Jeremy's Den: In Our Minds

I’m beginning to see that time is like a river. That you can throw the biggest rock that you can find into the river, but the water just goes around the rock, and it continues downstream as if the rock was never there.
(Trevor Holden, Travelers: Kathryn, 2016)

No battle plan survives contact with the enemy. Plans are useless. You are planning to fail.

(Helmut von Moltke)

As usual, click on the images for larger and clearer pop-up versions.

Rishi Sunak sacking Sue-Ellen Braverman was totally expected, as he should never have re-appointed her in the first place, after Liz Truss sacked her. Rishi Sunak bringing back David Cameron in one of the Great Offices Of The Empire was totally unexpected, and probably not the miracle cure to save his Premiership from complete disaster. Not to mention that bringing back the man who unleashed Brexit as Foreign Secretary looks like taking the piss out of pretty much everyone on the planet. I also wonder if Rishi Sunak realises that bringing back David Cameron is a clear admission that the Conservative talent poll has totally dried up. Not something you should want to make painfully obvious just months before a general election. Though there was a fun side to the whole fiasco, Sue-Ellen whining that Rishi had broken promises he made to her. What the fuck did she expect? It's the fucking Conservative Party, for fuck's sake. Or it might be Therese Coffey telling the media that she almost died from "ministerial stress", a very rare occurrence for someone who has done jack shit to the power of fuck all in all her time in government. YouGov, always ready to help, speed-polled the two main announcements in a matter of minutes. The Great British Public agree that sacking Sue-Ellen was the right decision, but are not really enthused by Call-Me-Dave now in charge of handling the two biggest international crises since VE-Day.

Interestingly, Cameron's appointment also highlighted how little the average Brit knows about what passes for a constitution in These Isles. Even The Hipstershire Gazette's supposedly enlightened readers, as they felt they had to mansplain us at length why it not illegal for Cameron to take a position in the Cabinet. Because, superseding everything else, there is this little thing called the Royal Prerogative. Which means that the King can appoint whomever he wants to whatever position in government. Of course, the King never does that, but that is only the effect of a modern convention that transferred executive power from the monarch to the government, not of any legislation. The last Prime Minister appointed by strict use of the Prerogative was Stanley Baldwin in 1923. Just a century ago, and all later nominations have gone by the convention of "the person most able to command the support of a majority in Commons", in plain English the leader of the first party. The point, regarding Cameron, is that there is no law anywhere saying that members of the Cabinet have to be MPs. Again this is only a convention, which actually exists only since 1963 and Alec Douglas-Home. And these misconceptions are again the result of the Westminster System disregarding the principle of separation of powers, and putting the executive power in the hands of the legislative, again by convention only. Then YouGov also had to speed-poll the underlying existential question, whether or not ministers who run a department should be MPs, or can do it from the Lords.

And it's again not the relevant question, and can only further fuel all the misconceptions about the non-constitution of The Realm, and how it is ruled only by precedents and conventions, that do not have the slightest real legal status. A majority of Brits opining that Cabinet Ministers must be MPs, just because the two main parties of yore agreed to it sixty years ago and could never be arsed to translate it into an actual Act of Parliament, does not give it any legal standing. In some other countries, that seem to have a better understanding of what "separation of powers" means, it is even illegal to be a sitting member of either House of Parliament, and a member of the government simultaneously. I'm thinking France and the USA here, and they do know what they're talking about. One invented the principle of separation of powers, and the other one was the first to enforce it in a written constitution. More than two centuries ago, when most of the British Cabinet were Lords after Lords after Lords. Interestingly, Rishi's last stunts, which kind of overshadowed the full extent of the reshuffle, don't seem to have had any profound effect on voting intentions. But Keir Starmer's latest shenanigans certainly have, as Labour have now again lost the votes they gained after the reshuffle.

The expected effect of Braverman's sacking and Cameron's rehire was certainly to gain back some centrist-minded voters, both from the Liberal Democrats and the fringes of Labour. But the trend of polls does not look like the Master Plan is working. The very first poll conducted after the reshuffle even showed the Conservatives considerably leaking votes to Reform UK, the knee-jerk fallback vote for Eurosceptics, anti-wokerati and otherwise gammonish voters who idolised Sue-Ellen. Though you might consider a poll commissioned by GB news somewhat suspicious. Especially when later polls proved once again that Labour are their own worst enemies, managing to wipe out their post-Cameron surge in a matter of days. There was still a fucking hilarious unintended consequence to the whole mess, Rishi getting letters of no confidence over the Supreme Court ruling the Rwanda deportation scheme unlawful, when it was Sue-Ellen's pet project and only an acquired taste for him. But now, Rishi is fully endorsing it and promising to fight for it. He definitely wants to use it as another dividing line with Labour, whatever the consequences and the possible electoral repercussions. And I will tell you more about this further down the line. Promised.

Planning is indispensable. If you fail to plan, you’re planning to fail.

(Benjamin Franklin)

Although he did not meet Rishi Sunak, the Greek Prime Minister did have a discussion about the Elgin Marbles with Sir Keir Starmer. And after 45 minutes he said, “You know what? Just keep ‘em, mate, I’ve got to go”.

(Guz Khan, Have I Got News For You?, 1 December 2023)

Interestingly, the most recent results of the "Best Prime Minister" polling have evolved towards looking more like their respective parties' voting intentions. Though not convincingly and sustainably so, as Keir Starmer's ratings have fallen quite sharply, after rising quite suddenly. But Starmer will certainly look at the bright side of life only, that Rishi Sunak's ratings are steadily dropping, and now reaching their lowest level ever since pollsters started tracking this one. There is no swing back to Sunak, but to the undecideds, who might be closet Ed Davey fans, for all we know. Keir Starmer's stand on the Israel-Hamas war is surely still taking its toll here, and preventing Sly Keir from fully benefiting from the government's ineptitude, as exemplified by the Autumn Statement and the Tory shouting match about immigration. But Keir's spads have surely explained him already that there is nothing to really worry about, so long as 'None Of The Above', or Ed Davey, does not surge back to being the people's first choice. And I totally agree with them here, as Keir love-bombing Thatcher has, quite oddly, hurt his own ratings less than Labour's voting intentions.

These are indeed bad times for Rishi Sunak, who probably can no longer expect good ones. It was mercilessly stressed recently by one of We Think's polls, finding that a plurality of Brits think that Rishi won't make it as PM to the next election, because he is undermined by his own party and is a weak leader who does not deliver on his promises. If this is a true reflection of the Great British Public's current state of mind, the incoming snap general will be worse than an uphill battle for the Conservatives. Rishi can find some solace in knowing that he is still considered a better Prime Minister than Liz Truss, whatever this actually proves. But a look at the latest results of Savanta's very own and very special Appreciation Scale for Wannabe Prime Ministers will certainly send him doubting again. Boris Johnson used to beat Keir Starmer on these criteria, that you and I would probably use to select a pub quiz teammate rather than a Prime Minister, but Rishi fails. Which is indeed quite damning.

But events also have form correcting themselves in the oddest of ways, and this month has been no exception. Once again, the hand of fate has intervened. Just when it looked like everything was going tits up for the Conservatives, Labour shot themselves in the foot. Again. Keir Starmer tried to invoke the Bain Principle, threatened dissenters, and to no avail. 56 Labour MPs, including ten frontbenchers, voted for the SNP's amendment to the King's Speech, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Which was in fact a very predictable rebellion, as Sly Keir had got dozens of warning signs. The worst thing is that the rebels are not all from the Owen Jones Hamas-hugging wing of the party, as shown by Jess Phillips's resignation, so Sly Keir won't be able to handle that with one dismissive soundbite aimed at Corbynistas. When even a prominent centrist member of Labour Friends of Israel rebels over your position on the war in Gaza, you are in deep shit, probably deeper than you think. There is not even a hint of victory for Starmer in that vote, even when The Hipstershire Gazette feel compelled to also publish that rosy-eyed version, probably for the sake of fairness and balance. Before pretty much calling for an immediate ceasefire... but between Starmer and his rebels.

He has some issues with coherent thought, but who doesn't?
(David Mailer, Travelers: Simon, 2017)

Most belief systems are just a shared vocabulary for people in search of meaning.

Maybe the important thing is to just believe in something. Something spiritual? Something.
(Trevor Holden, Travelers: 11:27, 2017)

In today's British politics, a lot has to do with the appearances or, as the punditariat put it, "the optics". This is not a British-only phenomenon, you can trace it back to the United States of several decades ago, like lots of the plagues inflicted on the UK by political "modernists". Our first truly image-obsessed politician was certainly Tony Blair, with The Prince of Darkness Alastair Campbell hired to do the dirty work, and it has not gone better since. One of politicians' pet obsessions is whether the Great British Public thinks their party is united or divided. Because they have convinced themselves that party unity is an election-winner, while division is a curse. Which is only partly true, but now is not the time to discuss all the historical evidence both for and against this conclusion. I mention it only because YouGov, always happy to oblige, have been polling the public's perception of both main political parties through that prism. And both will probably hate the results, especially Labour as they are now massively seen as a divided party.

It's quite revealing to see that Labour's image has altered considerably over a very short period. Which is probably why YouGov decided they had to survey the exact same question twice back to back. Just six weeks ago, it looked like all the self-inflicted wounds from Starmer's Cull Of The Radical Left had healed, and the Labour Party was not as divided as it had been a year or two before. Then the war in Gaza wrecked Sly Keir's efforts to make the party look united behind him. But the Conservatives would be wrong to celebrate this, as their own image is even worse.

Both parties have a long history of division and factionalism, and the Conservatives are less proficient at hiding it, even when they are in government. Over the last thirteen years, all worse decisions taken by successive Tory governments were the product of Tory factionalism. It was contained for a while under the Coalition, but it bloomed again as soon as David Cameron bagged a majority in Commons, and used it to appease various vociferous factions within the Nasty Party, instead of taking the right decisions in the best interest of the people. He got Brexit jump-started and wasn't even smart enough to have any contingency plan for the outcome he did not personally wish, but was unable to avoid. So it is quite legitimate to have some concerns about his abilities to be the right Foreign Secretary at the right time. He certainly can't be as bad at the job as Boris Johnson, though you never really know. The Great British Public have not forgotten Cameron's stint as Prime Minister, and that's probably why he is already very unpopular. Like all the current Conservative Grandees, actually, which is certainly more significant than the public thinking that they are divided.

What you have here comes from a poll conducted by J.L. Partners on behalf of The Sunday Times, just after David Cameron was lured back to the Cabinet. The luckiest ones among the current governing clique are the ones who haven't left enough of a mark in the public's mind, and thusly avoid both strong positives and negatives. Otherwise, the negatives always outweigh the positives, for many reasons, often rooted in events and behaviours witnessed early in the current Conservative era. To name just one, the ideological choice to impose austerity on the UK was also the direct result of appeasing Conservative extremists, and we are still paying the price in various ways. International comparisons, which the Tories hate, say that the UK was among the most egalitarian countries in the world at the end of the 1970s. All the Tories have done since is making it one the most inegalitarian again, Something New New Labour have no real will to address, as it would require them dumping neo-liberal identity politics and returning to classic social-democratic class politics. And also admitting that Tony Blair was wrong. Don't hold your breath...

What comes from the liberal left is a unique combination of the deeply ignorant and the profoundly opinionated. It is half-baked certainty sitting on a thick base of groupthink.

(Starfleet Admiral Penny Mordaunt)

It's the sort of certainty that can only come from over-educated under-achievers. People who have never done anything. Never created or built anything. People who don't value others that do.

(Starfleet Admiral Penny Mordaunt)

The main event of last month, clearly intended by Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt to be a game-changer, was the Autumn Statement, or mini-budget, or subsidies to the wealthies, whatever you want to call it. I will of course come back to it in more detail later. Jeremy Hunt has been keen and quick to stress it is a chemically pure act of governance, and has absolutely nothing to do with an incoming general election. You could almost hear him say, "Election, what election?". Which is a clear sign it has everything to do with an incoming general election. And also a clear reason for Rishi Sunak to call the election as soon as possible, before the Great British Public have had the opportunity to see what the "crowd-pleasing" mini-budget actually entails. But Rishi's main concern is just how the Statement has impacted voting intentions. And he will surely be disappointed. My updated Poll Mash includes the last six, conducted by Redfield & Wilton, More In Common, Deltapoll, YouGov, Techne and We Think between the 30th of November and the 8th of December. That's a super-sample of 9,927, with a theoretical margin of error of 0.98% and Labour leading by 18%, so no real reason for Rishi to celebrate.

The current configuration of voting intentions is still good enough to deliver a massive Labour majority. By the way, Charles III approved the Order In Council enforcing the constituency boundaries from the final proposals of the 2023 Periodic Review on the 15th of November. This one flew under the radars for various reasons, including Rishi Sunak having to explain why this happened two weeks after the legal deadline, and he had to invoke "exceptional circumstances" to get Charles's seal on it. This also shed quite an amusing light on what a meeting of the Privy Council actually looks like. Not the hush-hush affair you would expect from its total of 742 members, as the law mercifully sets the quorum at.... 3. Rishi Sunak and Starfleet Admiral Penny Mordaunt have to be there, the latter in her capacity as Lord President of the Council, one of the few positions that never got a female or gender-neutral transposition. So they just have to drag a random Cabinet Minister into it with them and, bingo, we have a legally convened meeting of the Council. And that removed all ambiguity about which boundaries the incoming snap general will be fought on. On whatever boundaries, Labour are predicted to score big, ending up with a majority on just the English seats outwith London this time.

In this context, it is quite amusing that The Scottish Pravda platformed one of Starmer's prominent opponents within Labour, delivering quite scathing statements about the Great Leader. You know that I actually agree with Jamie Driscoll's conclusion, that a New New Labour government led by Starmer will quickly become unpopular, but did not reach it by the same paths. I think it will happen because Rishi Sunak will deliberately leave a number of things undone and cases open, thusly sowing a multitude of ticking time-bombs across Starmer's way. Not because of the rebellion about an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, which will probably be forgotten a year from now, or because Starmer is a "full-on Stalinist", which is definitely the oddest possible accusation. But now the ball is in Jeremy Hunt's court, and drafting an Autumn Statement and then a Spring Statement, which will both be exercises in budgetary falsification, must be quite the predicament. He loses the Red Wall if he delivers a Sheriff Of Nottingham budget, but he loses his own seat even if he doesn't. Jezza must surely regret that he did not confirm he was standing down because the numbers didn't add up, the numbers of projected votes, that is, as the ones in the mini-budgets were never supposed to. Rishi would have sacked him in the same cull as Sue-Ellen, and he would be done with all the pretending and posturing...

Looks to me like you’ve just handed yourself a golden opportunity to screw the pooch.

(Molly Cobb, For All Mankind: Pathfinder, 2021)

I have a secret. I know the future. I know what's gonna happen. Global events. Deaths. Winners of horse races. It was all recently delivered to me, like a movie. And mostly it's the same future that I remember.
(Philip Pearson, Travelers: Update, 2017)

Interestingly, we had that poll recently, from More In Common, that is pretty much an outlier in the current context as it predicted Labour winning by "only" 12% of the popular vote. But this one is also interesting, because it is quite close to the margin on which Labour won the 1945 general election, and the Conservatives won the 2019 general election. Both were described in their day as landslides that carried a strong popular mandate, so all it took was to feed my model with it, to see what kind of Parliamentary majority this would deliver now on the brand new Boundaries Of 2023. The More In Common poll did not survey Northern Ireland, so I added data from the new poll of Northern Ireland by the Institute of Irish Studies of the University of Liverpool, to which I will come back in more details soon. Consider that pretty much a spoiler alert. The voting intentions may not be as sensational for Labour as from other polls, but they are still doing really well in Scotland and Wales, which would matter in a close general election. The findings for London are a bit disappointing, but the rest of England is quite positive for Labour.

The breakdown of predicted votes in the regions of England shows a pattern that is probably not the one that Labour HQ would expect from such numbers GB-wide. Labour, with a little help from the Liberal Democrats, are still able to contain the Conservatives in the three regions of the South. The Conservatives bagged a majority of the popular vote in all three in 2017 and 2019, and already in 2015 in the South East and South West. Now Labour's voting intentions in Little England are better that they were in 1945, and also all along the Blair years, when the Liberal Democrats outvoted Labour Doon Sooth. But there is a price to pay for this, and it is in plain sight in that poll. Labour being tied with the Conservatives in the Midlands. This just the phenomenon I have warned about many times before, in situations where the Labour vote goes down GB-wide, so there is definitely no surprise here.

The seat projection, with the breakdown by nation and region within England, again shows that the new voting patterns deliver quite an unexpected situation. Unexpected, of course, only if your electoral knowledge is based solely on the results of previous elections, but fairly natural if you have followed the sequence of voting intentions polling since the 2019 election. Now this poll says Labour would lose the Midlands to Conservatives, 49 seats to 53. It's 1966ish in the West Midlands, and worryingly close to the early 2010s in the East Midlands. The irony is that the South more than makes up for that. Even on a rather mediocre performance GB-wide, Labour still get their largest number of seats ever in East Anglia, slightly better than Blair in the South East, and far better than Blair in the South West, thanks to a lesser performance by the Liberal Democrats. Keir Starmer has obviously been briefed about these changes in electoral geography, that weren't there in the Corbyn years and are mostly the fallout of Covid-related internal migration from London to the various circles of the Commuter Belt. Surely that helps explaining some of his ideological shifts towards liberal centrism, and how the Home Counties have become an unlikely battleground for the next election, and in some cases a three-way battleground.

Globally, the result is quite encouraging for Labour, falling pretty much midway between Attlee 1945 and Johnson 2019. By the BBC's classic method, 375 seats amount to precisely a 100-seat majority. If you follow my more politically accurate method, factoring in Sinn Féin not taking their seats and the SDLP taking the Labour whip, that's a 111-seat working majority. More than enough to claim a solid mandate. Then it's fairly easy to make some more calculations, that confirm a conclusion that I reached some months ago already. If you stipulate that all the voting intentions in Scotland and Wales, and the LibDem vote share in England, stay the same, then all Labour need is a 4% lead over the Conservatives in England. Even with their lead shrunk that way, they would still get a majority of seats. The teeniest-weeniest possible, but still enough to say they cleared the hurdle and won the election. Which, in its binary way, is all that matters, as there's no spectrum of options between losing and winning. Politically, of course, it's another matter, and everyone will agree you need better than a two-seat majority to claim a mandate, which is the point Labour will want to make. And all available evidence points to the conclusion that they will succeed.

Don’t overlook the upside. Homage from favour seekers. Opportunities to wreak revenge on people who crossed you.

(Edward Baldwin, For All Mankind: Pathfinder, 2021)

Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth.

Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.

(St Francis of Assisi, or maybe Margaret Thatcher)

At the beginning of last month, in the middle of the controversies about the British political establishment's positions on the war in Gaza, Savanta went one step further than other pollsters and surveyed the voting intentions of British Muslims. Their poll was conducted after Keir Starmer stated that it was OK for Israel to break international law so long as they did not break international law. But before Labour voted against an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, which they do support, or don't, because Willie Bain and whatnot. And also in the same timeframe the Metropolitan Police told Sue-Ellen Braverman to fuck off and let them allow Hamas headbands to be worn on the streets of London. A period of controversy and confusion for pretty much everyone. The poll is of regular size, with a sample of 1,059, but some of the regional crosstabs have very small subsamples. This is why I disregarded their findings for Northern Ireland, and those for Scotland and Wales are to be taken with extreme caution. Then what the found for England generally, and especially London, can be considered just as reliable as any run-of-the mill poll.

I have not found any breakdown of the 2019 vote by religion, so I can't say how this poll compares with it. Let's just say it does seem very plausible. Labour ending up 25% ahead of the Conservatives in the GB-wide voting intentions does look quite possible. After all, the general population, regardless of religious affiliation, granted Labour that kind of lead and above during the Truss Interlude. So I'm not surprised to see something similar from a part of the electorate who have always been said to be close to the Labour Party. Unfortunately, we have no way to assess if and how British Muslims have changed their minds about Labour in recent years. Now let's see how the next Commons would look like if only Muslims voted or, to be more factually accurate, if the whole electorate voted the same way as Muslims. Due to the absence of a genuine Northern Ireland subsample in the poll, I have restricted this to only the 632 seats for England, Scotland and Wales. What we get here is not that incongruous, as we have seen very similar predictions for the Great British Public as a whole, during the very short period Liz Truss was Prime Minister By Mistake.

Of course, this seat projection is highly hypothetical, as generic voting patterns are unlikely to ever return to their state under Liz Truss. But future campaigns may be influenced by the fact that British Muslims are still in the frame of mind to massively support left-leaning parties, pretty much all across Great Britain. The one striking result, though, is the the residual Conservative seats in England outwith London would all be in the Leafy South. The second one being that Scottish Muslims do strongly support the SNP and Labour too, with the Conservatives ending up a very distant third. Savanta also tried to find out if the voting patterns are influenced by their panel's assessment of how various organisations and politicians handled the war in Gaza. This does in no way imply that the British Muslim electorate are a one-issue bloc, which would be a very simplistic approach. The results of that specific question support this, as Labour fare really badly here, though better than the Conservatives. British Muslims are conclusively dissatisfied with Labour's handling of the situation, some may even be genuinely angered by it, but they still give Labour a massive majority of their votes.

I don't know what the sponsors of this poll wanted to prove here, but what they do prove is that British Muslims are not really different from the rest of the electorate. They certainly pay more attention to what is happening in Gaza, and how the British political establishment handle it. But it is not the one issue that would single-handedly determine their vote. I'm quite sure we could liken that to the Scottish electorate in general, for whom Independence is a key issue, but not the one that would allow you to accurately predict their vote all by itself. The strong level of approval for Humza Yousaf, the only one to get a majority of positives, probably has a lot to do with his personal situation, which he has handled with dignity even when he and his wife feared the worst, and empathising with his ordeal. The poll was in the field before the King's Speech and the SNP's motion to amend it with a demand for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, which can obviously only increase the level of satisfaction with the party and its leader. But also generate backlash against Labour because of they way they handled that vote, which was both ineffective and politically idiotic.

Islam expanded across the globe almost as quickly as Fox News thinks it still does today.

It was an apparently irresistible spread, like Nutella.

(Philomena Cunk, Cunk On Earth: Faith/Off, 2022)

If you are a Tory, you don’t need a conscience. You know you’re right.

(Kate Bridges, Upstairs, Downstairs: Magic Casements, 1971)

One of the recent major issues was the Supreme Court's decision to strike down the UK government's Rwanda Deportation Scheme as unlawful. But the Conservatives think it's a vote winner, so they can't let go of it, and are even ready to pass some absurd legislation, basically to make what was unlawful now lawful, no matter what the Supreme Court rules. The chosen road now seems to be a binding international treaty, a very unusual move for the Conservatives, but quite expedient to circumvent legality. Which brings me back to my earlier point about the Very English Concept of parliamentary sovereignty being a constitutional monstrosity, which is in plain sight now as it is used to remove the last tiny shred of scrutiny of the judicial over the executive, and basically opening the floodgates to a Russia-like totalitarian regime. I'm not one to throw around that kind of accusations lightly, but it's happening here and now under our eyes, and totally affirms and validates the urgent need for both a change of government and deep constitutional reform. Back to my point, Savanta and YouGov both polled the basics of the Rwanda Deportation Scheme, before Rishi decided to table a law allowing him to break the law, and the results are not reassuring at all.

Both polls used a factual and almost identical wording, Savanta going "The government has agreed a deal whereby some people who have entered Britain and applied for asylum will be flown to Rwanda, in Africa, for their applications to be processed. If their application is successful, they would be given long-term accommodation in Rwanda. To what extent do you support or oppose this?", which is a bit long-winded but necessary for completeness and avoiding bias. YouGov's wording was almost the same, differing in only insignificant details. Both polls show a convincing plurality supporting the scheme and a minority opposing it, which is not at all comforting, and both also show it being a major hit with Conservative voters. So Rishi has found something that can be electorally expedient and allow him to keep voters that were considering deserting the Tories in droves, but that does not make the whole scheme less morally objectionable. Savanta tried to shift the focus to the morality of the scheme, with a follow up question going, "The government has a policy of deporting asylum seekers who arrive in the UK by small boat across the Channel to the African country of Rwanda to seek asylum there. To what extent would you say that this is acceptable or unacceptable?", in two distinct specific situations. And it went worse.

So, if people try and reach the UK in small boats at the risk of their life, a majority think it's acceptable to deport them to a country with one of the worst human rights records on the planet. And even more so if they have been denied asylum, which is the most likely outcome for most of them. I suppose the rationale here is that it's morally acceptable because they asked for it, or summat. But Keir Starmer, if he was made aware of this polls, would also notice that Labour voters disagree with the rest of Britain here. I'm not sure this would convince him to adopt a more humane approach to the situation. So long as the Great British Public are groomed to believe that immigration is a major issue and a major threat, there is political expediency in making yourself sound tough on it. Especially when voting intention polls show Reform UK doing really well in the North of England, where they could even become credible competitors in a handful of Labour seats. The next step, to make the unlawful lawful, is the UK withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights. Some Conservatives, of the more nutjobby variant, are really serious about doing this, so Savanta also polled it. and the results are also quite unsettling.

Savanta also used a long-winded wording here, going "To what extent would you support or oppose leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, to stop the European Court of Human Rights (which is not part of the EU) from preventing or delaying government deportations to Rwanda?", just to make sure their panelists got the full picture. Leavers clearly outnumber Remainers here, especially among Conservative voters. It would be interesting to know where the neutrals and undecideds would go if this was a real issue, like being proposed in a Draft Bill in Commons, instead of being purely theoretical. Odds are it will remain theoretical, as Rishi Sunak probably won't want a debate about what the ECHR actually covers, which goes a long way beyond immigration, and includes many basic rights and freedoms that Priti Patel and Sue-Ellen Braverman wanted removed from the British public. Even The Telegraph found convincing reasons why leaving the ECHR can't and won't happen, as membership of it is at the core of many agreements between the post-Brexit UK and the EU. It surely helped Rishi Sunak decide at first to not start another binfire about these issues a few months ahead of a key election. Then you have to wonder why Rishi finally chose to make the ECHR an issue again. This is extremely hazardous terrain, as it does not open another front in the culture wars with Labour, but one across the Conservative Party.between the lunatics who want to convince you that removing legal protection of your rights and freedoms make you freer, and those who have kept a wee smitch of their senses. And you can tell you chose the wrong hill to die on, and the wrong path to climb it, when even The Telegraph points to the sheer idiocy of your brand new legislation.

These are my principles and, if you don’t like them, well, I have others.

(Groucho Marx)

The main issues are going to be the ones we always expected. Housing and rents and pensions, the cost of living and education.

(Harold Wilson, general election campaign, 1964)

The UK government have plenty of time on their hands to fiddle with the law while London's burning and calling, but none to deal with an increasingly devastating cost-of-living crisis. Even Gordon Brown is now campaigning about it, though his Holy Alliance of charities and businesses might not be the oven-ready world-beating remedy to it. The reality is that businesses do little and charities rely mostly on private donations, which are never enough to cover all needs. One of the most serious aspects of the cost-of-living crisis is how it affects children disproportionately, no matter what their parents are able to do to lessen the impact. Survation conducted a poll about this on behalf of Chefs In Schools, a charity devoted to providing proper food to children in need, among other goals. The poll surveyed parents of school-age kids in England only, but what it shows can surely be considered valid for the rest of the UK. The first step of the diagnosis was to identify the issues these parents have to face, and it's not a happy shiny picture.

It is quite devastating to see that more than half of the parents in the panel have difficulties making ends meet, when England globally is richer that it has ever been. The consequences for their children are even more appalling. One in five having to rely on foodbanks, a third or so lacking proper nutrition on a regular basis. You don't have to be a bleeding-heart-on-your-sleeve leftist to realise what an everlasting shame this is. And how morally repugnant is its to see the Conservative government steadily refusing to consider this a national emergency and a priority. This naturally led Survation to explore the specific issue of school meals in more detail, and here again the results prove that things could be done a lot better. Majorities believe that the current system of free school meals is unfair, and that requirements for eligibility should be revised. This leads to the natural conclusion, also supported by a majority, that it should benefit all children. Which, in practical terms, means cutting all of the social services' red tape, which is certainly ill-advised and possibly not even well-intentioned. Better feed one for free, whose parents can afford to pay for it, than leaving one hungry, whose parents can't.

You can only agree with the opening statement, that hot meals are beneficial for children, That's basic common sense, not only in is direct effect, but also because proper nutrition makes people less at risk to a large array of health hazards. This is also basic common sense. Perhaps Rishi Sunak's newly appoint Minister For Common Sense Esther McVey should tell her government colleagues to rely on their common sense and do something. Or else she is doomed from the start to be just the figurehead of vacuous right-wing virtue-signalling with no sense of purpose, common or not. This change of perspective could even be electorally profitable, as this seems to be the kind of moral compass Conservatives rely on, because the same polls found that 62% of the panel would be more likely to vote for a party promising to expand free school meals. In another unrelated poll, Survation surveyed a representative panel of the whole Great British Public about the impact or rising prices on them, and their findings are quite unequivocal and unsurprising.

For the general public, not limited to parents of school-age children, food and fuel poverty are the two main consequences of the rising cost of living. The government of course know it, as the same issues have been mentioned over and over again for years, and both are classics of every serious cost-of-living crisis. What is sadly lacking is a serious political will to tackle them. Jeremy Hunt clearly has his priorities wrong here, and his Autumn Statement changes nothing, as it is focused on Very Conservative Obsessions that go against what is urgently needed, more funding for emergency measures to heal the consequences of the cost-of-living crisis. That is all you can expect when its is not about policies, but about drawing dividing lines with Labour. It is also fairly stupid to assume that having succeeded in halving inflation, through external factors rather than by government action, somehow exonerates the government of any plan to cure the impact of past out-of-control inflation, which was never properly dealt with because Whitehall was in denial about it. It is a self-evident truth that poverty kills, that spiraling inflation kills, and not metaphorically. Will Jeremy Hunt and Rishi Sunak just sit there doing jack shit, content with getting more blood on their hands?

If the Almighty in his infinite wisdom has seen fit to ordain the world just so, how can we poor creatures, be we high and low, seek to change it?

(Angus Hudson, Upstairs, Downstairs: The Key Of The Door, 1972)

What exactly is a matter of principle, and how does it differ from any other opinion?

(Lawrence Kirbridge, Upstairs, Downstairs: For Love Of Love, 1972)

When it comes to the cost of living, everyone of us is pretty much just like everyone else. We have all seen the groceries and energy bills go up the same way, while our income lagged behind. Which is a loss of purchasing power in real terms, except for the very few lucky ones. To be honest, I don't feel anything particular from knowing that there are many people who are worse off than me. I take is as a fact, and that's it. Just like knowing that there are also many people who are much better off than me, and not all of them have actually done anything to deserve it. Which is, by the way, just the kind of thought that has started many a revolution in the past, but never mind. To help assessing the extent and nature of the problems we are facing here, Savanta conducts a poll of low-income households on behalf of the Joseph Roundtree Foundation every few months, with the same array of questions for tracking. They have released the latest iteration last month and it proves that nothing is improving. But we didn't really expect that, did we?

The poll surveys twenty different items that are likely to be impacted by the rising cost of living. All point to a rapidly degrading situation, to which the UK government won't offer any proper remedy. They're doing quite the opposite actually, with their obsession with "fiscal responsibility", that openly implies that all the "tough choices" go against the interests of the low-income households who have a legitimate right to expect a safety net against situations just like this one. Of course the Conservatives don't give a frying duck about all this, as they already have pretty much given up on the next election. But the people have an unalienable right to expect more from Labour than the vague promise of sunlit uplands on the other side of the rainbow. The most obvious expectation is policies that will lead to solid wage rises, compensating for the real-term losses suffered under the Conservatives. This surely can't be done in one year, given the width of the gap, but a commitment to do it over the five years of a parliamentary term is surely not a pipe dream. Labour only need an out-of-the-box strategy to convince the private sector to go along with it without jeopardising other policies. Attlee would have found a way.

The Joseph Roundtree Foundation also use this polling to identify the long-term consequences of the cost-of-living crisis. Don't be misled by the fact that we don't always have a majority of the panel identifying negative effects on their health or well-being. Remember that official statistics consider a household "low-income" when they earn less than 60% of the UK's median income, which was officially £33k in 2022 for a full-time job, or £27k on average of all full-time and part-time jobs. So we are talking here about people having to live on £20k a year at most if they're lucky enough to have a steady full-time job, and much less if health issues have forced them into an unwanted part-time job. According to the Office For National Statistics, this amounts to 17% to 22% of "individuals" living in England and Wales. As usual, the official statistics are designed to obfuscate, but can't hide the basic facts that we're looking at millions of people here, probably summat like 13 million UK-wide. So a negative impact on health that affects "only" a third of this population still hits 4 to 5 million. And that is massive.

These findings again prove that the biggest failure of current Conservative policies is turning this crisis into a ticking time-bomb with massive adverse effects who are likely to haunt and harm people for many years. The Conservatives have sown the seeds of a major public health crisis, and are probably content that they won't have to sort that mess, as it will be up the the Labour government after the snap general of 2024. And it would be foolish to believe that Jeremy Hunt increasing the national minimum wage to £11.44 an hour will solve anything. It won't because this rise less than the peak inflation since the last rise. It doesn't even make up for the rise of the price of groceries, that is higher than the composite market-basket Consumer Price Index. The levee has broken and Jezza is putting a band-aid on it, which will actually benefit fewer than 3 million full-time workers directly. On top of that, it is definitely bad timing to announce this on the same day YouGov released yet another speed-poll showing that an overwhelming majority of Brits think prices will continue to go up, and only a tiny minority who think they will go down. I think we can trust the people's common sense more than Jezza's on this.

Even on a good day, we use only 40% of our brain capacity. There is this whole other 60% of our noggin hanging around like an empty AirBnB.

(Rolo Haynes, Black Mirror: Black Museum, 2017)

This Autumn Statement for growth is now the 11th Conservative economic growth plan, from the 5th Prime Minister, the 7th Chancellor and the 9th Business Secretary. And what do those numbers add up to? According to the most recent GDP data, a big fat zero.

(Rachel Reeves)

How, if there is something special about the Autumn Statement, it's that it is the true hallmark of English exceptionalism. It's not even a real full budget, and neither is its twin the Spring Statement, whatever the current conventions say. You can see that by the amount of stuff that is left out, and that's usually a lot, that's dealt with elsewhere in random primary legislation. The Act of Parliament that created it in 1975 does not say otherwise, as it is formally meant to only factor in the impact of economic forecasts on what you could call a theoretical "budget trajectory". This was the case again this year, with one thing conspicuously missing, income tax. Because the "tough choices" on that had already been made, and the government surely did not want Labour to question them, or discuss their real impact. Because the freeze on tax bands thresholds is a concealed tax hike for millions of Brits, including 4 millions with low income who will be paying income tax for the first time. Not something Jeremy Hunt wants the public to hear too often. What was in the Autumn Statement obviously needed some speed-polling, and this time Savanta beat YouGov to it. And quite cunningly started by asking their panel whom they trust most with running the economy.

No surprise here, Labour beat the Conservatives, even it you can't call it a massive ringing endorsement. The Conservatives have little support nevertheless, even from demographics that are supposed to support and trust them more than Labour. That's why the replies to the other questions of the poll are surprising, though probably not totally unpredictable. After all, Rishi Sunak has made it clear that he doesn't care about good governance anymore, if he ever has. PMQs and draft bills have ceased to exist, as they have transitioned into hustings and campaign pamphlets. Saving the economy is no longer the main concern, saving Tory MPs is. And there is no way Rishi can be arsed to assess the consequences of his actions, as he will no longer be here to deal with them. Keir Starmer will, cleaning the mess. So every announcement that spawns five minutes of popularity is good, and Rishi has the media blitzes ready, to make these moments last longer than their shelf-life. And the Savanta poll showed that it worked.

It's a quite extraordinary response, as even the less popular and more controversial provision, forcing people with mental health issues to work from home to keep their benefits, has a net result of support from the Great British Public. What they fail too see is the ripple effect embedded in this statement. Rising the minimum wage by 11% is a welcome decision, and it does indeed make the UK look good in international comparisons. Converted into dollars for comparison's sake, the UK's nominal wage now ranks second of all OECD countries. But, if you shift to actual purchasing power, we fall to eighth place because the cost of living is higher here than in the Netherlands, France or Germany, to name just a few. Then there is another paradox here, that you could call a wage squeeze. People who are paid just above the minimum wage will not benefit from the rise, and thusly will find themselves squeezed closer to the bottom of the wages ladder. I seriously doubt that private businesses will respond to that by rising all wages by 11%, and that will generate frustration among all people on low income, who have already suffered the most from the cost-of-living crisis. You even have a hint of that in Savanta's final question, about whom will benefit the most from the new measures.

It is quite interesting to see that, despite their high level of satisfaction with the Autumn Statement, the Great British Public do not see themselves as the main beneficiaries of it. Perhaps they do smell a rat after all, and don't even think the Statement will do anything to improve the UK's economic situation. Because there will be victims here, real ones, not those whining about always being the victim no matter what happens outside their bubble. Think about middle income earners, who will probably get a token pay rise lower than inflation, but could end up paying more income tax because of the aforementioned tax bands threshold freeze. It is even more likely to happen to pensioners with their triple-lock-guaranteed above-inflation rise of the state pensions. A lot of things like these will undoubtedly happen, not as unintended consequences or ripple effects of Jeremy Hunt's budgetary acrobatics. I'm quite sure it's in fact a fully intended cascade of boomerang effects. Taking back with one hand what you gave with the other and more, as the party of low taxes ends up delivering the highest level of taxation in 70 years, and real disposable income falls below its pre-pandemic level. I'm not the one saying that, the Office for Budget Responsibility and the Resolution Foundation are, in their immediate assessments of the Autumn Statement. Jeremy Hunt might well bask in the transient glory of a few well-received measures, but he won't be able to use the same stunts in the Spring Statement, if there ever is another one on his watch. The end is nigh, Jezza!

He is oddly compelling, in a kind of Patrick Bateman in a vinyl raincoat kind of way.

(Audra Khatri, The Morning Show, 2023)

Who is to undertake the governance of the Irish, since the Irish do not seem to want to do so?

I’m told the climate is mild enough, and there are people who have spoken well of the whiskey.

(Elizabeth I, Elizabeth I, 2005)

At long last, voting intentions in Northern Ireland for the next general election have been polled. By the Institute of Irish Studies (IIS) of the University of Liverpool, as no pollster seemed ready and willing to do it. The poll shows some significant changes from the 2019 result, which is probably why the IIS's comment on their own poll sounds overenthusiastic for Sinn Féin, who are credited with a quite spectacular increase of their vote share and becoming the first party. This reaction would probably be validated by the seat projection if we were talking proportional representation here. But we're not. It's First-past-the-post, and 14 out of 18 Northern Irish seats were won on a margin of 16% or more in 2019. So it takes a bit more than the swing seen in the poll to trigger massive changes in seats. Furthermore this is Northern Ireland, not Sussex, so you have to add a layer of communitarian groupings to your analysis. And here we have to aggregate Unionist vote going down from 42% at the 2019 election to 41% in the poll. And the Republican vote going down from 40% to 39%. So not a massive change, and the seat projection is probably not what you would expect from the raw data.

You must bear in mind that the recarving of Northern Ireland's constituencies was made in such a way that most changes were cosmetic, and it should not disrupt the precarious balance reached in 2019. This is why there is absolutely no change in seats between the actual results of the 2019 election and the notional results under the new, now newly-current, boundaries.That's a unique situation in that boundary review. And the newly-enforced boundaries actually preserve the same number of seats for each camp, and in fact the exact same seats for each party with only one exception. South Antrim predicted to switch from the DUP to the UUP, from hardline Unionists to softball Unionists, by the slimmest of majorities. That's something you can call a surprise, but not an upset. It probably wouldn't happen if the TUV had not decided to field candidates in all constituencies, thusly snatching quite a number of hardcore voters from the DUP. But the constituency also has a history of swinging back and forth between the two main Unionist parties, making this change more plausible. If there is a surprise here, it's the SDLP holding both their seats despite losing almost half their votes nationally. But they benefit from having bagged massive majorities in both seats in 2019, with double the vote of the runner-ups. We have had just one Commons poll so far because pollsters were more interested in the next Northern Ireland Assembly election, which is probably more of a concern that the Westminster election.

In the Assembly polling too, there is no cataclysmic change between the results of the 2022 election and the most recent polls. But the Assembly is elected on Single Transferable Vote (STV), which is like the evil combination of the worst of all worlds. Here we have the appearance of proportionality, which is never fully reached as STV allows fuckloads of tactical voting on the high-rank preferences, something we are familiar with in Scotland with our Council elections. What the polls say now is that both communitarian camps would again lose votes to the non-sectarian Alliance Party, but that voters switching from one camp to the other is highly unlikely. So we can expect the Alliance to gain a couple of seats, probably snatching them off the junior party on each side, the UUP and the SDLP. It is also quite likely that the senior parties on each side will also snatch a seat or two from their juniors. So we could plausibly end up with the DUP, Sinn Féin and the Alliance gaining one or two seats each, and the UUP and the SDLP losing one or two each. I will not be more precise because of the mysterious ways STV works. And, at the end of the day, that would not change the balance of power within the Assembly, and thusly offer no easy way out of the present institutional standoff. Which, to be honest, is not really due to the DUP having a beef with Brexit, but to their unwillingness to formally give away the Big Dog slot to Sinn Féin. Unless the next English Government is ready to show them that resistance is futile. By any means necessary.

The Irish may not break out into open rebellion. They may do it quietly without informing us.

It doesn’t always rain there. They’re not savages. Well, not all of them, anyhow.

(Elizabeth I, Elizabeth I, 2005)

I am no subject, and would die a thousand deaths rather than acknowledge myself to be one.

(Mary, Queen of Scots, Elizabeth I, 2005)

For weeks, everything was quiet on the Scottish Polling Front, and then we had that truly unbelievable Full Scottish from IPSOS. At fist, I thought they had their poll results all mixed up, and were republishing one from two years ago. But it's genuinely dated "Monday 20th to Sunday 26th November 2023", with a question about Michael Matheson to prove it, so let's see what we can make of their findings. With the caveat, actually provided by IPSOS themselves, that "there is a 9 in 10 chance that the true value of a party’s support lies within 4 points of the estimates provided by this poll". Common knowledge, but it's worth repeating that there is always a lot of uncertainty in polls with a 1k sample. That poll may have found 54% for Independence, but it's the only one saying that recently, and the same pollster found the same result six months ago. So I will need a couple more like this one before believing that we have bucked the trend without any trace of a deus ex machina intervention.

Of course, there was intense confusion sown when Redfield & Wilton's monthly Full Scottish, the one I was actually expecting, was released just hours after the Ipsos poll, and conveyed vastly different messages, much more consistent with the overall trend of all polls. Which means we are still pretty much stuck with Yes 3-4% behind, and not really improving. And even if Yes was winning, that would be fucking irrelevant with no referendum in sight for the foreseeable future. The Great Scottish Public are also not fans of all the alternative Independence strategies that have come form here, there and everywhere over the last few years. The concept of a 'plebiscite election' or 'de facto referendum' is discredited, and we can only hope we never hear from it again. Then Alba's Scotland United policy has also failed to convince people. We can consider it's dead now, anyway, after Alba published a first list on their Westminster candidates. And the Greenies never gave a fucking shit anyway, as they are attracted to vanity candidacies like magpies to shiny pebbles.

I am still truly amazed by the SNP always trying to sell us Independence and membership of the European Union as one indissoluble package. It is not, it never was, and it never should be. What should be is a proper democratic debate after Independence, and with all possible options honestly laid on the table. The SNP just conveniently forget what could be a major stumbling bloc, that revised EU rules have made it de facto mandatory to join the Euro, and Scots are not enthused with that. The potential of the Euro acting as a deterrent to rejoining the EU is regularly tested by We Think. For a long time, it was not, but their latest such survey shows that it is now. Not all gory details are in the article itself, but the data tables say that the prospect of having to join the Euro would shrink the Scottish vote to rejoining the EU from 53% (raw data with undecideds and abstainers counted) to 32%, and increase the Scottish vote to stay out from 34% to 47%. That's quite the evidence that the Euro is a deterrent now, that would be put on the table by opponents to rejoining the EU. Or by those who want to become members of some union again, but want all options honestly discussed. Like gaining back freedom of movement and access to the single market as a member of EFTA, without the unpopular Euro attached.

Our poor country is so far from the bright lights. We go to bed early and have little informed conversation.

(James VI, King of Scots, Elizabeth I, 2005)

Loyalty is an overrated virtue, championed by the bovine, dignified by the weak to justify their weakness. The strong must overcome the weak.

(Reinhard Heydrich, The Man In The High Castle, 2015)

I must admit I am a bit puzzled by the results of that IPSOS poll, that was conducted right in the middle of iPadGate, which was pretty much the SNP's PartyGate then, until a juicer episode surfaced. The iPad thing would never have expanded to intergalactic dimensions if Michael Matheson had admitted he fucked up and paid the money back on Day One, and then kept a low profile for a couple of weeks. Then we had to endure the appalling spectacle of the SNP circling the wagons and offering Doogie Ross an opportunity to claim the moral high ground, something I never had on any year's Bingo Card. After all this, you just don't expect the SNP to climb back in any poll to levels they reached since... err... checks notes... the previous IPSOS poll. Of course The Scottish Pravda instantly drooled all over that poll, without for even one second questioning how you can get the same results as six months ago, after all that has happened since. In all fairness to them, they did not question the Redfield & Wilton poll either, when it reached opposite conclusions on the Westminster votes. They just repeatedly added confusion to their low standard of journalism, by mixing references to IPSOS with the article about Redfield. Back to the numbers, the IPSOS poll obviously shows the SNP and Labour diverted from their collision course. Though I wouldn't bet on it staying that way for long.

The seat projection from the IPSOS poll is, as expected, far different from previous Holyrood predictions. We would still have a pro-Independence majority, though it could be a close call. My model, factoring in regional voting patterns that may differ from the trends of uniform national swing, says the Yellow-Green Axis would end up one seat shy of a majority. They would thusly need reinforcements from the Alba Party for a majority. Which would probably lead to some interesting debates among them, unless they choose the path of least resistance, a minority coalition government. The obvious downside, whichever projection you choose to trust, is that a weakened SNP would automatically grant the Toxic Greens more influence on legislation and government policies. Which is not necessarily what the Great Scottish Public at large, or even the SNP's own voters, really want.

Sadly, the Redfield & Wilton poll did not include Holyrood voting intentions this time. I have a solid hunch they would have sent a substantially different message from the IPSOS poll. It would also be interesting to know how voting intentions are influenced by the Green Civil War now openly underway, or Alex Cole-Hamilton assuming he has an unalienable right to drink voting. But any future election is bound to be dominated by the Scottish public's assessment of the SNP's achievements in power. Redfield & Wilton tested this on an array of issues that Scots find important. Which does not mean they assign the same level of importance to all. The economy and the NHS are put at the top of the list by 64% and 59% of Scots respectively, while the gender thing is mentioned by only 2%. Even SNP voters don't give a flying fuck about that one, as only 3% of them mention it. Overall that's a net average rating of -8%, with only two out of ten topics getting a net positive, the environment and transportation. Even if that's much better than Scotland's assessment of the UK government, who get a net -28% this month, it's definitely not the stuff landslides are made of.

In this context of mild, but certain, discontent, it was quite hilarious to see Humza Yousaf defending the "mandatory heat pumps" scheme during FMQs, when there are solid hints that the UK government is ready and willing to scrap it because it's not working despite the increased grants, and thusly stop all funding for these devices. It has been quite obvious, for some time now, that the Greenies' obstinate support for heat pumps depends a lot on the availability of the funding. If the UK government actually cancels it, then the dogmatic heat-pumpers will have to perform an emergency reverse ferret, and set foot in the real world again. That world where the rest of us leave, where there are devices that are cheaper and just as carbon-neutral as heat pumps, without demanding major roadworks in your back garden. Paddy Harvie hasn't reached that stage yet, even if he has denied contemplating to go into punitive mode against dissenters, even if it definitely looked like he did. Ironically, Paddys' antics did not deter Robin Harper, the first ever Green MSP, from urging his former comrades to get rid of the present leadership. Which would have only upsides for Scotland, unlike heat pumps.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

(Aldous Huxley)

You can't blame yourself for not being able to foresee the unthinkable. That's why they call it unthinkable.
(Trevor Holden, Travelers: U235, 2017)

A lot of people seem to have a real interest in what's happening in Scottish politics, so we're never short of Full Scottish polls. And even some who are not genuine Full Scottish, but walk and quack like one. The last such came from Survation, who conducted a massive MRP poll all across Great Britain, with a sample of 12,128. Their Scottish subsample was 1,052, so in the same league as the usual Full Scottish. Of course, it covers only Westminster voting intentions, and its sheer size makes it worth including in my sequence of Full Scottish, even it if didn't make things better for the SNP, but quite markedly for Labour. Then we had the infamous IPSOS poll that showed a massive swing from Labour to the SNP because of Keir Starmer's stance on Israel and Gaza. No shit. Err... wait... checks notes... there had been two earlier Full Scottish polls since Starmer made his outrageous statement and... err... neither showed any swing back from Labour to SNP, quite the opposite actually. But never mind. Some Glaswegians might want to make Keir Starmer feel unwelcome, but the trends of Full Scottish Westminster polls are unmistakable, with Labour now leading by a hare's breath.

It is quite interesting to see that at least one columnist for The Scottish Pravda has decided to face reality instead of entertaining the SNP zealots' fantasies. I've said it before, and will say it again, yes, a number of pro-Independence voters are switching, and will switch, from the SNP to Labour. Because their most urgent priority is to kick the Tories out of the English Government, no matter what. Not to hand the SNP another "mandate for Independence" in the absence of any credible strategy or any clear will to make it happen. And that the Tories sliding ever further to the right makes that shift even more likely, despite Keir Starmer's dubious stance on so many issues that are dear the the Great Scottish Public. Even SNP MP Pete Wishart is now admitting that Labour are a serious challenge to the SNP, hoping we have forgotten that he denied any sort of Labour surge was happening, not so long ago. The findings of the last quintet of Full Scottish polls, and the seat projections therefrom, are unequivocal. Apart from an obvious outlier, they agree that more SNP incumbents will lose their seats than at any general election before. And then the time will come for a massive reset of Scottish politics.

Despite what the polls say, and probably because they never listen to anything from outwith their homemade echo chamber, there is something very strange happening to the SNP now. Like doubling down on very unpopular and indefensible policies, like convicted men in women's prisons, as if they're in for just one last stand before their cows come home to roost. Which might well happen at the incoming snap general, whenever Rishi Sunak calls it, as there are too many negatives already piling high. Like the massive failures of education in Scotland. "We're better than the OECD average" will definitely be considered a non-valid defence when we're also worse than the UK average and falling faster. Parents will also not find solace in the fact that their kids are shit at science but fluent in pronouns, and I can definitely see a link between the two. His reaction to the Court of Session's ruling about the Section 35 Order that denied Royal Assent to the infamous GRR Bill again proves how out of touch Humza Yousaf is with the true wishes of the Scottish people. And also with what the law actually says, be it the Scotland Act, the Gender Recognition Act or the Equality Act. A drubbing at the snap general will only be the people's natural verdict on such levels of denial and incompetence.

I mean, is it what it’s all about for you know? Getting pissed in the bar and playing the same irrelevant political point-scoring games as the rest of the wankers in this place! Sticking your tongue out at the Tories! It’s pathetic!

(Nicky Hutchinson, Our Friends In The North: 1987, 1996)

All those lives moving through space. All that humanity whizzing by in a frenzy of burgers and chips, bank holiday fun, burst tyres, screaming kids and sudden heart attacks.

(Eugene Jones, Torchwood: Random Shoes, 2006)

A couple of weeks ago, Redfield & Wilton published the latest update to their now ritually monthly polling of Wales. With the usual chapters about Welsh Independence, Westminster voting intentions and Senedd voting intentions. I will no longer display or discuss the Senedd voting intentions for now. We know they have been made irrelevant by the announcement of a major overhaul of the electoral law, that will happen next year. The only thing we can do with such polling now is speculate about whether the actual vote under the new law would be more like the constituency vote, or more like the list vote, or somewhere in between. So I will wait until after the new legislation has been passed, and pollsters have adapted their Senedd polling accordingly, before ranting about the Senedd again. In the meanwhile, we still have the Great Welsh Public's views on Welsh Independence. That are just hypotheticals, as an actual referendum on it is as likely as Keir Starmer not performing any U-turn until the next general election. Anyway, that's where Wales stand now, according to Redfield & Wilton.

The chart represents the raw data before any weighting. It amounts to 63% No to 37% Yes once you discard the undecideds and abstainers, and weigh the data according to the usual criteria. Which is actually not that bad for Wales, considering that the constitutional debate is far less prominent there than in Scotland, you could even say far less of an everyday obsession for either side. Plaid Cymru are not pushing it too hard because they know what they have to gain from their power-sharing deal with Labour. Labour are perfectly happy bunnies with that, and they all lived happily ever after. Neither's attitude is likely to change before the incoming snap general, and even less so after it if Labour win it, and everybody sees the realpolitikish upside of having the government in London and the government in Cardiff in broad agreement on essential matters. Full Welsh Westminster polling shows that Welsh voters fully intend to be part of it, by granting Labour a substantial plurality of their votes.

Just like everywhere in the UK, Labour rose to unexpected heights during the Truss Interlude, and trends of voting intentions have now returned to more plausible levels. Labour will not necessarily do much better than in 2019, but the Conservatives doing considerably worse is enough for major changes in the seats count. If this is reached because of Reform UK doing better, as they are predicted to do in many corners of the Red Wall, it's even better. The residual Conservative MPs would interpret that as a sign they should slide further to the right and further down the twin rabbit hole of exceptionalism and xenophobia. Thusly paving the way for a repeat of 1997 leading into 2001, and another Labour landslide. For now, Wales are ready for Labour's return to a massively dominant position, whether you read that from one Full Welsh of the aggregate of one month's subsamples of GB-wide polls.

The results from the subsamples are only marginally different from the Full Welsh polls, which is quite natural as a bigger mass of datapoints will spontaneously tend to follow a regression to the mean. You will still get some totally outlandish results from some subsamples, but it does not matter so long as the next one delivers an equally outlandish result, just pointing to another direction. What we can deduce from the main trends of Welsh polling, of any variant, is the probability of a high Labour lead, around 20%. There is more uncertainty for Plaid Cymru, as even a slightly higher vote share could see them losing one of their two notional seats to Labour, which would be really bad luck. The only problem for Welsh Labour might be one of leadership. Mark Drakeford's net approval rating has dropped from +4% to -15% over the last year, while Keir Starmer's rose from -1% to +6% over the same period. The Welsh electorate don't have a problem with the party, but with the local leader. Drakeford has announced he will retire from politics at the next Senedd election, but he will still be leading the campaign for the general election. Could his sometimes unpopular decisions and statements make him a liability for his party? It will be interesting to watch, among others, the impact of the postponement of the "gender quotas in Senedd" bill, uncoincidentally just minutes after the ruling on the Scottish GRR Bill. Whatever the Welsh Government will not say about this, because it's a fucking embarrassment for them, this one would have been struck down for the exact same reason, infringing into reserved matters by redefining the already dubious concept of "legal sex".

We’re just animals howling in the night, cos it’s better then silence.

Moths around a flame, creatures clinging together in the cold.

(Suzie Costello, Torchwood: They Keep Killing Suzie, 2006)

The time has come for politicians to tell people the truth. The years of division and deceit are over.

(Claudia Seabrook, Our Friends In The North: 1979, 1996)

Redfield & Wilton have also updated their polling of select Red Wall constituencies, and this iteration is good news for Keir Starmer. Remember that this polling was never meant to be representative of the whole Red Wall area, as nobody knows what the Red Wall actually is. Redfield & Wilton selected constituencies who switched to the Conservatives under Boris Johnson, after years and even generations in Labour's hands. The purpose of the tracking, and it's a very valid one, is to assess how much voters who were seduced by Boris are now ready and willing to switch back to Labour. Their voting intentions show that they definitely are, and have become more favourable to Labour in the last two months. What we have now is a 12% swing from the Conservatives to Labour in those select seats. With two added bonuses for Labour: a strong Reform UK vote, and evidence of tactical voting from erstwhile Liberal Democrat voters.

The Conservatives' standing in the Wild Wild North is unlikely to improve now, after Jimmy Dimly, as The Hipstershire Gazette's John Crace quite aptly calls him, called Stockton-on-Tees a shithole. Of course, the Temp Home Secretary is entitled to his opinion, just like any of us. But some thoughts are better kept between a man and his priest or, better yet, between a man and his dog. Unless you want to spend all the time you have left before losing your seat trying to disentangle yourself from the mess you have created, and failing. But this is probably the least of the Conservatives' worries by now, as more and more voters desert them because they have lost all trust in their managerial competence. The zenith of this, or maybe the nadir would be a more appropriate term, was the UK government's handling of the Covid crisis, which seems to have turned into a shambolic mess in the North, according to the ongoing Covid Inquiry. Redfield & Wilton's Red Wall panel don't think much of the Tories, as shown by their replies when asked which party they trust the most to deal with their own priorities. It's not always a massive endorsement of Labour, but it's always really bad for the Conservatives.

The people's priorities are unlikely to change mush before the snap general election of 2024, and the Conservatives are left with pretty much no wiggling space to improve their image. If Conservative experts of opinion polls take a look a this one, they will be devastated to see that it's not just Labour winning the competence and credibility game. It's also Reform UK acquiring some veneer of credibility on some issues where the Conservatives are likely to have a hard time making themselves heard. Because 13 years have delivered nothing but failure. Their biggest failure, in these regions with many deprived communities, is obviously the cost-of-living crisis. Redfield & Wilton asked their Red Wall panel if they think the UK government is taking the right measures to address it. A straightforward question getting a straightforward answer. Nope, they fucking don't.

Given their verdict on the cost-of-living crisis, I have a hunch Our Friends In The North won't be happy bunnies about The Crown's use of bona vacantia funds, after the issue was raised by Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham. This is a government matter because Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, pretty much the Chief Accountant to the Royals, is a Cabinet position. It's even the ranking position at the Cabinet Office, second only to the Prime Minister. So, the current holder, Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden, should legitimately be questioned by MPs about what the fuck happened here. The position may have evolved into a sinecure for an overpaid jack-of-all-trades tasked with special missions for the benefit of the Prime Minister, but the holder is still legally answerable to Parliament for the governance of the Duchy. Which seems to have been abysmally deficient in that case. And it would also great fun to see the ectoplasmic Dowden being grilled by Angela Rayner on this. Deputy vs Deputy, in Committee.

You believe that people choose their own lives? We don’t. We don’t have to accept things. We can change things. You do something useful or go to hell, then.

(Nicky Hutchinson, Our Friends In The North: 1970, 1996)

So dauerhaft beweist sich doch nur das Echte.

(Sigmund Freud)

Finally, we have also had a new instalment of Redfield & Wilton's polling of a section of the Blue Wall, bringing a mixed bag of news for Keir Starmer. It looks good at first glance, because Labour are still outvoting the Conservatives in these select constituencies. But Labour's lead has gone down since the previous poll a month before, just as it has all over England. This has pretty much become three-way marginal territory now. And Labour's tiny lead does not even stay when the panel are asked which party they trust most to deal with a number of issues, those the poll identified as their priorities, ranked from highest to lowest from left to right. This should be a concern for Keir Starmer and Labour's policy writers. They're not backed by an unprecedented number of Home Counties voters because of a positive view of their policies and abilities, but by an unexpected urge to get rid of Conservatives MPs this part of England has re-elected for generations. That's more quicksand than solid rock, and the kind that may well evaporate in a really short time after Labour win the next general.

The poll also shows a deep lack of enthusiasm for Starmer himself. Which is not a South-only thing, but Labour's very tiny lead in the people's preferences sheds a cruel light on it, with Rishi Sunak defeating Sly Keir as the people's choice for Prime Minister. There is a high probability that Labour's good showing Doon Sooth is threatened by Keir Starmer's vacillations on a number of issues. Starmer defeats Sunak on only three of the issues used by Redfield & Wilton to define their primeministerabilty, and one of them is actually more like a three-way draw, as is the average assessment. I have a hunch that the denizens of the Home Counties, though they are obviously smarter than the average Englander, still have a hard time figuring out who Keir Starmer really is and what he stands for. Pretty much like the average Englander, after all. And, as a strong presidential component is now embedded deep into the Westminster System, this kind of interrogation will definitely not help Labour anywhere. Especially not the "Thatcher was great, but she got it all wrong, and I never said she was that great anyway" bit of the routine. Aye, the one that allowed Owen Jones to demonstrate that there is actually a sentient being inside that shitweasel persona, and one that actually makes sense once in a while.

Oddly, Redfield & Wilton did not ask their Blue Wall panel about the cost-of-living crisis. Do they think that the Posh Counties are not affected by it? Or maybe they aren't and never have to choose between eating and heating, but just between pony lessons and piano lessons for Geraldine and Crispin. But the results that we have from polls like this show that Labour should never be overconfident. Some of their predicted gains in England are fragile, because Labour are failing to project a totally positive image of themselves. The main reason is obvious, and I've pointed to it repeatedly already. If you publicly advocate conflicting, if not contradictory, policies all the time, voters will quite rightly start questioning everything you say. If your answer to criticism is a U-turn followed by a U-turn within a U-turn, you are not improving your credibility. If you mention both Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher as inspirations, the Great British Public are justified to wonder which one is you real role model. And you may not have time to sort it all out before Rishi Sunak capitulates and calls the snap election. Don't say you haven't been warned.

I have nothing against Golden Russets, my issue is with people who can identify Golden Russets.

(Dora Williams, New Amsterdam: Rituals, 2018)

Why don’t we just ship the Elgin Marbles to Rwanda, and then let the Greeks deal with them?

(Ross Noble, Have I Got News For You?, 1 December 2023)

Never short of a bad idea, Rishi Sunak thought the day between Remembrance Month and Christmas Month was the right time to declare a culture war on Greece over the Elgin Marbles. Which would be a total non-issue if the English Government had sent them back to Moray Council, as I advised them repeatedly in the past. Anyway, this will be another mess to sort for David Cameron, with no obvious political gain for Rishi, even in the backwaters of Middle England. The truth is that not even Tory backbenchers give a drying fuck about it, and the Parthenon is as likely to be mentioned on doorsteps as John Profumo. And Profumo might even have better odds. Now there is something that will surely get mentioned on doorsteps, the revelations of the Covid inquiry. Especially the parts where Rishi Sunak lobbied for lifting all precautions because it was bad for business. Labour will definitely have to use this, and whatever else surfaces during the inquiry, as the current batch of polls shows a 2% swing from Labour to the Conservatives in England over the last month, though with quite a different impact from region to region.

Oddly, the biggest swings away from Labour are in the Northern regions, but don't have a massive impact on the seat projections there, as Labour still get twice as many votes as the Conservatives in all three regions. More than enough vote sinkholes there to hold a massive majority of the seats. There is a more tricky situation in the Southern regions, where the last batch of polls says that both Labour and the Conservatives have lost voting intentions to the Liberal Democrats. That's just what Ed Davey has been waiting for since he became LibDem Leader, and started fancying he could be a thorn in the arse of a future Labour government. We're actually still very far from that, even if the Liberal Democrats treble their number of seats, which is quite a plausible scenario now. It will probably boil down to the amount of tactical voting, which seems to be swinging back and forth between Labour and the LibDems quite regularly now. And this does not necessarily help Labour in the nether regions of The Realm. But, as always, Labour have more to fear from themselves than from anyone else. Like when Wes Streeting, who may be the next Health Secretary, goes into a hissy fit about the NHS wanting more funding. What the fuck was he thinking?

The changes in the projection of likely seats in England, the results of a lesser overall performance for Labour, may explain Keir Starmer's odd move, the one nobody had on their Election Bingo Card. Praising Margaret Thatcher is indeed a bold move for Keir, but bold does not mean clever. And there are many examples of bold moves turning out to be dick moves. The mysterious part is what Starmer actually expects to gain from this. It won't attract "soft Tory" voters, who would prefer a return to a form of conservatism that existed before Thatcher. And it won't attract True Blue Thatcherite voters, who think Rishi Sunak is a softy, and that we should abolish taxes altogether. There are too many examples in history when "meaningful change" meant a turn for the worst, to quote them all. I also seriously question the wisdom of mentioning "our natural entrepreneurialism" in a time when the people's main concern is how to make ends meet, and being able to afford both eating and heating. The sad part is that everybody would have clapped Starmer if he had limited his references to Attlee and Blair, and then he spoilt the fun by unnecessarily adding the still-deeply-hated Thatcher. He will be lucky if that one does not come back to bite him in the arse during the actual campaign.

The Greeks have accused Rishi of playing politics to win votes. That’s an offensive and outrageous accusation, because Rishi Sunak has consistently demonstrated that he has absolutely no intention of ever winning an election.

(Guz Khan, Have I Got News For You?, 1 December 2023)

No surprise Jeremy Corbyn likes Middle Eastern food. He’s always been a big defender of hummus.

(Jo Brand, Have I Got News For You?, 3 November 2023)

Quite unexpectedly, and quite ironically, London politics are again dominated by Jeremy Corbyn. Not really because of something he has done, but of something he has not done. Calling Hamas "terrorists" despite Piers Morgan aggressively pressing him to do so a dozen times. And also because of Keir Starmer's odd obsession with him, prompting him to state once again that Corbyn will never be a Labour MP ever again, in case somebody missed the point the first seventeen times. Then I'm wondering what Starmer's deepest secret fear is. It could be the prospect of Corbyn standing as an independent for his current seat in Islington North. Corbyn still maintains a cloak of creative ambiguity about this option, which could gather support from outwith the constituency or even from outwith London, and possibly defeat the party's electoral juggernaut. Or it could be Corbyn standing for Mayor of London against the Labour Establishment incumbent Sadiq Khan, who seems to be genuinely worried by that prospect. We have had three more polls of the incoming Mayor's election since my last article, one from YouGov, one from Lord Ashcroft and one from Find Out Now. YouGov did not include a Corbyn option in its polling of voting intentions, but the other two did, and the results are quite substantially different from what we had in earlier polls.

This time, I have displayed separately the total of votes bagged by the Reclaim Party, UKIP and the Heritage Party in 2021, for comparison's sake. None of them is standing for the next election so far, and they represent pretty much the classic far-right electorate that Reform UK will be targeting next year. Now these last three polls show quite a radical departure from what we had seen so far. Until late September, London polling led to the conclusion that Sadiq Khan was in a very precarious position, could be defeated by a lacklustre and gaffe-prone Susan Hall, and indeed would if Jeremy Corbyn entered the competition. The new polls, even the least Khan-friendly one from Find Out Now, say the exact opposite, that Khan will be reelected in a landslide, and has nothing to fear from Corbyn. So you have to wonder what has changed to justify such a reversal of fortunes. And the answer is... fuck all. Just Khan going more irritatingly woke than usual, which should have had the opposite effect. Lord Ashcroft sought to shed some light on these surprising voting intentions, asking his panel if some qualifiers are completely true, or not true at all, of Khan.

The scale used in the polls has eleven steps from 0 to 10, 10 being of course the most favourable, which I have summed up in a classic five-step scale for more clarity. Lord Mike obviously chose only qualifiers that convey a positive image of the Mayor but, on average, the results are not spectacularly good. On average of the ten traits surveyed, 48% of Londoners think they truly represents Khan, and 39% think that they don't. Of course, people will not always understand the items the same way, depending of their own political perspective. But some of them definitely can't be misrepresented, and should raise some alarms within London Labour. Probably the most significant is that 43% of Londoners consider that Khan understands people like them, and 45% think he does not. This could become really meaningful if the Conservatives try and rescue their campaign by injecting some elements of "culture war" in it. This is where Esther McVey and her orwello-pythonesque Ministry Of Common Sense could find some practical use. Something like a variation on the well-rehearsed "aloof woke metropolitan elite" theme song. That may even work, if you consider the public's response to another question, whether or not Khan is doing a good job on a number of key issues.

On average of the fifteen items surveyed, 41% of Londoners think that Khan is doing a good job and 43% think he is doing a bad job. Another question in the poll takes us down pretty much the same road. Lord Mikey found it significant enough to feel compelled to devote a whole hit job of a comment to it, which saves me the bother of dissecting it too. To cut a long story short, Londoners think that everything is going tits up in the Imperial Capital, nothing works and everything has gotten worse since Boris Johnson departed. That's definitely a bleak starting point for Khan's campaign, especially when you consider his main areas of weakness, those where he gets a double-digit net negative. Homelessness, taxation, crime and cleaning the Met. It's too late now to do anything about it, with just five months and change left before the election. His strongest points, protecting green spaces and standing up for inclusive values, might also not be the main focus of the average voter. I think Sadiq Khan can consider himself lucky that the Conservatives, for some unfathomable reasons, have chosen as inept a candidate as Susan Hall. Former Minister for London Paul Scully would certainly have been a tougher adversary, and his selection would have saved him from an undignified sacking, for unclear and undisclosed reasons. But now Scully is out, and Hall surely ain't no Mulder...

London Mayor Sadiq Khan has called for a ceasefire to prevent tanks rolling into the Gaza Strip.

And if that doesn’t stop them, he’s going to declare Gaza a ULEZ zone.

(Jo Brand, Have I Got News For You?, 3 November 2023)

You wouldn’t put a pig in charge of a herd of prime beef cattle, even if it looked good in a twinset and pearls.

(Bob Hawke, The Crown: Terra Nullius, 2020)

Next year's big thing in Europe will be the elections for the European Parliament, held in all 27 member countries between 6 and 9 June. Don't think that it is irrelevant to the British public because we are no longer part of it. It is, because the political choices that emerge from it, and the subsequent mandatory reshuffle of the European Commission, will determine the EU's foreign policy for the next five years. Including their relationship with the UK. It has, quite unexpectedly, improved during James Cleverly's tenure at the Foreign Office, and the return of David Cameron could improve it further. One of the reasons is that the EU is already undermined from the inside by Putin's allies in its ranks, Hungary and Slovakia, and will surely do what it takes to ensure mutual understanding with the UK. Not just in the short-term, as Cameron's tenure is certain to be short, but also in the long run after elections in the UK and EU have brought new leadership in. A perfect context to hit reset and start again, on the right foot this time. Europe Elects has been tracking, synthesising and publishing voting intentions for the European Parliament in all member countries. They admit themselves that it's not an exact science, as relevant polling is not always available, but what it gives is a broad idea of where the EU is heading, updated on a monthly basis.

The first obvious trend is a weakening of the left-wing parties (The Left, Greens-EFA, S&D), and a strengthening of the hard-right (ECR) and far-right (I&D). This is supported by actual polling in countries where all of these are represented, like France, and more generic polling or election results in countries where European Parliament polling is scarce or non-existent. Pan-European estimates of voting intentions also show a shift within the right-wing parties, from the liberal-centrist Renew, the successor of the once-powerful liberal ALDE, to the conservative EPP. This second trend in not necessarily true individually in all member countries, as Renew are not a major force in many of them, but they are likely to come second or first in France and Poland, with some strong representation also likely from the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden and Romania. Now the important thing is what kind of majority these elections could deliver, and Europe Elects simulate this monthly too, to the best of their ability. Bear in mind that most of the currently "unaffiliated" MEPs actually come from a galaxy of small nationalist parties, that are so far deemed too controversial to be accepted into either ECR or I&D. This might not be the case next year if including them strengthens the concept of some fantasy "resistance front" against the Parliament's majority.

Of course, there will be no majority in the next European Parliament, and decision-making will continue to rely on compromise and case-by-case alliances. The sequence above includes the breakdown after the 2019 elections, on 751 seats with the UK still in. What it became after Brexit on 705 seats, with the UK out and part of our seats reallocated to other countries. How it looks now after defections, readjustments and whatnot over the last three years. And finally how it is predicted to look like after next year's elections, with total membership increased to 720. With no genuine majority possible, a big-tent meta-coalition of the European People's Party, Socialists and Democrats, and Renew is likely to be the driving force behind most decisions. This would lead to legislation and regulations of broadly liberal inspiration, as has been the case for decades now. But it would not help with operational decisions that require executive decisions by the heads of state and government in the European Council, which require either unanimity or a qualified majority. There is one major issue that will be impacted by this, support to Ukraine. The allies of Russia within the EU, Hungary and Slovakia, can't block humanitarian and military aid from other member countries, but they could block its funding by the EU budget, transferring the financial burden to member states whose public opinion may disagree. Just when it's becoming painfully obvious that the war in Ukraine will be a long-drawn and costly affair, and the EU already finds it problematic to fulfill all its earlier promises.

A planned withdrawal to prepared positions isn’t a defeat, it is a sound strategic move.

(Angus Hudson, Upstairs, Downstairs: News From The Front,1974)

Those who live by populism, die by populism.

(Will Self, The Queen And Her Prime Ministers, 2021)

Since the beginning of the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, YouGov, and to a lesser extent We Think, have been tracking the Great British Public's level of sympathy for both sides. What they find is not necessarily conclusive, as it is ambiguous, but there is one unmistakable trend. The level of sympathy for Israel has decreased and the level of sympathy for Palestine has increased. This is quite a natural evolution as the news we receive have shown the massive and disproportionate violence of Israel's onslaught on Gaza, more and more similar to Russia's criminal war on civilians in Ukraine. Then we have evidence of Israeli settlers on the West Bank turning into a vigilante mob and harassing Palestinians, without any intervention from the Israeli military to stop assaults and murders. But there is a disturbing flip side to this, that I have already alluded to earlier. That British media, even the "fair and balanced" BBC, take everything from Hamas sources as a self-evident truth, and everything from an Israeli source as dubious at best, fake news and propaganda at worst. This culminated with Owen Jones urging us to treat Hamas as humanitarians, genuinely concerned with the health of the hostages they violently abducted from Israel. This creates a climate in which the change of heart of our public opinion is actually fueled by massively biased influencers.

This is sadly just another sign of the times, of the Loony Woke Left's pre-scripted ideological narrative polluting our collective psyche. In a totally disproportionate way, as I totally agree with Ed Balls calling Wokistan's poster man-child Owen Jones "so intellectually second-rate". This toxic lot have their heads so far up their arses that they can't disentangle themselves from their mush-brained echo-chamber of intersectionalist deconstructivist groupthink and face the reality of Hamas. A genocidal islamo-fascist terrorist organisation who have never ever worked in the best interest of the Palestinian people, or to fulfill their legitimate claims to safety and freedom in an independent nation of their own. If you genuinely want a free Palestine, and I most certainly do, it means Palestine must be cleansed from Hamas. Otherwise, you will have achieved nothing, other than creating a theocratic dictatorship worse than Iran and Afghanistan. We can only hope now that Owen Jones's atrocious reaction to the videos of Hamas atrocities will at last totally discredit him and his horde of Hamas-enabling followers. One can dream. Then, as an immediate measure, we need a full ceasefire, to stop further destruction and massacre from out-of-control Israeli strikes. Opinium polled this and found that the British public favour a full ceasefire over some "humanitarian pause".

Humanitarian pauses, as the one we have witnessed recently, are not enough when everybody uses them to get ready for renewed acts of criminal aggression after a few days. The Great British Public know that and don't believe that a four-day lull will lead to an end to the conflict. Labour HQ should also factor in that their own voters and the younger generation, those most supportive of them, choose a full ceasefire over pauses even more significantly that the average Brit. So, what is strategically and morally right is also politically expedient, so why wait? Nobody would chastise Keir Starmer for U-turning and calling for a ceasefire. We would just take the piss out of him and wonder aloud what took him so long. This is even more true of the UK government, when foreign governments are already calling for a ceasefire, or are cautiously moving in that direction. I don't care that neither Israel nor Hamas want a full ceasefire, for their own ulterior motives. If there can be such a thing as a revamped Coalition Of The Willing, for a worthy reason this time, it must make it its mission to strongarm both sides into a ceasefire. By all means necessary, and that includes sending boots of their own on the ground to enforce it. Or, more subtly, or not, use the leverage they have with aid to both sides. The Thirteen Colonies' branch office of YouGov tested their panel about that, and there are some interesting results in that.

The divides here are predictable and classic. The Left are open to cutting military aid to Israel and strongly support humanitarian aid to the Palestinians, while the Right go in the opposite direction. I think opposition to the United States' extravagant amounts of military aid to Israel will become more and more widespread quite quickly. The American supporters of Israel do not have a case that it helps the United States themselves, directly or indirectly. It will actually hurt the United States more and more, as Netanyahu's Putin-like criminal war on the civilian population meets with more and more reprobation internationally. The other option, using humanitarian aid as leverage on Hamas, might not be the most morally attractive, but we have to contextualise here. Millions are funneled into funding Hamas's military capability, or embezzled into their leadership's offshore accounts, so the actual pressure would not be on the civilians of Gaza and the West Bank, who are the only legitimate recipients of our humanitarian aid. So there's an option not to be dismissed. Whatever helps stopping the fighting has to be considered, even when it's clearly outwith the classic toolbox of diplomacy.

Last time I checked, reconstructing the moral fabric of the universe was not our mission.

(Danielle Poole, For All Mankind: New Eden, 2022)

Vladimir Putin’s favourite sandwich comprises kebab, gherkins and barbecue sauce.

Otherwise known as the KGB.

(Jo Brand, Have I Got News For You?, 3 November 2023)

There are many worrying trends in the way the situation in Ukraine, and our perception if it, has evolved over the last few months. There is an atmosphere of defeatism now, sadly fueled by some Ukrainian leaders, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy has a really hard time fighting it. In the meanwhile, Vladimir Putin has never sounded so confident, and he certainly has a point. Sadly, the main reasons Vlad The Invader has to feel buoyant point to our own failures in providing the right kind of support to Ukraine at the right time. The main factor here is obviously, as it ever was, Joe Biden's procrastination based on imaginary red lines that never existed on the Russian side. Sloppy Joe has been guided solely by doing what was expedient in terms of American domestic politicking, not what was strategically right in the long term. And now even that is failing, as a vociferous minority of hard-right Republicans in the House of Representatives are blocking any substantial increase of military aid to Ukraine. There are repercussions of this in YouGov's polling of the American public, especially now that the war in Gaza provides a distraction from the war in Ukraine, that Russia can only welcome.

The American public's view that the war in Gaza is more of a threat to American interest than the war in Ukraine inevitably leads to a rising tide of isolationism from the latter, and a diminished sense of responsibility for the protection of Ukraine. The generational divide does not look like a massive factor here, but the political divide certainly is, whichever way you evaluate it. Biden voters, registered Democrats and self-described liberals don't offer massive support to the United States taking some responsibility in the Ukraine war. While right-wingers of all shades more visibly embrace some sort of American disengagement from it. But now is not the time, as reliable news from Russia prove. Vladimir Putin might try and paint a rosy picture of Russia's economy and the "failure" of sanctions, some hard facts remain. Military spending will rise to 30% of the country's budget in 2024, or 6% of GDP in direct spending. Or 10% of GDP if you add indirect spending like unprecedented benefits for war widows. So it's the right moment to hold steady in our support for Ukraine, and the Great American Public actually agree.

As of this month, only a third of Americans want to cut aid to Ukraine, and half of them want it to be at least the current level. Which does look like a clean open-and-shut case, but unfortunately isn't as American politics are never about what the people really want. Media and spads manage to focus attention, not on the half of Americans who want to support Ukraine, but on the half of Republicans who don't. And Democrats fall for it because elections are now less than a year away, and their main concern is how any position they take will impact their electoral prospects. They are prone to choose the safety of cowardice because they know a lot of their voters have been groomed by the Radical Left, to believe that Vladimir Putin actually has the best interests of all the oppressed in the world at heart. Which is risible when you know how minorities and dissenters are treated in the Born-Again Soviet Union. But this is another aspect of the deranged intersectional deconstructivist Articles of Faith. Sadly, these vociferous fringe have enough weight to make their elected officials ignore the fact that an overwhelming majority of Americans support Ukraine against Russia. As shown by YouGov again, who else?

Even a majority of Trump voters and self-identifying conservatives support Ukraine, so that should be a no-brainer for Congressmen and Senators, when Russia is going on with its criminal war of attrition against the civilian population. It sadly is not because a number of FSB-sponsored influencers, plus some Ukrainians, have sown the seeds of distrust and defeatism. The American public are uncertain about who actually has the advantage in that war and, before you ask, the British public are too. Unfortunately, the Democratic establishment are in complete denial about the part their lack of action has played in this feeling of uncertainty and failure. It was obvious, right from the start, that only the United States had the potential to provide Ukraine with the amount of weaponry they needed, and they wouldn't even have needed to deplete their first line of defence. According to official sources, the United States have around 1,400 F-16 aircraft and 3,700 Abrams tanks of earlier generations in storage. If a decision had been taken a year ago, hundreds of each could have been refurbished to more modern standards, sent to Ukraine with fully-trained crews by now, and turned the tide of the Ukrainian counter-offensive. American support is even more crucial now after the Dutch general election, where a fascist pro-Russian party came out first, which can only further weaken the European Union's resolve to support Ukraine as long as necessary. Biden can't say he hasn't been warned.

I’m not gonna sit here and pretend to know what makes us who we are. But I got to figure it’s more than just the sum of what we remember.

(Grant McLaren, Travelers: Marcy, 2016)

The issue for Putin was his project to rebuild the Soviet Empire.

His project to reintegrate what he regarded as the spiritual heartland of Mother Russia.

(Boris Johnson)

YouGov may have been distracted from Ukraine by more pressing issues, like how we like to be addressed in commercial spam, but fortunately other pollsters kept their eyes on the ball. More In Common fielded a poll about Ukraine last month, which they oddly did not advertise or publish an article analysing it. But never mind, they have made the full results available, so I will tell you what I make of it. Easy task, as the poll includes only four questions, kind of focusing on the essentials. It is important to assess where our own public opinion stands now, even if the results are not always encouraging, as the main danger is us succumbing to defeatism, which does not look better when you reframe is as the proverbial "Ukraine fatigue". Interestingly, More In Common found fewer hints of this than previous polls. They first asked their panel if the UK should support Ukraine even if it hurts us. Obviously their exact wording refers to the sort of economic hardships like an energy crisis and its impact on the cost-of-living crisis. And the results are actually better than they look at first glance.

The link between our support for Ukraine and our own situation, and how it might be manipulated by Putin-enablers, has always been something of a concern for politicians, and polled often. Two months ago, BMG Research found that 31% of Brits would oppose aid to Ukraine if it had a negative impact on the economy, and 44% would still support it. And, a year ago 40% of Brits told YouGov they would oppose supporting Ukraine if it meant increasing the cost of living, with a thin plurality of 43% saying they would still support Ukraine. So More In Common's findings, even if they sound half-hearted at first, are actually quite good, and an improvement on earlier polling. More In Common also surveyed how far the Great British Public think out support for Ukraine should go, offering more detailed options than other pollsters who polled on lines approaching this in the past. And, again, the results are better than they look, if you put them in perspective.

The last time something similar was polled, by YouGov in June, 55% of Brits said we should support Ukraine until Russia had withdrawn from Ukraine. More In Common kind of splits the vote by offering the options of the pre-2022 borders vs the pre-2014 borders, but we still have the same level of overall support, on 55%. YouGov did not offer any option for a time-limited support, or stopping support, but found 22% of Brits supporting negotiations even if it meant Ukraine losing the occupied territories to Russia. So we're in the same waters as the 14% supporting only temporary aid now, and the 12% who want to stop all aid. The More In Common poll also confirms what was seen in previous polls, that voters of all three main English parties offer stronger support for Ukraine than average. No pollster offered political crosstabs beyond these three parties, so it's a matter of conjecture where higher levels of opposition come from. All we can guess is that it comes as much from the right as from the left, even if it's for different reasons. But don't forget that the main point here is that both Labour and Conservative voters strongly support continued support for the Ukrainian war effort, which means a change of government next year will not jeopardise it. And this can only be good news.

People have waited a long time for the Russia thing to play out.

Napoleon told Joséphine he wanted to wait until the Russia thing played out.

(Stuart Heyford, The Diplomat, 2023)

What is the purpose of our defence policy? It is to make people believe Britain is defended. Not the Russians, the British! The Russians know it’s not. It’s for all our simple, ignorant people shuffling in and out of houses, buses, factories and the Cabinet room

(Sir Humphrey Appleby, Yes, Prime Minister: The Ministerial Broadcast, 1986)

There is another side to the war in Ukraine, which pollsters oddly seem quite reluctant to address, probably because the UK government themselves find it awkward to discuss it. That's the issue of what kind of impact it has on the UK's national security and the future of the UK's defence. Both of which are obviously hot issues because some firebrand might turn them into some hyper-nationalistic narrative with clear Russophobic overtones, which probably wouldn't help. Just the sort of thing you might have expected from Ben Wallace, but that any of Grant Shapps's personas will carefully avoid, which is why he was Rishi Sunak's best choice for Temp Defence Secretary. David Cameron too is keen to avoid an overtly aggressive rhetoric, and reminding the Great British Public of the evils of appeasement instead is certainly a good way to make the point that defeating Putin is in the UK's best interests. The Great British Public seem to see the logic in this, when asked how important it is for us that Ukraine defeats the Russian aggression.

A massive majority of Brits definitely see that it is in our best interests that Ukraine defeats Russia, significantly more than support continuous aid for Ukraine. I guess we should now wonder how Ukraine can defeat Russia without massive help from us. Especially when the United States Congress is held in a stalemate by rabid pro-Putin Trumpians. Biden tried to bait them with a legislative stunt, bundling aid to Israel and Ukraine in one package, and he failed. And then Republican extremists responded with a counter-stunt, linking aid to Ukraine to massive funding for Trump's Wall at the Mexican border, only to defeat it on a procedurality, thanks to the arcane rules of the United States Senate. It also casts a merciless light on the American Loony Left, that "socialist" Bernie Sanders voted with the Republicans to defeat the bill. This again shows how solidly entangled the Trump clique are with Russia. But they should also pay attention to much closer to home, to Venezuela's farcical referendum, that opens the door to an attempt to illegally annex parts of Guyana. This is obviously a direct result of showing weakness in confronting Putin, which emboldens other authoritarian dictators to trample international law. There can be no appeasement of this lot, or else we are sure to lose, and probably more than we can imagine. Which inevitably, and quite sadly, leads directly to wondering if we should increase our military spending.

I personally see no conclusive need to increase the defence budget until we have found ways to use it more efficiently. Which is not a given, when you consider the repeated massive failures of British military procurement, from destroyers that can't function in hot water to leaky aircraft-less aircraft carriers plagued by crass project mismanagement. Certainly an immediate priority must be increasing funding for cyber-security, which has to be treated as part of national defence, as there is more than enough evidence that Russia and China have made targeted cyber-attacks a priority. What has been found at Sellafield is most probably just the tip of the iceberg, with all the seeds of a major national security disaster already sown. Then we obviously need a thorough and uncensored review of the Dreadnought-class submarines, that are definitely not an independent deterrent as we can't use them without approval from the United States. The Royal Navy should definitely consider cutting the class to just two units, before it's too late to do so without having to pay massive cancellation compensation. Then reconfigure the remaining two as platforms for conventional cruise missiles, as the US Navy have already done with some of their own ballistic missile submarines, and return the whole Trident paraphernalia to the United States, to whom it belongs anyway. We don't need a bigger defence, just a more efficient and better managed one. Which, of course, neither the Conservatives nor Labour will do, so feart they are of being called "unpatriotic".

If we’re going to war with Russia, we should get a dog. I’m getting a fish.

(Stuart Heyford, The Diplomat, 2023)

Jeremy's Den

10/12/2023

In Our Minds

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