SNP tsunami that would validate the very concept of the 'plebiscite election'.

Of course, what we have here is mostly Scottish subsamples of GB-wide polls, and I have already stipulated that they are less reliable than a Full Scottish. But even Wokopedia, who factor in only the 44 Full Scottish polls fielded since the last general, show similar trends. If a subsample of 180 finds the SNP on 37%, what it actually says is that there is a 95% chance the SNP would be anywhere between 30% and 44%. Then it's your responsibility to choose how you interpret it, and experience says that going for the raw result is the safest course, and the one that ends up being the best predictor of the actual result. Unless you were trying to predict the result of the 2017 general election in Scotland, as back then the worst poll was the best predictor. This being said, my current Poll'O'Polls paints quite a different picture from the Panelbase poll. The Conservatives are predicted to go down with a thud, and lose all their seats to the SNP. The Liberal Democrats would also lose Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross to the SNP by a bat's whisper. But the trend says that Labour were probably underestimated by Panelbase, as they would snatch a polydactylous handful from the SNP, and again bag their usual Magic Seven (Airdrie and Shotts, Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill, East Lothian, Edinburgh South, Glasgow North East, Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, Rutherglen and Hamilton West).

There is a lot of unpredictability today, and 2023 will certainly be a turning point. Depending on whether or not we have a snap general election, an independence referendum, or neither, or both. Right now, I'd say that a snap general election is far more likely than a referendum, and that the SNP will need some special kind of juju to make it a success. With the additional problem, that Nicola's hubris has inflicted upon herself and her party, that the measure of success this time will not be the number of seats gained or lost, as it always has been and always should be under FPTP. But a number of votes that seems unlikely to be reached, no matter how you count them, and whom the deranged Aberdeen gender voodoo mob choose to excommunicate. That's when Nicola will realise she should have listened to Margaret Thatcher and John Swinney, and reframed her ambitions to just a majority of seats.

Can I just mention that, since we’ve been disparaging about the Scottish diet, that we

don’t all eat chips every night. Sometimes we have some chips and leave them aside

till the morning, and we have them cold the next day, and that’s a salad.

(Fred Macaulay, QI: Bees, 2004)

Dogs look up at you, cats look down on you, but a pig looks you in the eye and treats you as an equal.

(Winston Churchill)

The current Poll'O'Polls confirms that the predicted results in Wales would be good news for everybody but the Conservatives, now predicted to lose more than two thirds of their seats to a three-pronged assault from Labour, Plaid Cymru and revived Liberal Democrats. They would lose Brecon and Radnorshire to the LibDems, again. Ynys Môn to Plaid Cymru. And two oligodactylous handfuls to Labour (Aberconwy, Bridgend, Clwyd South, Delyn, Preseli Pembrokeshire, Vale of Clwyd, Vale of Glamorgan, Wrexham). It's better for Labour than the benchmark Blair's Last Stand of 2005, or the Corbyn Surge of 2017, and a massive improvement over the Corbyn Slump of 2019. I guess some would argue that this better result would owe more to Mark Drakeford than to Keir Starmer, but Sly Keir can surely live with that.

YouGov also tested the prospects of Welsh Independence this week, in a weird parallel polling to Panelbase's Full Scottish. YouGov also used the same alternative universe questions, reframing the Independence voting intentions with different persons named as the sitting First Minister of England. There was probably some division of labour here, as Panelbase are more proficient in Scottish polling and YouGov are regulars of Welsh polling. The baseline goes 25% Yes to 53% No, with the rest undecided or not voting. The partisan breakdown is even more counter-intuitive than in Scotland, with 31% of Plaid Cymru voters opposing independence and 34% of Welsh Labour voters supporting it. Just like Scotland, the Yes vote goes up when a specific Prime Minister is named, to 31% under Johnson, 28% under Sunak and 30% under Truss. Interestingly the better results would owe a lot to Labour voters, as a plurality of them would vote Yes in all three alternative scenarios. Support for independence is also at its strongest, in all four options, in the Cardiff and South Central region, which is pretty much perennial Labour heartlands with a weak Plaid Cymru presence.

A fox’s genitals tied to the forehead is the surest route to relief for a headache.

(Pliny The Elder)

Once in the 1980s, I met Johnny Rotten at the Midland Hotel in Manchester. I went up to

him and I said "Oh, Mr Rotten, I'm so delighted to meet you". And he said to me, "Fuck off'.

(Gyles Brandreth, QI: Revolutions, 2020)

It used to be, not so long ago, so clear that the mythical North, the one in England, was Labour's heart and soul. It's not so clear anymore, as the Conservatives had proved in 2019 that populist rhetoric can turn the working class around. It had happened before, in France, Northern Italy or the eastern Länder of Germany, and it was probably foolish to expect it would never happen in England. The current headcount and map show a success for Labour, compared to their nadir of 2019, but an admittedly moderate one. They're barely recouping their losses and bouncing back to 2017 in the North West and North East. Only Yorkshire grants them more satisfying results, bouncing back almost to the 2005 benchmark. Overall, Labour are credited this time with 121 seats across the three regions, four more than in 2017, but still twelve fewer than in 2005 and eighteen fewer than in 1997. There is even a potential of fragility in the predicted gains, as many of these are located in West Yorkshire, which has proved to be quite volatile in the past, and not just in 2019.

As you might recall from six weeks ago, the first time I used the maps, the black hole in the middle of the North West is Chorley, Lindsay Hoyle's seat. This is the 'Other' in the 2019 bar of the chart, for want of a better descriptor. The 'Other' in 1997 was Martin Bell, one-term MP for Tatton, otherwise a reliably blue seat that later propelled George Osborne and Esther McVey to the Cabinet. Then of course there's the curious incident of Edward John Izzard in Sheffield, which could be quite the spanner in the game. I definitely wouldn't put it past Keir Starmer to indulge himheritthem and grant him her wish to stand in a safe Labour seat that would be conveniently vacated for them. And the ensuing show might be more fun than expected. It actually could mean one of two things. Either New New Labour don't give a fucking shit about winning the next election, and one seat more or less won't matter. Or they are sure they will cruise to a landslide, and one seat more or less won't make a fucking difference. Either. Or. Can't have it both ways. Even with Edward John.

Sometimes pots need to boil, don't they? Otherwise no one eats.

(Agatha Christie)

Out flew the web and floated wide, the mirror crack'd from side to side,

"The curse is come upon me", cried the Lady of Shalott.

(Alfred Tennyson, The Lady Of Shalott, 1842)

For two months now, Redfield & Wilton have been dedicating a fortnightly survey to the Red Wall, that imaginary construct that did not exist before 2019, but has since become a staple of the English political punditariat's perorations. Or a good topic for slow news days. Redfield and Wilton's panel includes 1,500 registered voters from 40 constituencies. 7 from the North East, 9 from the North West, 6 from Yorkshire and the Humber, 4 from the East Midlands, 8 from the West Midlands, and 6 from North Wales. Which stretches the definition of the Red Wall a wee smitch, as it is technically pretty much just the Southern boundaries of the North West and Yorkshire and the Humber. You can put the Western goalpost in Delyn, but no further. and the Midlands component should surely not stretch beyond Stoke-on-Trent. But never mind, you have the full list of the constituencies in the Methodology sheet of the date file attached to Redfield and Wilton's fortnightly report. In every instalment they poll voting intentions, which are consistent with the regional subsamples of the standard GB-wide polls. They also poll which party their panel trust most on a number of issues, and here are their latest findings.

Here we're dealing with regions that offer Labour a stronger support than average, though the Midlands are more of a 'jury still out' case, more on this later. So it come as no surprise that Labour do well on issues that are considered more left-wing, even if they have to share one of the awards with the Greens. But they also do quite well on other issues that are generally considered to be more within the Conservatives' areas of expertise, like the economy, immigration, foreign policy and crime. Which is a bit of a paradox in regions that elected a majority of Conservative Police and Crime Commissioners just last year, but there is probably some kind of buyer's remorse at work here.

At face value, these findings are quite encouraging for Labour. But, there is always a but, this is happening against a background where anger against the English Government is rising, the unions are getting more resolute by the day, some would say more radical, and lots of people have lingering doubts about Labour's commitment to actually enforce policies that would benefit the common people. Labour should also not ignore the people's massive support for the strikes, emphasised again by a Survation poll about the Royal Mail strike, including massive support for more radical proposals like capping upper management salaries. Labour have been warned in 2019 that they should not take even perennial heartlands for granted, and this is certainly still true today. They should also be careful which message they send, as mixed signals generally don't work well. This is again my never tired Stoke-vs-Camden line. The Northern working-class don't give a fucking shit about pink-and-blue zebra crossings. But they do care about the price of baked beans at Aldi's, which is terra incognita for the Pret-fed rainbow-socked hipsters of Labourgravia. And that's a circle Peter Mandelson's focus groups won't square.

She know not what the curse may be, and so she weaveth steadily,

And little other care hath she, the Lady of Shalott.

(Alfred Tennyson, The Lady Of Shalott, 1842)

I used to buy two frozen doner kebabs for a quid, comes horse meat scandal.

I’m lucky I haven’t developed hooves, the amount of shite I ate as a kid.

(Jon Richardson, Meet The Richardsons, 2021)

Redfield & Wilton tried a different angle with the follow-up question, about the level of trust their panel have in either Labour and the Conservatives on some issues. This is subtly different from the 'who you trust most' question, and of course delivers subtly different results. Trusting Labour more than the Conservatives does not imply that you genuinely massively trust Labour, which is where Labour HQ should look up 'relative' and 'absolute', and try and grasp that these are two different concepts that quite naturally elicit different responses. For example, the panel's verdict on the economy here is far from being as clearcut as the first question led you to think. This and other questions show that trusting Labour more does not necessarily come from a genuinely high level of trust in Labour, but probably more from a massive level of distrust in the Conservatives, even on issues that would be traditionally seen as their strong points.

There is a case to be made that this poll somewhat illustrates the gap between peoples' hopes and their expectations. Wanting Labour in power, in the hope they will do better than the Conservatives, does not imply that you fully expect them to. And a cocktail of high hopes and low expectations can be explosive indeed. Especially for a party that has a hard time reframing their message to increase the people's expectations, and trust in their ability to deliver.

Oddly, Redfield & Wilton didn't mention the energy crisis or the cost-of-living crisis, unless they thought they had included it under the broad umbrella of 'the economy'. Which sounds odd just days after Gordon Brown, quite unexpectedly, came out with proposals to tackle the cost-of-energy crisis that Keir Starmer would dismiss as 'too lefty' if they came from anyone else. Then Sly Keir partly endorsed them and made them Labour policy, just avoiding the tricky part about taxing bonuses in the financial sector. Then it looked like Keir might also have fucked up the part about the freeze of the energy price cap, maybe because he's not too familiar with the common people's heating habits. But being £5bn, or even £8bn, off is just a ripple on the iceberg now, given the teranormous nature of the incoming disaster. That's giganormous times 10 to the power of 3, by the way. Or a thousand times worse, in lame man's terms. Let's just hope Keir gets his numbers right next time, before he is actually in charge of anything serious. Like First Minister of England.

I’ll never forget my first tin of chunky chicken, there were tears of joy in my house.

(Jessica Knappett, Meet The Richardsons, 2021)

Apparently it is possible to put the bins out badly, that can be done, that’s a thing.

I thought that was one of those jobs that’s sort of unfuckupable.

You’ve got one thing to do all week and you don’t give a shit.

Just kick the bins down the hallway, “They’ll find it there, that’ll do”.

(Sean Lock, Keep It Light, 2017)

Again, it looks like the Midlands haven't got the memo that they should be kind to New New Labour. There is a case to be made that things took a turn for the worse for Labour when new boundaries were enforced at the 2010 general election, which coincided with a 9% drop of the Labour vote in the East Midlands, and an 8% drop in the West Midlands, and things have never been the same ever since. Admittedly, current polling predicts a majority of the Midlands seats for Labour, but only by a hare's breadth. One seat, and a far far cry from what Blair achieved there. The headcount and maps show that Labour are now doing better in the West Midlands than six weeks ago, when they were already predicted a majority UK-wide. But visibly worse in the East Midlands, as they had an unprecedented full slate in Derbyshire six weeks ago, and widely miss it this time. Which is admittedly mostly of symbolic value, but symbols also matter and sometimes shape politics, especially when dealing with an iconic county for the labour movement and the trade unions.

Numerically, the harvest of scalps is impressive, with thirty seats predicted to change hands. But the predicted losers are all second or even third tier within the Conservative Parliamentary Party. Only five are on the government payroll, all of them in minor roles: Tom Pursglove, Amanda Solloway, Maggie Throup, Lee Rowley and Michael Ellis. Most of the Conservative intake of 2019, in these nether marches of the Red Wall, turned out to be just non-descript backbench cannon fodder, whose sole mission statement was to shut the fuck up, vote and clap. So they now go back to their private sector jobs, while the earlier generation stay on, more firmly entrenched in their rural constituencies.

Sprouts, they’re the devil’s haemorrhoids, they’re so horrible,

like the whole taste of a cabbage concentrated into one bite-size piece of evil.

(Jason Manford, Alan Davies’s Xmas Untitled, 2018)

Joey Essex, I met him, he thought that Richard and Judy created the world.

He got confused with Adam and Eve.

(Rachel Riley, Room 101, 2016)

There are still strong signs of an incoming political earthquake in the South of England. At first, only Redfield & Wilton found it, so it could be blamed on random variations. But now all pollsters find it. YouGov's last poll found Labour and the Conservatives tied on 36% and LibDems on 16% in the South. Earlier on the month, Opinium had found Labour and the Conservatives tied on 35% and LibDems on 15%, to name just two. These two crosstab only at the meta-region level, but most others drill down to regional level, and show that the Labour surge now appears more evenly distributed across the three regions, when it was more significant in the South West in earlier polls. Whatever the exact geography of the gains, nothing that happened at previous elections offered the weeest warning of it, especially not 2017 or 2019. The headcount is quite remarkable here, with Labour on 69 seats overall, their best ever result in recorded history in that neck of the woods. Which is fifty more seats than in 2019, and ten more than in 1997. And there's surely something meaningful to be read into Starmer doing better than Blair in traditional Conservative heartlands, when he fails to do so in the rest of England.

Interestingly, fourteen of the eighteen predicted Liberal Democrat gains are expected in the South. They would unseat Dominic Raab in Esher and Walton, which has been pretty much a standard prediction for months already. But also Jeremy Hunt in South West Surrey, definitely not something anybody saw coming. The trophy hunt is even more spectacular for Labour, with fifty names on their Bingo Card. Including Jacob Rees-Mogg and Liam Fox in Somerset, probably the unlikeliest gains of all. But also Tobias Elwood, Conor Burns, George Eustice and Robert Buckland across the rest of the South West. Alok Sharma, Iain Stewart and Steve Baker in the South East. Will Quince, Chloe Smith and Grant Shapps in East Anglia, jto name just a few. Even Liz Truss in South West Norfolk would have her margin cut to 16%, down from 51% in 2019. Which still keeps her at Number Ten. Not even Starmer would be lucky enough to unseat the sitting Prime Minister, something that has never happened in living memory.

An onion is the only vegetable that can make you cry without touching it.

A carrot can make you cry too, but you would have to ram it up there really hard.

(Jon Richardson, Funny Magnet, 2012)

You can develop film in the River Lea, but you can't kayak.

(Rich Hall, QI: Bats, 2004)

London is again predicted to be Labour's Kohinoor after the next election, even if current polls say they would bag a smaller share of the popular vote than at both Corbyn Elections. But a LibDem surge also helps here, as it would push the London Conservatives into an unprecedented slump. On these numbers, Labour would unseat Iain Duncan Smith in Chingford and Woodford Green, Theresa Villiers in Chipping Barnet, and Felicity Buchan in Kensington. Kensington is not really a surprise, as Labour losing it in 2019 was pretty much a freak accident due to a LibDem vanity candidacy. Chingford and Woodford Green has deeper Conservative roots, as it and its predecessor seats have been blue for more than fifty years, with only two MPs. Norman Tebbit from 1970 to 1992, and Iain Duncan Smith continuously since 1992. Chipping Barnet is even truer bluer as it has been held by the Conservatives for more than seventy years, with only three MPs. Reginald Maulding from 1950 to 1979, Sydney Chapman from 1979 to 2005, and finally Theresa Villiers since 2005. But changes in demographics have made both seats more Labour-friendly, including Labour taking over Barnet Council this year after 20 years of Conservative majority control. So it definitely looks like Labour gains there were bound to happen sooner or later. And, before you ask, Boris Johnson is predicted to hold his seat, only with his majority cut by half.

There are also good news for the Liberal Democrats here, as they would double their number of seats in the Imperial Capital. Reclaiming Carshalton and Wallington after one Tory term, and gaining Wimbledon from a five-term Tory MP are not surprises, as there have been clear signs this would happen for months. The real upset is a predicted LibDem gain in the Cities of London and Westminster constituency. There is an interesting tale of two cities here, that were merged into one constituency only in 1950 and held by the Conservatives ever since. Prior to that, the City of London had had its own seat in Commons since 1298, which were actually seats for almost 150 years, as it elected four MPs between 1801 and 1885, and then two between 1885 and 1950, despite its dwindling population. The City of Westminster was granted two MPs from 1660 to 1885, then split between two one-member constituencies until 1950, which did nothing to address its over-representation. The important point is that all this collection of seats have been reliably Conservative from 1874 to the present day. But the Conservative grip weakened already in 2017 against Labour, and then in 2019 against Chuka Umunna in his third incarnation as a Liberal Democrat. Westminster Council also changed hands this year after 58 years of uninterrupted Conservative majorities, so maybe they had it coming after all.

I think we’re the weakest generation since time began.

If Wi-Fi went down, half the population would die.

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

Can I just say to everybody as a health warning, you do not need a coloscopy

if all you've had is beetroot. I'm just going to put it out there.

(Sandi Toksvig, QI: Radioactive, 2020)

To end on a lighter note for once, YouGov conducted and published a poll, paid for by the Wine and Spirit Trade Association (WSTA), about taxation of alcoholic drinks. Coincidentally of course, this poll was released right in the middle of the Conservative Beauty Pageant and the panel was members of the Conservative Party only. Amidst this not-too-subtle effort to support lobbying, YouGov nevertheless introduced a subtle auto-check mechanism in the wording of the questions. Making some about reducing duties, and others about increasing them, just to check the panel were sober enough to pay attention and give consistent answers. Which they did, as there is a clear pattern of Conservatives opposing increasing taxation, and supporting reducing it. Which will be milk and honey to Liz Truss's ears, with her obsessive compulsion to enforce tax cuts, even when everybody tells her it's bullshit politics. There's one odd exception for high-strength cider, probably because they believe cheap prices make it a bigger health hazard than champagne or pink gin. Which was probably true five years ago, but no longer is after stints of lockdown-imposed sobriety. Or it might be an oven-ready way to make dosh out of the oiks rather than the toffs.

It was quite fun to compare the whole panel's replies to those of the Scottish Tories subsample. We all know Scots love their booze, which is why the Scottish Tories were up in arms against the Scottish Government's minimum unit pricing policy, and YouGov has the numbers to prove it. Scottish Tories are less supportive than average of increasing the duties, even on the dreaded ciders, and more supportive of reducing them. That does make sense, doesn't it? Then there is the trick final question about lower rates for small wine producers. This time, Scottish Tories are less supportive, probably because the full question casually mentions it would apply only in England and Wales, and there hasn't been any wine produced in Scotland for the last five years anyway, so what the fuck? Of course, the proposal itself has nothing to do with the fact that most English vineyards are in the Leafy South, with a high concentration in Kent and Sussex. Just the regions that Conservatives want to protect from a Red Wave at the next election, and pandering to tax-averse small businesses is a time-honoured way to do that. No shit, Sherlock.

The difference between automatic writing and mindless scribbling is interpretation.

(Agatha Christie)

Jeremy's Den

31/08/2022

Change We Must

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