Jeremy's Den: March 2023

I only see things. I don’t make them. I fore-suffer them, lying in the damp earth beneath these walls.

I say only what I see, and I know that humankind cannot bear too much reality.

You will know, and then you will wish that you did not know.
(The Seer, Vikings: The Ice Maiden, 2020)

Nothing is ever permanent. Everything is always changing. Shifting.

What is real today might not be real tomorrow. But sometimes, we have to help it to shift.
(Ivar The Boneless, Vikings: King Of Kings, 2020)

Remember to click on the images for larger and easier to read pop-ups.

Rishi Sunak's Great Matter this month was obviously Jeremy Hunt's Spring Budget. Another attempt to repaint the current Conservative leadership as the reasonable and competent ones, and erase the last remains of the Trussonomics debacle. Of course this was like Mission Impossible: Fallout as nobody will ever reclaim the £65bn spaffed by the Bank of England to mitigate Truss's and Kwarteng's crass incompetence, saving the pension funds and preventing the pound from falling to 1923 Papiermark value. Polls conducted in the immediate aftermath of the Jeremy Hunt Show in Commons, by Omnisis, YouGov and Opinium, show that any objective the English Government may have had was not quite met. First a glimpse from the Omnisis poll, asking their panel their general opinion on the budget, without exploring the specifics.

There is massive doubt about this budget, including its ability to fulfill some of Rishi Sunak's five pledges for 2023. The public are not really convinced this budget will boost growth, and definitely in disbelief when tangentially asked about its impact on the cost of living and their own situation. The interesting item here is whether or not this budget will male people more or less likely to vote Conservative next year. It's a net -23%, so possibly a hint that the current tiny Conservative surge in the polls might not be here to last. Especially as the main reason for it seems to be Rishi Sunak's Windsor Framework for Northern Ireland, which will be jeopardised by the DUP's decision to oppose it. Of course it has been passed by Commons, as Labour has supported it, but DUP opposition means it will miss its main target, which was to restore the power-sharing agreement in Stormont. Back to the budget, YouGov also polled their panel about it. They selected nine iconic items in Jeremy Hunt's Master Plan, and asked their panel if they thought each was a good idea or 'the wrong priority for the present time'. Which goes beyond the usual support vs oppose mapping, and the result doesn't look fantastic for the Chancellor.

The public quite predictably support the parts that will help them overcome some of the effects of the cost-of-living crisis. But there a reasonable amount of doubt and opposition to the Hunt's other flagship proposals. As you might expect, the least popular of all is the tax-exempt status for contributions to multi-million pensions pots. You have to wonder why, of all possibly unpopular innovations, Hunt chose just this one. You can't even argue it's part of some deluded belief in trickle-down economics, as pension pots by definition don't trickle down. It's not even the wrong priority for the present time, it's the wrong priority for any time. PeoplePolling also included this in their last poll, that did not survey all of the budget, and found only 23% of their panel supporting it, including 37% of Conservative voters, but with a much larger share of undecideds than YouGov. Opinium also submitted a list of select items from the budget to their panel. They selected eight, which only partly overlap YouGov's selection, and their results are not really more encouraging for Hunt.

The fun part of the Opinium poll is that they polled support for increased funding of the Potholes Fund. I didn't even know that existed. And yet it is a real thing that seems to exist since 2021. And now the 'curse of potholes' will get £700m a year. Which means Councils will still need some 20 years to fix all potholes across England. Because, believe it or not, it's an England-only thing. The English Government's website even give you the detail of the extra allocation for each local authority. More seriously, the Opinium panel are even unhappier bunnies than the YouGov panel over the tax-exempt status for seven-figure pension pots. There is also a debate about the new provision for extended free childcare. PeoplePolling found that 37% of Brits would prefer additional funding for providers to lower costs for families, and only 24% approve direct financial support to the families. There has also been criticism of the plan as unduly complicated, and also putting providers at risk of underfunding, which would quite defeat the very purpose of the provision. And it also won't fix the major problem, which is the overall lack of sufficient childcare places. Just as Jeremy Hunt thought it was a good idea to nick one of Labour's proposals.

Politics is almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous.

In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.

(Winston Churchill)

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again.

But already it was impossible to say which was which.

(George Orwell)

We've had a weird and unexpected episode this month, when the Match Of The Day was fought between Gary Lineker and Sue-Ellen Braverman. It definitely says a lot about the current state of British politics that this turned out to be a real story that was kept alive for more than one news cycle. There was definitely a validation of the law of unintended consequences here, as this futile and failed culture war against Lineker totally eclipsed Sunak's trip to Paris and his nascent bromance with Emmanuel Macron. On the plus side, it also avoided awkward discussions on why the fuck the UK has to pay France £500m to do the Border Police's work. But it turned the spotlight crudely to Sunak's Illegal Migration Bill. Which Rishi surely intended to be read as 'illegal migration' bill, but both the public and the punditariat were quick to read as illegal 'migration bill'. Especially after Sue-Ellen herself admitted it had no better than even odds of surviving a legal challenge, as it went against more binding international treaties than she could count. But posturing for the sole benefit of the far-right fringe of the electorate also has its rewards, as Rishi's standing in the Preferred Prime Minister polls has improved recently.

Keir Starmer's standing in this polling has also improved over time, but is not quite through the roof just yet. The public are certainly not enamoured of Keir as they were of Tony Blair before they actually tested him in office, or of Boris Johnson when he single-handedly delivered Covid jags to the whole Realm. Keir still has to prove himself and, to his credit, he does try, though not always in the most appealing and readily comprehensible way. I have made some fun of Rishi Sunak's Five Pledges for 2023 before, so a fair and balanced view definitely requires paying some attention to Keir Starmer's recently revealed Five National Missions For A Better Britain and a brighter future in the sunlit uplands beyond the horizon where Keir's magic powers make Brexit work and Spanish tomatoes affordable, and every dog will have his day. A recent Omnisis poll subjected them to the people's verdict and the results are quite enlightening. The panel were asked to rank the Five Thingies from 1 to 5, their own highest to lowest priorities. I definitely sense a mix of approval of the obvious, and bewilderment at some bizarre wording here.

Clearly the panel did not think much of a promise to become the Best In Show in the G7. The public certainly realise that aiming for massive sustained growth is something of a pipe dream when the starting point is barely better than Russia's. But the one that obviously left the panel perplexed the most is that thing about 'breaking down the barriers to opportunity'. This reportedly has to do with education and social mobility, and it certainly needs a lot of explaining to make it convincing. Tony Blair's 'Education! Education! Education!' was obviously much more spot on for the general public. Starmer himself put this one at the core of ''a long-term plan to unlock Britain’s pride and purpose" whatthefuckever his spads think that means in plain English. Unless it is North London Newspeak for 'Make Britain Great Again'. To be fair, the full mission statement does not really make things any clearer. Too much of it sounds painlessly like stuff a rookie management consultant could extract from ChatGPT and turn into a 10k-a-page PowerPoint presentation. If you survive the four pages of managerial gobbledygook about 'agile and catalytic government with a preventative approach' (their words, not mine), you will realise there is jack shit about any practical issue like the cost-of-living crisis, energy prices or fairer taxation. The public surely expect something more solid and bolder on these issues, and then some, and will feel cheated being told that more specific things will come later in the Manifesto.

To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.

(Søren Kierkegaard)

Years of bone-dry Toy government have built a bonfire of corruption and malpractice.

(Eddie Wells, Our Friends In The North: 1987, 1996)

Now that the Conservative Party have made themselves The Binfire Of The Vanities, the trend of voting intentions polls continues to be very favourable for Labour. Even if Labour's lead has slumped a bit, and is more likely to be in the high 10s than in the low 20s these days, which has restored some sense of hope in some Conservative circles. But hoping to fully buck the trend is probably just wishful thinking, and current polling is still more than enough anyway for a convincing Labour victory at the next election. As I mentioned earlier, the Conservatives have certainly benefited from some positive feedback on the Windsor Framework, but it didn't last beyond a couple of news cycles. Now the budget has received far less stellar coverage, and Boris Johnson's return to confront the Privileges Committee is not good news for Rishi Sunak. If Johnson falls, he will be tempted to take down others with him, and the current Prime Minister is an obvious and easy target. Sunak's own involvement in the Partygate fiasco is already on record, and Johnson would surely like nothing more than damaging a successor he considers a traitor. So the blue trendline is more likely to go down again before the Summer Solstice than to keep going up.

There are actually more good news than bad news for Labour in the trend of recent recent polling. Their lead over the Conservatives has shrunk a wee smitch since last month, but it is not catastrophic. Yet. It has more to do with the Reform UK vote ebbing and switching back to the Conservatives than with newfound Labour voters returning to the blue side. The Liberal Democrats also appear as less of a challenge in marginal seats, even if Ed Davey is openly trying to nick Labour votes in the South of England. The Guardian may have some newfound love for the Liberal Democrats, and may be supporting Davey's attempt to lure Labour voters to his side, the polls say otherwise. The voters quite understand tactical voting and, for now, it seems to be going from the Liberal Democrats to Labour, not the other way around. Finally, Labour is still doing unexpectedly well in Scotland, and the SNP's current troubles are likely to work in their favour too. More on that somewhere down the line. The general picture supports the view that voters are prioritising defeating the Tories over their own personal first choice, and that can only benefit the party that appears to be the natural option to maximise the chances of doing just that. In a word: Labour.

It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority.

(Benjamin Franklin)

Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.

Its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.

(Winston Churchill)

This week's Polls Pot includes the last four published ones, from PeoplePolling, Redfield & Wilton, Deltapoll and Survation. Despite Keir Starmer's Cull Of The Left, which could make you wonder if he hasn't made Churchill's definition of socialism his, it's still quite a success for Labour. Even if their performance has weakened this month, Labour have registered a lead over the Conservatives in an uninterrupted sequence of 473 polls over 469 days. Based on a super-sample of 5,346 and a theoretical margin of error of 1.34%, we now have a 18.6% lead for Labour, on a 15% swing from the Conservatives to Labour since the 2019 election. Both of which are better than what Clement Attlee achieved at the 1945 election, or Tony Blair at the 1997 election. The question now is whether or not the Conservatives can overturn the kind of lead Labour have in current polls. And the answer is 'yes', as it has already been done. Thrice. 1959, 1983 and 1992.

1983 is probably not the right precedent, as there is nothing today even remotely approaching the combination of the Falklands and Michael Foot's infamous 'longest suicide note in history'. Even populist legislation against the 'small boats', which might prove unenforceable anyway, pales in comparison to the Union Jack over Port Stanley, as a vote-gainer from the 'patriotic' wing of the Loony Right. 1992 doesn't really fit either as, believe it or not, John Major did enjoy a 'honeymoon bounce' that Rishi Sunak has totally missed. Then there is 1959, and Harold Macmillan surviving thanks to some sort of 'economic sunshine', that Rishi is surely hoping to get too. According to the Office for National Statistics, inflation was 9.2% in December 2022, and fell to 8.8% in January 2023. At this pace, it will take a year to halve inflation, and that's all Sunak needs to boast 'Mission Accomplished' on the first of his Five Pledges. Unless there are more unexpected spanners in the cogs, that set back the trajectory by three months. Fulfilling his promise on renewed growth will be harder. There is ample evidence that the 2021 and 2022 rebounds were quite artificial and just some sort of natural realignment after the Covid Depression of 2020. Prospects for 2023 are bleaker, and current forecasts lean towards stagnation at best, following the very same trend as in the last months of 2022. To make it even worse, government borrowing has reached an unprecedented level in February, and it's unlikely to get any better soon. Not really the scenario Rishi wants in the run-up to a snap election some time in 2024.

The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives

of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.

(Karl Marx)

A rotten house cannot be repaired. It must be torn down in order to build a better one.

(Godwin of Wessex, Valhalla: Miracle, 2022)

This week's seat projection is less brilliantly stellar for Labour than what we had a month or two ago, but they are still predicted to match Tony Blair's result in 2001, though with a significantly different breakdown of the seats by nation and region. Which probably illustrates in which directions the centres of gravity of English and Scottish politics have moved. But we'll come back to that later. Interestingly, we are now in the zone where the gerrymandering, that will be enforced some time in the autumn, does benefit the Conservatives instead of burying them even deeper. The slight decline of the Labour vote explains this, as they would no longer gain the seats that would fall because of a dummymandering effect. The battleground has moved towards seats that are closer to the profile of 'standard' seats before the boundary changes. The effect on the allocation of seats is quite close to what we saw for the notional seats after the 2019 election, and we're still safely away from the twilight zone where gerrymandering would reverse first and second place in a hung Parliament.

I have also included, just for fun, the projected results on proportional representation (PR), based on separate national lists, and regional lists within England, and a 5% threshold for representation. A hung Parliament that would require a Lab-Lib coalition for a functioning government, or possibly a Lab-Lib-Green coalition. Just to remind you of the in-built evils of PR, that can be used by extremist fringe parties to hold a government hostage, as the Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, of the HaTzionut HaDatit Party, reminded us a few days ago. He will get away with his very public hate-speech, which I won't repeat as you can read it in the Reuters article I linked, because his party has seven seats in the Knesset and Benjamin Netanyahu needs them for a majority, so he doesn't give a fucking shit about public outrage. That's what you always get when you allow fringe zealots to become king-makers and pillars of government. PR is cursed to deliver just that as soon as a loony party exists either on the left or on the right in a fragmented political spectrum, and even the watered-down Scottish variant does.

The Labour Party, of which I was a member, was the first to condemn the Jarrow March as hooligans.

Stabbed us in the back before we could go as far as Durham.

(Felix Hutchinson, Our Friends In The North: 1964, 1996)

The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

Workers of the world, unite!

(Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, 1848)

As I predicted earlier, and I fucking love to be right on that sort of things, Rishi Sunak's Winter Of Discontent 2.0 is giving way to a Spring Of Unrest across England and Wales. In early March, only the TSSA and University staff had agreed to the pay deals proposed by their employers. The Royal College of Nursing have only suspended further action, which may start again if their 'intensive negotiations' with the Health Secretary are not fruitful. Strikes have happened again, and some will extend into April, for RMT members in the rail sector, junior doctors, ambulance staff, BBC local staff, civil servants, public sector staff, London Underground and teachers. There have been actions in various sectors on 21 days in February, a further 12 days are already past or scheduled in March, and a further 5 already in April. Strikers directly blame the English Government for the continuation of the strikes, and so does the English public in most cases. Obviously, the level of support for the strikes is continuously watched by both the unions and the governments, as there is a steady flow of polls surveying it. Deltapoll have surveyed with a twist that no other pollster had dared try before. The first part of their findings first, where the dark green bars denote the proportion of the panel spontaneously supporting the strikes, and the light green bars the level of 'qualified' support per the modus operandi just below.

We have two series of results here because Deltapoll asked their panel whether or not they support this or that profession going on strike, without any further detail. But they also asked the same question for the same list of professions, adding information about the yearly wages for each, and the level of pay rise they are asking for. Which are the figures I added below the name of each profession surveyed. The '>9%' represents cases where the unions ask for a pay rise superior to the 'official' inflation, without mentioning a more specific amount. For some perspective, the Office for National Statistics says that the average yearly wage was £27,756 in 2022 in England and Wales. More precise amounts being £32,760 for a full-time job and £12,247 for a part-time job. The ONS also estimates that the average wage has increased by 6.8% in 2022, the detail being +5.7% for a full-time job and +8.6% for a part-time job. If you want some more gory details, the average for a full-time job was £41,866 in London and £29,521 in County Durham. What was that again about leveling up? The public probably don't know these statistics, but they know what their own wages are, and of course the wording of the 'qualified' question openly invites some comparison. In a way which might be called somewhat manipulative. Now here's the second half of the poll's findings.

The results are actually quite intriguing. Intuitively, you would expect the level of support to decrease when the respondents know how much the strikers make, and compare it to their own situation. At least, that was surely the intent, and it does so in only half the cases. The good news is also that the added data don't switch the result from support to opposition in any case, and even increase the level of support quite visibly in a few cases. There is not even a pattern where support would decrease for the professions with the higher wages or striking for the highest pay rises, both of which might be more than the panelists got in 2022. Looks like the panel guessed the ulterior motives and gamed the poll, or just answered more cleverly than the pollster expected. The English Government surely paid attention to such polling when it finally offered NHS England's staff a pay deal that looks acceptable, even if it might just be Jeremy Hunt wanting to do something popular after his Spring Budget received only lukewarm support from the public. The opening of serious talks with teachers and junior doctors is also a sign the government is relenting, and surely hoping more strikes will be paused or called off soon. But there is an alarm for the unions though, as support is dwindling for train drivers, as it was already in earlier polls. Which is surely why RMT chose to end the strike at Network Rail, which would surely have got more and more unpopular after they were offered just the 9% rise they had been asking for since the beginning. But now there is another strike looming on the horizon, where the English Government certainly least expected it and with the potential to be quite damaging even with a small number of strikers. Just wait and see.

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

(Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, 1848)

I sometimes feel we should make more scenes about things that really matter to us.

(Edith Crawley, Downton Abbey, 2013)

The NHS will most definitely be one of the key issues in the next general election campaign. Many polls have been fielded about it recently, and all rank the NHS as both a top priority and a major concern for the British public. Up there with the economy and the cost of living, ahead of Ukraine and far ahead of any variant of the culture wars. Which is indeed quite healthy and, in an ideal world, should drive the politicians away from pronouns and Roald Dahl, and refocus them on the genuine issues. Polls about the NHS tend to be contradictory, like on any other issue, and the more there are, the more they are. We know that the devil is in the details or, in this case, in the wording, as YouGov felt compelled to remind us recently. Let's start with a poll fielded by Opinium Research on behalf of Keep Our NHS Public. The first question, probably the key to all the rest, was what the public think about the level of funding the NHS receives.

There is a clear consensus that the NHS is underfunded, cutting across all demographics, politics and geographics. But nobody so far has found the Magic Money Tree that would solve this, and Jeremy Hunt has probably catch-22ed himself into squaring the circle with his Spring Budget. The English Government's last pay offer to NHS England's staff is a welcome outcome that should have happened earlier, but it will cost a fuckload. £4bn in Hunt's own estimate, and it might be just a start if junior doctors and teachers seize the opportunity to corner the government into more concessions and advantageous pay deals. We're probably looking at a £12bn shortfall for the NHS alone, and above £15bn for the whole public sector, before year's end. There is no way this can be funded by 'efficiency efforts', which seem to be Hunt's only strategy so far. Unless there is extra borrowing or some substantial tax hikes in the Autumn Statement. Or attempts to plug the holes with increased private sector intervention in the health sector. An option some of the public might be willing to consider, according to the Opinium poll.

Full privatisation, or a massive outsourcing of services, are obviously not what the British public want. Nevertheless, they look open to some sort of minority share for the private sector, which in some ways echoes what Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting proposed three months ago, which is like an eternity and change in politics. Especially as it immediately triggered some furious rebuke from some stakeholders in the health sector. The idea is also anathema to many on Labour's left wing, and explains why Streeting backpedaled later and described reliance on the private sector as only a temporary stop-gap measure. But his rebuttal of his critics was actually more like a general endorsement of the principle of 'reform' than a solid offer of long term solutions for the NHS. On the other hand, receiving praise from the right wing of the 'progressive' punditariat may have been milk and honey to Streeting's ears, but the very concept that reform should 'give patients more control' is questionable at best in this day and age of self-medication by Google. Besides sounding suspiciously like a slogan Conservatives could endorse.

What matters is to have power over the maintenance of our own health.

(Violet Crawley, Downton Abbey, 2015)

What is our task? To make Britain a fit country for heroes to live in. I am not using the word

"heroes" in any spirit of boastfulness, but in the spirit of humble recognition of the fact.

(David Lloyd George)

As I mentioned often already, polls from different pollsters dealing with the same issues are prone to contradict each other. Except when they actually don't, and polling about the NHS is no exception. Survation also conducted an NHS poll at about the same time as Opinium, and also asked a question about public service vs private sector involvement. At face value, you would think they don't send the same message, as support for a fully public NHS appears much stronger in the Survation poll. But it's only the optics, and once again mostly a matter of which question was asked and how it was phrased. The aforementioned Opinium poll was clearly more about a practical approach, and can be understood as asking about short-term stop-gap measures as advocated by Wes Streeting. The Survation poll is obviously about the guiding principles. So there is actually much less contradiction between the two than you might think at first glance. The British public are amenable to minimal private sector intervention to plug the leaks, but the long-term goal is still to fully reinstate Nye Bevan's founding principles, a fully public NHS to serve the public.

Another question in the Survation poll hinted at the electoral fallout of opposition to the privatisation of the NHS. The question was quite direct and straightforward, asking their panel if they would be more or less likely to vote for a party that promises to end NHS privatisation. A majority of the British public are more likely to support a party who pledges to keep the NHS fully public, with Labour voters being the strongest supporters. Conservative voters are less likely to consider this, but we still have a plurality among them who could be swayed by the parties' stand on the NHS. Quite remarkably, the level of implicit or explicit support for privatisation is extremely low, whichever way the question is tweaked. Even after 13 years of Tory governments using austerity to deprive the NHS of the necessary means to fulfill its missions, the case for privatisation is not made. A clear signal to any politician who would find it clever to continue heading in that direction.

This is probably the most important challenge for Labour in the run-up to the incoming election. Their own voters are the most determined to support preserving and rebuilding a fully public NHS. Unfortunately, Keir Starmer's National Mission to 'build an NHS fit for the future' doesn't really sound like a strategy, but more like Labour are confusing motion for progress as per usual. And all the fine print below that headline doesn't make anyone any the wiser. It sounds like stuff that a speech-writer could come up with off the muff five minutes before a conference speech, and can't hide their past vacillations and contradictions. All that made them look like they had more of an ad hoc hump of shifting positions than a policy. Clarification is needed and requested, and probably not the way Wes Streeting is ready and willing to deliver it. Now's the time to get your ducks in a row, mates.

The message is muddled. I wrote it and I don’t know what it says.

(Seth Wright, Designated Survivor, 2016)

The Highlander didn’t know what kind of booze the Devil was used to, but he could soon tell he never drank anything like this before as he was chugging the good whisky faster than any man should.

(Micky Bumbar, The Highlander and the Devil, 2018)

We were treated to two more Full Scottish polls this month, one from Redfield & Wilton and one from YouGov. Redfield & Wilton have polled Scotland only once before, in November 2022. Back then they surveyed only Westminster and IndyRef voting intentions. This time they added Holyrood voting intentions and the SNP leadership race. YouGov are frequent flyers in this neck of the woods, as this is their eighth Full Scottish since the last Holyrood election. This time, they also added the SNP's Best In Show. The IndyRef polling we have now is quite disheartening. Redfield & Wilton even found an outright majority for 'No' in their raw data including undecideds, something we hadn't seen in any poll since October 2022. It is also a 6% swing from Yes to No, compared to their previous poll four months ago. This result fits with a trend we have seen in IndyRef polling since December last year, while we had Yes in the lead for weeks after the infamous Supreme Court ruling confirming Westminster's assent is required to hold another Independence referendum. Not coincidentally, and I'll come back to that later, this reversal of fortunes happened around the time the Gender Recognition Reform (GRR) Bill was being debated in Scottish Parliament. Another poll, fielded by FinfOutNow on behalf of Scot Goes Pop blogger James Kelly, was released a few days after the Redfield & Wilton poll. It found an outright majority for 'Yes', but that did not buck the trend at all.

I must confess I am not convinced by James Kelly's article in the Scottish Pravda, defending his own poll and questioning other pollsters' professionalism. There is one major flaw in what seems to be Kelly's keystone argument. The other pollsters do not weigh their samples along 'Yes' vs 'No' votes in 2014. They weigh it three ways, 'Yes', 'No' and 'Did not vote'. So, as time goes by, the weight of the 'Did not vote' category increases, and these new and younger voters are strongly in favour of a 'Yes' vote. This is why I don't believe there is a pro-Union bias in all the other polls. What we are witnessing now is eerily similar to what happened around the time of the 2017 general election, when the SNP's dismal campaigning strongly played against Independence. We can look at that another way, through the snapshot of all IndyRef polls conducted in March 2023. That's four polls so far, polling more than 4k Scots overall, though there obviously are duplicates in the pollsters' panels. But the weighted average of all these polls still has No ahead by 5%, and only a remote plausibility Yes could prevail.

You have to wonder why this is happening, and I mentioned the GRR Bill purposely. Because we have a clue in another recent poll, conducted by Panelbase on behalf of Wings Over Bath... oops... Scotland blogger Stuart Campbell. We know Stu is quite vocal, and sometimes strongly biased, in his opposition to the GRR Bill, but the poll is not. The wording of all questions is elaborate enough to not make them leading questions. One in particular is as neutral as can be, as it just states 'Does gender reform make you more or less likely to vote for Independence?'. Not 'for the SNP', which is what I would have asked spontaneously, but explicitly for Independence. And the result feels like a punch in the gut, with half of the panel saying GRR makes them less likely to vote for Independence, and only one in six saying it makes them more likely.

As I said earlier, this is not the obvious question, but the results prove it's the right one. The inconvenient truth is that the SNP's pigheadedness in getting GRR done at all costs would cost Yes votes in an Independence referendum. The crosstabs make it even worse, with a third of SNP voters, 2014 Yes voters, new voters and the 16-34 age bracket less likely to vote for Independence because of the SNP's gender reform. These are the core demographics we need to solidify the Yes vote in the future, and 'less likely' outvotes 'more likely' in all four. I have a hunch there might be a subliminal message here, which was not in the question's wording, but I suspect was in the panel's minds. That Independence means 'Independent Scotland with the SNP in government', and this is quite plausibly what the 'less likely' respondents reject, rather than the concept of Independence itself. Something the SNP might want to pay attention to, if they were not trapped in their own echo chamber.

Only time will tell if it was you or the devil who got the better bargain.

(Leif Eriksson, Valhalla: Miracle, 2022)

The Conservative Party is now a right-wing English Nationalist Party,

and Scotland and Wales should be given the opportunity to break away.

(Chris Patten)

So we have two brand new polls of voting intentions for the next Holyrood election. What Redfield & Wilton found is the overall worst result for the SNP since the last election. The SNP's lead on the constituency vote has gone down from 26% in 2021 to 11% in this poll. And from 18% to 3% on the regional list vote. YouGov was more SNP-friendly, having them down 'only' 6% in the constituencies and 5% on the lists. What matters probably more is that Labour are once again predicted to finish second on both votes, with the Conservatives relegated to third place. This is more threatening for the SNP than what we had just before the last election, because it is quite clear that SNP-Labour competitive seats are more at risk now than SNP-Con ones were in 2021. The trendlines also show that constituency vote and the list vote are pretty similar for the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. But they're not for the SNP and Labour, as both feed the Green list vote. Mostly the SNP since the timely demise of the 'Both Votes SNP' mantra.

The two new polls are just a continuation of these trends. The total vote share for pro-Independence parties is down to 42% in the constituencies and 39% on the regional lists according to Redfield & Wilton. But 47% in the constituencies and 48% on the regional lists for the more favourable YouGov. This is still below the majority of the popular vote needed to spin it as a 'plebiscite election', and also quite bad in comparison to previous elections. YouGov takes us back to 2016, and Redfield & Wilton halfway between 2007 and 2011. Below is what my model makes of these two polls. I use regional crosstabs of the polls, that never fully match the theoretical uniform national swing, and are now much more favourable to Labour in their olden heartlands in West Scotland, Glasgow and Central Scotland. My model projects a 1-seat majority for the pro-Independence parties, based on the Redfield & Wilton poll, which would make sensational headlines. The YouGov poll is much more favourable for the Yellow-Green Axis, as the total headcount is just one seat below the 2021 result. But the penalty is a weaker SNP and stronger Greens, who would have more leverage to impose their agenda. Is this what we really want?

On these numbers, my model predicts that the SNP would lose eight to ten seats to Labour, but the exact list varies with the regional crosstabs of each poll, and gain one or two from the Conservatives (Aberdeenshire West surely, Eastwood probably). Five Ministers in Nicola Sturgeon's last government are clearly in the danger zone (Neil Gray, Christina McKelvie, Ivan McKee, Clare Haughey, Elena Whitham) as their seats are right in the middle of the regions where a significant swing from the SNP to Labour is expected. The probable changes in the SNP's list seats don't have the potential to bring back more than one or two of the constituency losers through the backdoor on some regional list. And it could get worse if the Greens go all the way and field candidates in every constituency. These would obviously be totally futile vanity candidacies, but could cost the SNP some more seats. The region to watch here is Glasgow. There is a distant but plausible prospect of Patrick Harvie gaining Glasgow Kelvin thanks to a shift from the SNP to Labour turning it into a three-way marginal. Even Humza Yousaf in Glasgow Pollok could face stronger competition than his 7k majority in 2021 would lead you to expect. The next poll will tell.

People like to see what’s on offer. Doesn’t mean they’re gonna take it.

It’s when they see the opposition they often realise how lucky they’ve got it.

(Rose Davies, The Jury, 2002)

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear,

so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

(Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire Of Louis Bonaparte, 1852)

Before we examine the last blow delivered to the SNP by the most recent Full Scottish polls, let's take a detour a few years back in time, to the run-up to the 2017 general election. This was an epic disaster for the SNP, despite Nicola Sturgeon trying to put on a brave face afterwards. And one that the SNP should have seen coming, because voting intentions polls clearly said it would happen. Here are the trends of voting intentions in Scotland between the 2015 election, that saw the SNP bagging a truly historic success, and the 2017 snap election, where they lost 40% of their seats. I used only the Full Scottish polls, those conducted in Scotland only and with a sample of at least 1,000, and factored out the Scottish subsamples of GB-wide polls. I have also highlighted the landing point, the actual result of the election, which shows beyond reasonable doubt that the outcome was as predictable as the Titanic hitting the iceberg.

The polls were just a rat's breadth away from the actual result, and got the main patterns right. The steady decline of the SNP vote, the Conservatives scoring big gains, Labour slightly up from their 2015 debacle, you name it, you got it. If you consider the trends of the Full Scottish polls conducted since early 2020 in the chart below, you see a disturbingly similar pattern. The main difference is that Labour and the Conservatives have swapped places for second and third. But there is a very similar decline of the SNP vote and a very similar surge of the Labour vote. In 2021 and 2022, Labour first siphoned a lot of the unionist vote from the Conservatives. This year, just as in 2017, Labour is also siphoning part of the centre-left vote from the SNP. For the same reason: a credible possibility that Labour will win the next general election, which is of course much stronger today than it ever was under Jeremy Corbyn. And this is reason enough for many voters to switch to Labour because, ye ken, better safe than sorry. And they also believe that it's more important to take the Tories out here and now than to offer the SNP yet another mandate for a Godot Referendum in 2050. Who could blame them?

Now let's get to the gory juicy part. What the two Full Scottish polls, and also a Survation poll fielded between them, that did not include Holyrood polling, found in their surveys of voting intentions for the next general election. I have included the voting intentions from all three polls, plus the weighted average of all polls conducted this month, including the subsamples of GB-wide polls. And then my model's seat projections on the current constituency boundaries, and the new ones proposed in the latest iteration of the 2023 Boundary Review. It is now a certainty that the final cut of this review will be fast-tracked through Commons in the autumn, and the next election fought on the new boundaries. Which, if you remember my earlier article dealing with this, have been carefully crafted to protect both the SNP and the Conservatives. And it works to some extent.

These results are actually not really an upset. This has been in the making for months now, and there have been enough warning signs for the SNP to reframe their strategy and up their game. Neither of which they are ready to do just yet, if the tone of the leadership contest is any indication. But we'll deal with that too a few scrolls down. What matters here is that the total vote for the pro-Independence parties is again far below the 50% hurdle, on 45% and change at best if you assume that some of the 'Others' would be votes for the Alba Party. And the best case scenario credits the SNP with a net loss of eight seats, compared to the 2019 result, or 'only' seven on the new boundaries. On the current boundaries, that would be the balance of ten seats lost to Labour and two gained from the Conservatives. On the current variant of the future boundaries, that would be six seats lost to Labour and one to the Liberal Democrats, quite unexpectedly as the proposed boundaries are supposed to hurt them more.

Some say, 'Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it'.

I say, 'Those who ignore history are in for a big surprise'.

(Stephen Colbert)

Any woman, or anyone facing prejudice ... if you let somebody stop you because of their opinions,

then the only thing you're doing is hurting yourself. I don't want to give somebody that power over me.

(Cindy Blackman Santana)

The Panelbase poll for Stu Campbell I mentioned earlier explores other aspects of the GRR Bill fiasco, in a surprisingly unbiased and straightforward way, given Stu's strong views on the issue. You only need to check the questions' wording to get my point here. I will start from the bottom, if you allow me, with the question about the Scottish Parliament representing the Scottish public, or not. You may remember that the SNP carefully avoided saying that the Section 35 Order went against the will of the Scottish people, but always said it went against the will of the Scottish Parliament. Because they always knew what we all always knew, and the poll confirms it. That the Scottish Parliament does not reflect the will of the Scottish people in this specific case. More than half say so, and less than a quarter disagree, which pretty much duplicate the people's view on the bill itself.

The crosstabs are also quite enlightening here. Even the demographics that are most likely to support the SNP's official narrative say the Scottish Parliament did not properly represent the people here, even if it's just by a tiny margin. Interestingly, Labour and LibDem voters feel even more unrepresented than the average Scot, while both parties supported the GRR Bill. The replies to the poll's first question are almost a mirror image of this one, with half of the panel supporting the English Government's decision to invoke Section 35 to block the GRR Bill, and only a third opposing it. The fun part, or the sad part depending on your perspective, is that Humza Yousaf is now backpedaling on taking the English Government to court over this, after making it a wedge issue against his two opponents in the SNP's Best In Show. Much ado about nothing.

The crosstabs show that there is a clearer partisan divide here, with SNP voters and Yes voters convincingly opposing the Section 35 Order. This reflects that they are the only ones buying the SNP's narrative, that invoking Section 35 is an attack on Scottish democracy itself, and the very foundations of devolution. Clearly there is no really convincing argument to support that view, and sooner or later the SNP will have to accept it. Then the real question is what should be done next. YouGov also asked this question with quite similar options, as I mentioned in my previous article last month, but Panelbase's findings are far less clearcut. Which only confirms that the question's wording was carefully crafted to not be leading. Fewer people here advocate dropping the GRR Bill entirely, and more support some kind of accommodation with the oppositions and amending the Bill.

The exact nature of amendments that would make the bill acceptable for a larger proportion of the public is a matter of conjecture. This could start with denying convicted felons the possibility to apply for a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC), which would forever avoid the divisive debate about transgender inmates in women's prisons. Or it could go one step further, as Labour proposed if I remember correctly, and denying the possibility of a GRC for individuals accused of rape or sexual assault before they go on trial, as this was the loophole used by Adam Graham and Andrew Duncan. Then there was another amendment, from the Conservatives if I remember correctly, to keep the minimum age for a GRC at 18. I'm not even sure that the whole package would be enough to appease the opposition, and there is every reason to believe it wouldn't, as the core issue would still be self-identification, and I can't imagine the SNP giving up on that even if it was never explicitly in their manifesto. Then we have the Greens blackmailing the SNP with their threat to withdraw from the Scottish Government if only one comma is displaced in the Bill. Something a lot of Scots would welcome, but it is highly unlikely the SNP would call the Greens' bluff, especially if Humza Yousaf is the next First Minister. So we are probably heading to a costly court challenge that will last for months, and only distract from the real issues that matter most to the Scottish public.

Words are not innocent. They reflect an ideology, a mentality, a state of mind.

To let a word pass is to tolerate it. And from tolerance to complicity, there is only one step.

(Gisèle Halimi, Une Farouche Liberté, 2020)

The main difference between humans and animals is that animals would never allow

themselves to be led by the stupidest of the herd.

(Winston Churchill)

There was a really sublime moment at the beginning of the SNP's leadership campaign, that is going to select the likely next First Minister of Scotland. When the SNP's NEC first thought it was a great idea to ban the press from the hustings, and then performed a handbrake reverse ferret just a day later. But that was just the beginning, as the campaign quite rapidly evolved into a fucking binfire that nobody could put down once the cats were out of the bag. When various accusations and epithets started flying around like a swarm of knives at a freak circus show, it was too late to put the lid back on what had turned out to be nastier than a Conservative Best In Show or an American Republican primary. Nothing says it better than two of the candidates challenging the integrity of the process and requesting outside independent supervision, as if it was Belarus and not Scotland. There was no appeasement in sight after Nicola Sturgeon and John Swinney both claimed they did not see what the problem was when, quite ironically, even Keir Starmer saw it. Various pollsters tried their luck with this contest, which did not really unmuddy the waters due to high numbers of undecideds.

What you can nevertheless conclude is that the SNP's membership are at odds with the Scottish public at large and even with the SNP's electoral base. The situation may look a wee smitch clearer if I factor out the undecideds, or not. Interestingly, the controversy over Kate Forbes's faith did not sink her candidacy. She was temporarily weakened and then rebounded. Quite ironically, she lost ground again in the last poll mostly because Ash Regan did better than in earlier polls. We still miss an important piece of information. The only poll of the SNP's membership surveyed only their first preferences. But the election is conducted on Single Transferable Vote, so the key is actually where the second preferences of Ash Regan's supporters will go. There is no absolute certainty that all would go to Kate Forbes. Extrapolating from the Savanta poll of SNP members, Forbes needs 55% of Regan's second preferences to prevail, if none go to Yousaf. Which is not implausible, but neither is it certain, and every vote for Regan that goes to Yousaf on the second count raises the bar.

From where I stand, safely outside the tent pissing in, this definitely looks too close to call. The tone of the campaign has become so toxic that I don't rule out the result being challenged, whichever way it goes. Interestingly, some SNP grandees seemed to agree with my joke that Humza Yousaf would be the SNP's Liz Truss. But they take it seriously, and are ready to dump him for some variant of the SNP's Rishi Sunak. Quite ominously, the trigger for such action would be a 2017ish drubbing for the SNP at the next general election. Which is exactly what current polls predict. I have a hunch it will get even worse in the immediate future, as nobody expected the leadership brawl to turn into the fucking omnishambolic mess it has now become, that even Nicola Sturgeon has had to acknowledge. That kind of 'Saturday Night At Wetherspoons' situation is bound to damage the SNP brand even further that it already is. I fail to see how it could be some sort of cathartic rebirth, as the Yousaf-promoting Guardian would like you to believe. Oddly, there has not been any proper new poll of the race for ten days now, even if the Scottish Pravda tries to pass a standard favourability poll as a 'Best First Minister' or voting intentions poll. It would have been enlightening to see how Scots react to the current mess, the SNP's Temp CEO denying members the right to think twice about their early choice, and Humza Yousaf resorting to shameless fear-mongering.

While the whole world was having a big old party, few outsiders and weirdoes saw what no one else could.

(Jared Vennett)

What the hell is this bridge? The Severn Bridge? What, you mean Wales is separate?

Is it like the British equivalent of New Jersey?

(Rex Matheson, Torchwood: Miracle Day, 2011)

Wales is still predicted to deliver an exceptionally good result for Labour, disturbingly similar to the Blairslide of '97. Ir could even be worse for the Conservatives, as Brecon and Radnorshire remains a tossup between them and the Liberal Democrats. Here we have working-class constituencies in the South returning to Labour, like Bridgend and Vale of Glamorgan. And iconic Red Wall seats in the North too, like Clwyd South, Clwyd West, Delyn, Vale of Clwyd and Wrexham. That's almost a quarter of century of mediocre Labour performances in Wales erased in one fell swoop. Plus the added gift of securing the three-way marginal Ynys Môn, despite a strong local showing by Plaid Cymru, who hoped to make it their fifth seat.

The incoming gerrymandering has some minimal effect in Wales, as it will allow the Conservatives to hold two seats in the same areas, but with a slightly safer result than the current boundaries. But it also allows Plaid Cymru to reclaim the redrawn Carmarthen, which was redrawn pretty much as one strongly Conservative seat absorbing a more competitive Plaid Cymru seat. But the small surge of the Plaid Cymru vote is enough to turn it around and grant them a better outcome than the notional 2019 result.

If you were better at math, you’d know that repeated luck is more than just luck.

(Abbas Hardin, Foundation: Barbarians At The Gate, 2021)

I went to Benidorm when I was 18 and I understood everything.

I assumed I was fluent in Spanish, but they may have been speaking English.

(Jon Richardson)

The current state of voting intentions across the regions of England outwith London shows that Labour are still doing well, despite losing some ground since last month. The swing from the Conservatives to Labour is not evenly distributed. The lowest is 10% in the North West, which fits with the recent by-elections in West Lancashire and Stretford and Urmston. Labour can't probably expect much better in a region that gave them their highest vote share in 2019. The highest swings are in the East Midlands and East Anglia, both on 21%. This is like a return to a semblance of normalcy in the East Midlands, where Labour were the first party during the postwar period and the Blair years, but totally lost it during the Thatcher years and the current Tory era. This is more surprising in East Anglia, where Labour won the popular vote just once in 1945, and were even outvoted by the Liberal Democrats as late as 2010. The Conservatives also have one, just one, reason to be cheerful. The Reform UK vote has ebbed in the North, so they no longer outvote the Conservatives there.

This translates of course into a very high number of seats, even it it has gone down from what we had earlier in the year. There are hints of tactical voting already here and there, from LibDems to Labour in the North and Midlands, and from the Greens to Labour in the South, which obviously helps Labour. The predicted number of seats is in the same league as 1997 in the North and Midlands, and higher all across the South. The 2023 gerrymandering does not change that much. It even benefits Labour and the Conservatives equally in the South, which was certainly not the intent. Which leads to the chicken-and-egg question. Is Labour more popular in the South because Starmer initiated a lurch to the right? Or did Starmer initiate a lurch to the right because he saw Labour becoming more popular in the South? Or is it a moot point, as Labour was destined to become the hub of middle-class social liberalism anyway? Whatever it was works, for now, but is not without risk as Labour makes inroads in regions where the swing voters were until now more likely to self-identify as One Nation Conservatives or Liberal Democrats.

This hints at two important things that could influence Labour's strategy in the coming year. First, the centre of gravity of their electorate has moved more than at any election since 1997. So they don't need the Scottish seats to bag a majority, but will probably get a dozen or so anyway. Because they have no reason to not go after these seats, as it could help them gain seats in the same areas at the next Scottish Parliament election. And also because the SNP are doing a pretty good work depreciating their brand in the Scottish public's eyes, and are not really on a trajectory of recovery. Second, they can afford to give away some seats to the Liberal Democrats in the South of England, even some where Labour came second in 2019. The key here is probably the results of the next Council elections. The textbook case is Somerset, where the LibDems are dominant by a wide margin in two of the three councils covering the county, though Labour came second in more Conservative seats there at the 2019 general election. This hints that highly symbolic seats like Liam Fox's and Jacob Rees-Mogg's would be easier to gain by the LibDems than by Labour. There are also iconic seats in the Inner Commuter Belt that would be better handled by the LibDems, like John Redwood's in Wokingham, Theresa May's in Maidenhead, Dominic Raab's in Esher and Walton or the now open seat in Windsor. Then I guess both Labour and the Liberal Democrats will have their geeks thoroughly dissect the results of this year's Council elections, and also last year's, before a Granita lunch to negotiate a Yalta of the most vulnerable Conservative seats.

The spectacle has concluded. And since we are in England, I suggest you make some tea.

(Blanche Mottershead, Upstairs, Downstairs: A Faraway Country, 2012)

If Labour moved headquarters to Newcastle, a lot of Londoners would find that a bit scary.

They’d be worried about getting a signal on their whey-aye-Pads.

(Romesh Ranganathan, Have I Got News For You?, 2021)

London is still expected to deliver a massive number of seats for Labour, even if they're not matching the Blairslide of '97 down there this time. But Labour has every reason to feel safe in Sir Keir's backyard, as the Imperial Capital is the unique example where the incoming gerrymandering favours Labour. And the Liberal Democrats too, though this could have been unintended collateral. There is anyway some unintended irony in the Conservatives losing more seats there on the new boundaries than on the old ones. In both cases Iain Duncan Smith, Theresa Villiers, Matthew Offord and Felicity Buchan are toast. But Boris Johnson would hold his seat under these new numbers, unless a recall by-election stops him in his tracks before the next election. Which is indeed the scenario the two dozen remaining Borista MPs fear. Interestingly, the two new open seats shoehorned into the Boroughs of Lambeth (Streatham and Norbury) and Newham (Stratford and Bow) are predicted to both go to Labour. And the heavily gerrymandered Eltham and Chislehurst in the Borough of Greenwich, notionally a Conservative seat on the 2019 results, would return to Labour, as the old Eltham seat was.

This is nevertheless an unsatisfactory result for the Liberal Democrats, who would just hold their four notional seats of 2019. Earlier polling hinted they could unseats Paul Scully in Sutton and Cheam, and Stephen Hammond in Wimbledon, both on the old and new boundaries, but the tide has turned this time. Interestingly, Boris Johnson has now chosen to pass on the Henley Regatta and stay in Uxbridge. Which does not actually squash speculation about him seeking greener pastures. He still has a year and change to change his mind and emigrate to a more welcoming backwater of the Home Counties. Especially now that polls hint that the Conservatives would take less of a drubbing in the South of England than expected just one or two months ago. Unless the Privileges Committee stops him dead in his tracks. Which is obviously what a growing number of Tory MPs want, and why Rishi Sunak has allowed them a free vote on Johnson's fate. Obviously, Rishi would like nothing more than a by-election this year sending Bozo packing, that would incapacitate him for a general next year. Fingers crossed.

I’m happy to tell you that most things you can buy in Ripon are also available in London.

(Elsie Hughes, Downton Abbey, 2014)

There is nothing Russian leaders admire so much as strength, and there is nothing

for which they have less respect than for weakness, especially military weakness.

(Winston Churchill, The Sinews Of Peace, 1946)

There was quite a flurry of polls about Ukraine around the first anniversary of the Russian invasion. More in two weeks than there had been in the previous fours months. Among these, we have a poll from Lord Ashcroft that was conducted simultaneously in the UK, the USA, Russia and Ukraine. Of course, Ashcroft did not do all the legwork himself, he had elves. And he left a massive clue that gives it away. The template used for his data files is the exact same commonly used by YouGov, for the British, Russian and Ukrainian parts. So it's a safe bet that they did it. The American part was done by another pollster, but I have no clue who it was. The poll is useful as it allows a direct comparison of the British and American public's state of mind, with some quite baffling differences between the two. Which are baffling only at first sight, of course, but can be easily explained by each country's political context, and how domestic politicking can influence public opinion.

If you're surprised by the much lower level of support in the USA than in the UK, remember that all kinds of complotists and conspiracists thrive in the Land Of The Brave. The sort that can rant for hours about the WEF's New World Order and belong to the loony wing of the Trumpian far-right. The problem is that they have a lot of influence in the media and politics, Fox News and the isolationist wing of the Republican Party. Now this lot are also more than happy to take the Kremlin's blood money and thrive on peddling the Putinist propaganda all over the USA. It's not that they actually believe the bullshit, but it pays well, and disrupting the fragile political consensus about help to Ukraine will embarrass Biden, which is what gives them their biggest hard-ons. This is the main reason why the overall level of support is 5% lower in the USA than in the UK, and the average level of opposition to helping Ukraine in any way is 6% higher.

But the American public are not exempt of contradictions. They are more supportive than the British public of the two extreme options, that would mean direct involvement and war with Russia. As Winston Churchill once said, "Americans will always do the right thing, after exhausting all the alternatives", and the alternatives we have here should definitely be the road not taken. There is also a surprisingly high level of support, in both countries, for a peace plan. Which is just the kind of red herring the 'pacifist' left might pursue. This faction have a lot of influence in the Congressional Progressive Caucus of the Democratic Party, the ones like rising star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who love Dylan Mulvaney but loathe Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The ones who released a letter urging Biden to broker peace, then humiliatingly retracted it. In the real world, there is only one peace plan on the table, the ten points proposed by Zelenskyy that clearly say 'peace after victory'. The Chinese twelve-points proposal doesn't qualify, as it is only inoperative political platitudes that don't even start to define the conditions needed for genuine peace negotiations. Which makes full support for Ukraine more necessary than ever, and fortunately we have a political consensus in the UK for doing just that.

Putin, sort of, threatened me at one point and said, you know, “Boris, I don’t want to hurt you,

but with a missile, it would only take a minute”. Or something like that, you know? You know, jolly.

(Boris Johnson)

In war, it does not matter the size of your enemy’s forces, the strength of his steel or the

valour of his men. All that is required for victory is to know your enemy’s deepest desire.

(Emma of Normandy, Valhalla: The Reckoning, 2023)

Then we have to wonder what Russian public opinion thinks and wants. Of course, we first have to question the reliability of the polling, considering the tight control of the Russian state over their population, and their repression of any form of dissent. But I assume that having a British pollster doing the legwork offers some guarantees, even if some dose of self-censorship seems unavoidable. There is also circumstantial evidence supporting the reliability of this poll. Some of the questions are the exact same used in their own surveys by the independent Russian Levada Centre, that I mentioned in an earlier article, and the results are strikingly similar. That's good enough for me to use Ashcroft's findings, especially as some questions have surprising results that do not exactly fit the Kremlin's narrative. What we have here shows that the Russian public are quite receptive to the Kremlin's official narrative, which was only to be expected. But they are probably not as brainwashed by the ultra-nationalist propaganda peddled by the Russian media as we usually think, as they are not exempt of doubt and contradictions. So here's the first half of the key questions, that go further than any survey done earlier by the Levada Centre.

So the Russian public opinion pulls an Owen Jones, saying that they are the victims here and only responded to threats. OK mates, have it your way even if your Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov got laughed off when he tried the same stunt on the delegates at the Raisina Dialogue Conference in India. I won't even debate that, as there are more important findings in this poll. A majority support negotiations with Ukraine and the West. But what is there to negotiate and with whom, when they don't recognise Zelenskyy as the legitimate authority, and deny Ukraine the right to join NATO if they wish so? Replies to another question in the polls makes it even worse, with 91% of the panel saying that Russia should keep Crimea, and between 81% and 85% saying that they should keep the four Southern oblasts of Ukraine, that were illegally annexed in September. They obviously know this is a red line for Ukraine, and it signals Russia are not serious about any kind of genuine negotiations. It's interesting, though, to see that there are doubts about the success of the 'Special Military Operation', in a way that matches earlier findings by the Levada Centre. The second half of the survey shows an odd mix of brutal realism and delusion, an indication that the Russian public buy only parts of the Kremlin's propaganda.

There is one question in here that the Putin-enablers won't like, all those who tell us that the sanctions against Russia don't work. But 40% of Russians, against Putin's own narrative, agree that they actually do. Another key component of the Putinists' narrative is challenged here. The part that says that opposition to Russia is just a Western thing and that they have wide support in the 'Other South'. But 40-45% of Russians think that their country's international standing has been damaged. Which is more in line with what we hear from the real world, when even Brasil and India put serious caveats on their apparent support for Russia. I also think that the high level of support for Putin and his administration might be transient, as it relies heavily on the massive amounts injected into the Russian economy to mitigate the impact of sanctions. For a British equivalent, just remember the stratospheric levels of approval for Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak when they flushed billions into various schemes to alleviate hardships during the Covid pandemic, and how they crash-landed when reality took over. The very last item surveyed is also a welcome sign that Russians are not in complete denial of reality. They do acknowledge that Ukraine is a far tougher nut to crack than Putin led them to expect a year ago. This alone is grounds to never relent in our support to Ukraine, whatever the Kremlin-bribed defeatists in our own ranks say.

If an injury is to be done to a man, it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.

(Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, 1532)

Diplomacy is the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions.

(Winston Churchill)

The survey of the Ukrainian panel in the Ashcroft poll is also quite clearcut. The background is that 91% support Zelenskyy, more than Russians supporting Putin. 96% consider that surrendering the four illegally annexed oblasts is unacceptable, and 84% think the same about Crimea. Finally, 75% say that banning Ukraine from ever joining NATO is unacceptable. More evidence that brokering a peace deal in the present context is a complete delusion. When one side's non-negotiable conditions are the exact mirror image of the other side's non-negotiable conditions, the only option is to put any plan on the back-burner, and fully overhaul it at a later date. Just as important are the poll's findings about what Ukraine expects from their allies. The poll provided a prepared list of seven items, and asked the panel to select three of them as their priorities. Which gives us a precise snapshot of the Ukrainian public's expectations. Two of the items in the list are a definite no-go for the West. There will be no troops on the ground and there won't be a no-fly zone, no matter how loudly the Ukrainian government asks for them. And even more so after The Curious Incident Of The Drone In The Black Sea, which is a textbook case of how unwanted escalation could happen.

This takes me back full circle to the British and American parts of the Ashcroft poll, where we find the level of support for delivering what the Ukrainians ask for. This is what matters, real action instead of needy politicians like Boris Johnson using Kyiv as the background for self-promotion. To recycle John F. Kennedy's famous one-liner, ask not what Ukraine can do for you, ask what you can do for Ukraine. The British and American public are actually quite open to further support to Ukraine, except the more aggressive options that have already been ruled out by their governments anyway. Here's how they respond to Ukraine's priorities, measure by the level of support to the seven items selected in the poll.

This is an overall quite positive response to Ukraine's needs, though I sense some ambiguity about what 'more weapons and military equipment' actually means. The sequence of questions in the UK and US polling clearly indicates it is about equipment of the same categories that have already been supplied. But I have a hunch the Ukrainian poll actually refers to equipment of a different nature to what has already been supplied, namely heavy tanks and fighter jets. Support for the delivery of tanks is quite a moot point now, as the decision has been made and deliveries are happening as we speak. The American Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin has confirmed last week that about 150 German-built Leopards from nine different countries are on their way. But support for the delivery of planes is not what it used to be when Zelenskyy first requested them.

In January, the level of support for the delivery of planes was the same as for the delivery of tanks. Then it went down quite sharply in February. It has not been polled again in March, but there is every reason to believe that it is now at best similar to what we had a month ago, and quite plausibly even lower. This might be because Western governments seemed quite enthusiastic about the idea at first, but have since found quite a number of good reasons to put in on the backburner. But this debate has probably become irrelevant too last week when Poland announced the transfer of four Soviet-built MiG-29 to Ukraine, who can use them instantly as their pilots are already trained to operate them. It is quite ostensibly a way to force the USA's hand, as the Biden administration blocked a similar transfer a year ago, as too provocative for Russia. The USA might even find this announcement works to their advantage, especially after Poland increased their donation to 20 MiG-29s, which is probably all they have readily available and operational. This way, the Biden administration can avoid, at least for a few months, a debate in Congress about the supply of F-16s. The Polish decision has also started a domino effect, with Slovakia announcing they will deliver 13 MiG-29s to Ukraine. Both countries are willing to accept a temporary weakening of their own air forces, as they have replacements on order that should be delivered in late 2023 and 2024. American F-16s to Slovakia, American F-35s and South Korean FA-50s to Poland. French sources hint that Bulgaria may follow, as they have 14 operational MiG-29s, but it's unlikely to happen until after their next general election. So there is a real hope now that Ukraine will at last get proper reinforcements in time to repeal the expected Russian Spring offensive. Maybe just in time.

It is not open to the cool bystander, who afterwards becomes the loyal and ardent comrade

and brave rescuer, to set himself up as an impartial judge of events which never would have

occurred had he outstretched a helping hand in time.

(Winston Churchill, The World Crisis: The Aftermath, 1929)

Jeremy's Den

23/03/2023

As Long As We Want Them Here

We Must Be Dreaming