Jeremy's Den: Give The People What They Think They Want

I only served one term as an MP. By the end of my first term, I knew I had contempt for my constituents. It simply came as a bit of a shock to find the feeling was entirely mutual. And it did not help that my darling wife put our house in the constituency up for sale during an election campaign.
(Gyles Brandreth)

What emotions do to our lives! We struggle to live in the intellect where everything is circumscribed by reason, and all the time emotions drag you down into an undertow and you can’t get free.

(John Deed, Judge John Deed: Nobody’s Fool, 2002)

In case you had forgotten, click on the images for larger pop-up versions.

The Conservatives' latest, and surprisingly unnoticed, campaign stunt was to "give back" voting rights to UK citizens how have been living abroad for more that 15 years. And then appointing a coordinator to boost turnout from a group that they imagine will be reliable Tory voters. Oddly, The Hipstershire Gazette reprinted a Conservative soundbite without challenging it, while it is a mix of truth and approximation. It is true that US citizens living abroad have voting rights for life in the home constituency where they were last registered to vote. But the situation in France is vastly different. There are eleven seats in the National Assembly, and twelve seats in the Senate, representing French residents abroad, based on the country where they actually live for the National Assembly seats and at-large representation for the Senate seats. You thusly grant expats representation, which is their unalienable right, but avoid interference in any home constituency with which they have only the most tenuous of ties, which respects the rights of people actually living in the constituency. Two consecutive speed-polls from YouGov showed that the British public disapprove of the principle itself, and are also split about the best mode of representation. But the Conservatives are so desperate that they obviously count on these 2.2 million extra voters to curb the trends of voting intentions, and that might prove a risky gamble. Because, for obvious reasons, there is no evidence whatsoever that this extra layer of voters do prefer the Conservatives.

The most striking thing in these trendlines is that there has not been any massive change for a long period. There are fluctuations, often way beyond the usual margin of error of generic voting intentions polls, but nothing that suggests a reversal of fortunes. Whatever the Conservatives do to make themselves more attractive and electable, they still get numbers in the mid-to-high 20s. Probably because they don't actually do that, but always find new stunts to make themselves more repellent. On the other side of the street, whatever Labour do to make themselves more unattractive and unelectable, they still get numbers in the mid-to-high 40s. Not for lack of trying, obviously, and recent polls even have them regaining some ground again. But the Westminster System has also been summat Americanised over the last few decades or so, and there is also a pseudo-presidential dimension in it. Which is why it is always fun to compare voting intentions with whom the Great British Public pick as the best potential Prime Minister. It's fun, of course, because it never matches to the last decimal place. Not even to the nearest 5%, actually.

We see that again this month, as Keir Starmer's rating as Britain's preferred Prime Minister is up again, after taking a visible nosedive. He doesn't have much to fear, as Rishi Sunak's is doing really poorly, and the proverbial Neither is still the Great British Public's second choice. Or it could be Ed Davey, or whatever is left of him after the Post Office Scandal saga. Or not. More likely not. This has led to some speculation about whether or not an alternative leader could save the Conservative Party from abject humiliation, triggered by a piece posted by YouGov, which they freely admit does not prove much so long as you can't name the hypothetical Spare, and dutifully relayed by The Torygraph, who should know better than encouraging a mass scuttle before the battle. I'm not sure that the public would be thrilled by yet another Conservative leadership ferrets-in-a-bag, that Conservative Home predicts would be between Kemi Badenoch and Penny Mordaunt, neither of which is a very appealing prospect. But it could of course be worse. They might decide that a Trump Moment is better than a galaxy of Portillo Moments, and bring back Boris Johnson. No shit, Sherlock.

Try not to think of a polar bear, and you will see the cursed thing comes to mind every single minute.

(Fyodor Dostoevsky)

The poor are never happy. That’s a myth, fostered by the rich, to make the poor less troublesome.

(Georgina Channing, Judge John Deed: Duty Of Care, 2001)

To enlighten us about what may happen in this Tory Wipeout Election year, Deltapoll have surveyed what can be the Great British Public's motivations when casting their vote. On a scale from what you could call a selfish vote to a selfless vote, with "the greater good" in between, whatever that actually means. I'm actually surprised that only a third of Brits admit that they vote according to their own interests, and that more than half say they are motivated by the Greater Good. But, of course, nobody is supposed to tell nothing but the truth to a pollster, are they? That's one of the quiet joys of psephologhood, trying to decipher when people are lying, and for which ulterior motive. Or you just admit that they don't, and rejoice at the thought that Scots are the less selfish and the most concerned by the wellbeing of the underdog of all Three Nations.

Then it comes as no surprise that Conservative voters are the least likely to vote for disadvantaged, while Labour voters are the most likely to be motivated by that rather than by self-interest. But the electorate's motivations are not by themselves enough to guess which party they will choose. Unless the pollster asks, which Deltapoll dutifully did. Not surprisingly, the Labour Party wins hands down as the best choice to meet all there criteria, which is the logical continuation of the current state of voting intentions. The most interesting bit here is that Scots are much more likely to pick Labour as the party that will do right by everyone and their dog, something to keep in mind when examining Scottish voting intentions, which will come in due course.

The poll's crosstabs also shed a light on the political divides involved in peoples' voting motivations. Of course Conservative and Labour voters choose their own preferred party as the flag-bearer of everyone's best interests, and LibDem voters favour Labour. Though there is one very revealing exception. Conservative voters are split three-ways about which party best represents the interests of the disadvantaged. Even they clearly have no delusion about whom the Nasty Party actually work for. There is too much evidence to deny it. But they still choose to vote for them in spite of it. Which is also an interesting insight into what goes on in their minds, summat like a variant of the proverbial "I'm alright, Jack" spirit.

Do the people's motivations really explain their vote? All things considered, probably not completely and conclusively. All the good intentions in the world won't make a fucking difference when the people have to decide, on the more concrete and rational basis of their main concerns. All polls show that the cost of living and the state of the NHS top the list every time the question is asked, and that works all across the Three Usually Polled Nations, whatever the person's pre-existing political affiliation. So people voting on the basis of who's best equipped to do what's right in these two domains will definitely vote for what's good for them. That it may also be the right choice for everybody else in the UK is just a serendipitous coincidence. As is pretty much the case with all motivations that can't be reduced to some abstract principle with little bearing on the brutal facts of life.

The greater good, there’s a rock upon which fairness and justice have become arid to the point of death.

(John Deed, Judge John Deed: Political Expediency, 2002)

Plato observed that it would be better to be guilty of manslaughter than of a fraud about what is just and fair, and the Greek geezer was right.

(Peter Cherry, Silent Witness: Grievance Culture, 2024)

The Great British Public's perception of the two most likely contenders for Number Ten has changed quite considerably since Rishi Sunak was anointed by a Very Tory Coup, quite similar in its brutality to the demise of Margaret Thatcher. YouGov has been tracking both men's popularity for years now, and have summed it up in an article that pretty much makes the case that Rishi Sunak has become as much of a liability for the Conservative Party as Liz Truss once was. There is no doubt than Rishi Sunak saw himself as the Saviour Of The Natural Order Of Things As We Know It, and that Conservative MPs agreed. The same MPs who are now chuntering from the backbenches, making up new excuses to not show up at PMQs, when they're not openly calling for Sunak to stand down before the election. Because yet another Conservative beauty pageant is certainly all we need. The most rebellious among Tory MPs surely find some reason for agitation in polls like YouGov's comparison of the two top contenders, that show how much the voters make it personal against Sunak.

So the public see Sunak as hardworking, but out of touch with ordinary people, dull, fake and untrustworthy. Definitely not the place from which you want to start a campaign. If the intent is actually to win it, not to get done with it and trot off to a Clegg-like cushy job in The Americas. You just have to wonder whom Rishi Sunak will blame for such abysmal results, if he ever reads them. Will he chastise the public for misunderstanding him? Or will he point to the ever growing factionalism within the Conservative Party and the many ways these factions find to embarrass and undermine him? There are now officially more factions within the Conservative Party than political parties representing English seats in Commons, some of them being actually splinter groups from splinter groups. Which kind of undermines their barbs about divisions within the Labour Party, and their collective credibility. But the Great British Public still seem to think that Rishi's worst enemy is Rishi himself, as their assessment of his competence is just as bad as their assessment of his personality.

When he was elevated to the Premiership, Rishi Sunak did enjoy some level of support and trust on his specialist subjects. Which were all things related to the economy and public finances. But it's all gone with the wind now, as the highest levels of public trust he gets are a joint 30% on defence and his handling of the war in Ukraine. But he still gets 57% of distrust on both, that were generally considered to be Conservative fortes, especially after Boris Johnson had become Ukraine's mascot after his multiple photo-ops in Kyiv. On average of the twelve key issues surveyed by YouGov, Sunak gets a net rating of -43, with 24% trusting him and 67% not trusting him. Kicking the election into the long grass will not help, as the voters are very likely to resent it and become increasingly incensed by the belief that the government does jack shit to address their most pressing and immediate concerns. The poll hints at just that as three out of five of Rishi's worst ratings, those below a net -50, refer to the NHS and the cost of living, which have been identified as the Great British Public's two top concerns by all pollsters for months. Is there a way out of this for Rishi Sunak now? It seems there is just one left, calling the election now and bracing himself for the inevitable.

I have a plan so cunning you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel.

(Edmund Blackadder, Blackadder The Third, 1987)

We live in an age of unreal reality, don’t we? The triumph of artifice over substance. Merit is sacrificed for appearance every day. What happened to us?

(Peter Cherry, Silent Witness: Grievance Culture, 2024)

It would be foolish to expect Keir Starmer's ratings to be a mirror image of Rishi Sunak's, and of course they are not. The Great British Public have broadly accepted the idea that he will be the next Prime Minister, but are definitely not sold to the concept of him being the Saviour who will Make Britain Great Again and groceries cheaper. Starmer created that impression himself as he has been sending contradictory signals continuously. On one hand, Owen Jones may be whining for the rest of his days about the Cull Of The Left, that was indeed quite distasteful and distastefully enforced, but the public don't really care and it is actually likely to have improved Starmer's image with many voters. On the other hand, Starmer equivocating on the Israel-Hamas war or gender ideology has most likely produced the opposite effect. Ambiguity, no matter how creative, will not be an option at Number Ten. The public know it, Sir Keir knows it but can't help entertaining it, so the public's responses on his personality traits also tend to be somewhat ambiguous.

Based on YouGov's last poll, Keir Starmer is seen as hardworking, competent, kind and honest. This is quite a contrast with Rishi Sunak, but Starmer is also considered weak, indecisive and untrustworthy. Just like Rishi Sunak. He's also seen as dull, which is probably no longer a liability. People are surely ready to have a Prime Minister who is just as entertaining as James Acaster, because they have had more than enough clown politics with Boris Johnson. When you consider the average verdict on the personality traits probed by YouGov, Starmer's results are split three-ways between those leaning towards the positive side, those leaning towards the negative, and those who can't choose. The distressing part is that Starmer seems keen on getting it wrong again and again, because some focus groups said so. He certainly will not be considered more in touch with ordinary people with his interview to the Express, promising to "get tough on yobs". That's him cuddling Farage-loving populists with the appearance of toughness, but the first thing people will see is that the real Starmer actually does not talk like that, so that's another epic PR fail. Nevertheless, the Great British Public are inclined to trust Starmer more than Sunak on the key political issues, even if they don't grant him an unequivocal endorsement.

Starmer's average rating here is a net -16, with 34% or the panel who trust him and 50% who don't. Getting a better result than Rishi Sunak is the least you can expect in the current atmosphere of a complete Tory meltdown, but the net negative says that Keir Starmer still has a long way to go before he can claim to be more than a choice by default. Even on his two best ratings, the NHS and education, he still gets a small net negative, and he also gets below average results on the cost of living and the economy. This is certainly because Starmer has failed to make a real difference about the whole range of topics broadly covered by "the economy". Starmer may genuinely think that his proposals are progressive and innovative, but lots of voters feel they are hearing just more of the same. English voters, for example, are aware that it will take billions of pounds to put their NHS and their schools back on the right track, and that staff shortages might even be the least of their problems. And they have every right to be perplexed by Starmer's insistence on cuddling the suburban middle-class instead of the working class. Solidifying Labour's potential gains in the South is one thing, but rebuilding the Red Wall is quite another. The longer we have to wait for the election, the more likely Starmer's strategy is to backfire. And he surely knows it.

Scum rises to the top and drapes itself in the cloak of woke. You can lie with a straight face, makes you perfect for academics.

(Peter Cherry, Silent Witness: Grievance Culture, 2024)

We see a discrepancy within government. They want to be nice and cuddly to the plebs, but they don’t want to obstruct the wealth creators by pushing up industry’s costs and slowing growth.

(Laurence James, Judge John Deed: Duty Of Care, 2001)

As the days get longer, and prices still get higher by the day, the pollsters' mythical Britain is marching from an Autumn Of Discontent into a Winter Of Unrest, as exemplified by the number of new strikes already being called. Then we will dance to the same tunes. Pollsters asking us if we still love the nurses and the posties. Rishi Sunak blaming the unions for everything Liz Truss has fucked up. Keir Starmer telling his MPs to never get near picket lines, or else... But the Great British Public's main reason for whining will remain their perception of the Government's ability to tie their own shoes without falling over, which has been tested by Savanta in a bespoke poll, that sends even worse vibrations Sunak's way than the familiar weekly probing by other pollsters. They called it their Government Performance Poll, but the replies clearly show that it's actually about their lack of performance. For greater meaning, I have sorted it on the proportion of people who think the Government is doing badly or massively badly, from lowest to highest.

It is both striking and alarming that, even in their most "successful" area of action, 56% of the Great British Public think the UK government has fucked it up. It's a never ending litany of incompetence and failure, never matched by any previous government in its awful extent. And they fully intend to double and triple down on it for hypothetical electoral gain, like when using unexpected resources for irrelevant and ineffectual tax cuts, instead of plugging some blatant holes in key public spending. The public are merciless because Rishi Sunak has asked us to judge him on the results of his actions, back in the olden days when he articulated his Five Pledges, that are not pledges any more, but some fuzzy variant of a collection of vague and shifting goals. No matter how the Interim Prime Minister repackages it, the Great British Public are quick to point he has failed here too.

The public are even openly taking the piss out of Rishi, like about inflation. It has halved, and even better, but experts said long ago that it would halve anyway, and the government would have nothing to do with it. The public quite clearly agree and won't credit Rishi even for that. But they don't conclusively trust Labour to do any better on the three items linked to the economy. Is this another sign of doubt about Labour's true abilities? Or just acknowledging that the UK's economy has been badly hurt by the Conservatives' successive and inconsistent voodoo remedies, and that it will take more than five years of Rachel Reeves at the Treasury to put it right? Not so long ago, I would have gone for the former. Now I'm tempted to go for the latter, seeing how Savanta's panel responded to a more wide-ranging question about their level of trust in either party to deal properly with an array of issues. Sorted by level of trust in Labour, from lowest to highest, to make the message clearer.

It's not just about Labour doing better than the Conservatives, which has become the standard response to that kind of polling by now. Not even about Labour bagging 40% or more on all items bar one. The most striking result is the one you don't see on the chart, the average rating of both parties on all twelve items. It's 44% for Labour against 26% for the Conservatives, quite similar to some random voting intentions poll. This is new, and a welcome sign for Labour. For months, we have seen Labour down some points, and the Conservatives up some points on their voting intentions, when both are tested on the issues. It no longer applies, though there might be a diversity of explanations. Labour activists will conclude that they have got their message through, and convinced more and more voters that they genuinely deserve their chance in government. Or you might go for the less rosy explanation, that it's just the Great British Public finally admitting that the Conservatives are hopeless and beyond salvage. The difference between a Labour landslide by conviction and a Labour landslide by default. Your pick is as good as mine here.

What makes Britain great is people. It’s not the government, it’s people. And people want to see a future for their families. But people have to get together again. We’ve not got to be fragmented, otherwise they’ll always pick you off.

(Ray Chadburn, Miners’ Strike 1984, Channel 4, 2024)

There’s no room for tolerance in a world of privilege.

(Evelyn Larkin, Upstairs, Downstairs: The Key Of The Door,1972)

There's an issue that will unavoidably surface during the incoming campaign leading to the Tory Evaporation Election. That of culture wars, that the Tories love so much because they divide the Left, and the Loony Woke Left love just as much because they think it makes them look witty and clever even when they are talking fucking bollocks out of their arse. There were two outstanding examples not so long ago, when TransPennine Express and Network Rail at London Bridge almost simultaneously thought it was the right time to live up to their Stonewall credentials, and celebrate groupthink. Just the kind of performative virtue-signalling that comes out as a bit rich from the train operator who has the worst record of all regarding cancellations, and the public body who is supposed to keep the rail network fit and trim, and regularly fails. The Great British Public had every right to question them about their allocation of resources, whether they should go to their actual public service jobs rather than to subsidising an extremist lobby group. That same week, Opinium addressed these issues in their fortnightly poll for The Observer, first asking their panel their opinion of Rishi Sunak's statement that went, take a deep breath before reading, "We are not captured by identity politics. We can stand up to this ‘woke nonsense’ that wants to cancel our history, our values and can’t even say what a woman is”.

That's quiet a wide-ranging statement from the Interim Prime Minister, just as you might expect from somebody that keen on lighting fires all across the place, to distract the voters from his broadly abysmal record. The ambiguity here is that we don't really know if the panel are agreeing or disagreeing with the subjective ideological substance of Sunak's statement, or with the objective fact that it accurately represents what the Conservatives stand for. The vast differences between Conservative and Labour voters lead me to believe it's the former, and probably also Opinium's intent in asking the question. The generational divide also points in that direction, even if "standing up to the woke nonsense" comes first in all age brackets. I guess it would have been different if the 18-24s had been crosstabbed separately. Interestingly, Scots are more likely than average to support the wokos, while the Welsh go the opposite way. Then, for fairness, balance and full disclosure, Opinium probed their panel about Keir Starmer's response that went, take another deep breath, "The Conservatives have got themselves so tangled up in culture wars of their own making, that instead of working with the National Trust so more people can learn about, and celebrate, our culture and our history, they’ve managed to demean their work".

There is lot to say about the substance of the statement, inasmuch as it is quite typical of Starmer's performative ambiguity. He does not actually address what Sunak has said, but bats a curveball into the long grass in the opposite corner of the court. That's of course a very deliberate deflection, as he is not willing to address the very specific points Sunak has raised, very specifically not the booby-trapped debate about gender ideology. Notwithstanding, the generational and political divides are pretty much a mirror image to those about Sunak's statement, just with more people left speechless and probably wondering where the fuck Starmer was going to with that statement. But these two questions are just hors d'œuvres, as the heart of the matter lies elsewhere. Where Opinium boldly go as the conclusion to this sequence of their polling, asking their panel what they think politicians should focus on. In a Very British Fashion, the response is not devoid of ambiguity.

First, I fail to see what logic could lead you to disagree with both statements. It has to be one or the other, hasn't it? I don't see any third way here, as it's laid out in pretty binary terms, like most things in the real world. Unless the intent is to signal that you don't give a frying duck either way, which is probably a valid option too. It's reassuring to see that more people think that politicians should focus on potholes and World War Three, rather than on the proper prison term for misgendering, but it's disappointingly not a massive proportion going that way. It's also mildly amusing to see that Labour voters are more likely to want their politicians rooted in real life issues, while Conservative voters are more likely to want theirs trading barbs with the opposition over the luxury beliefs of the metropolitan hipstertariat. It is also intriguing to see Scots split close to three ways here, unless you pin that on too much exposure to the performative student politics of the Yellow-Green Axis. And summat disturbing that the conclusion is that this poll was just too much ado about nothing, and will not convince any politician to deviate even just one jot or tittle from their already chosen path.

We can’t change what was by trying to dictate what should be now. We have to step back and learn to let go.

(Jo Mills, Judge John Deed: Nobody’s Fool, 2002)

Wretched weasels! Reptiles! Oleaginous reptiles! You do your best to keep their whole shoddy system functioning, and they slap you in the teeth. Reptiles!

(Joe Channing, Judge John Deed: Lost And Found, 2005)

Recent British polling has acquired a distinct feel of plus ça change, pretty much like Conservative politics of late. Or déjà vu, for those of you who are not fluent in French. No matter what the Labour Party says, no matter how wrong their campaign soundbites sound, no matter how closely they cuddle the right-wing electorate, the Great British Public still grant them the benefit of the doubt and almost twice as many votes as the Conservatives. A lot of voters also transfer their voting intentions from the Liberal Democrats and the SNP to Labour, while stronger voting intentions for Reform UK further weaken the Conservatives. My current snapshot of polls includes the last five ones, fielded by YouGov, Techne, We Think, Redfield & Wilton and Deltapoll between the 30th of January and the 5th of February. That's a super-sample of 8,959, with Labour leading by a massive 20.1%.

This reflects a period when bad news have kept accumulating for the Conservatives, even in domains that seemed within their area of expertise. The last one, probably mostly unnoticed, is that the Royal Navy's destroyers do not have the capability to fire cruise missiles at land targets. Which is quite embarrassing when you consider that the United States have had their own cruise missiles since 1983, and the UK could just have bought the already oven-ready product. Or that France have their own since 2017, developed from the airborne SCALP, which is the same as the Storm Shadow used by the UK. Again, this could have been procured for the Royal Navy too, but Brexit purists would probably have howled at the moon about it. This does not look good for a government that has the ambition to play a major role on the international scene, and can only offer feeble excuses for its failures. And may help explain while Labour are now more trusted than the Conservatives, even on defence and foreign policy. The Big Unknown is of course when the Tory Cull Election will happen. Only Rishi Sunak can decide, and he probably still doesn't know. Notwithstanding, Savanta have polled their panel about it twice in January, and Survation once, and their findings show some evolution.

It is of course too late to hold the election in February, and it already was when the second poll was fielded, as the law says that five weeks must elapse between dissolution and Election Day. But that wee bit of technicality does not invalidate the key findings. Savanta twice found that more than half of the Great British Public wanted an election before the Summer Break, and only a quarter were willing to wait until after it. Survation then found an almost even split between the two sides, as the public realised that the probability of an early election was withering. This will of course have fuck all influence on Rishi Sunak's decision, as he is totally immune to the people's will. He will first listen to the feedback to the very early Spring Statement, which will in fact be delivered while we are still in winter. If the election in to be held on the 2nd of May, coinciding with the English local elections, the decision has to be made by the 27th of March at the latest. That leaves Rishi Sunak just three weeks to assess the impact of the first delivery of tax cuts, and decide whether or not he is ready to gamble his political future on that. It's extremely unlikely he will go for it, as even getting a hung Parliament would require cutting Labour's current lead by more than half. That's so unlikely to happen that Sunak will surely decide to wait until November and after the second wave of tax cuts, which probably won't save his arse either anyway.

Sadness is caused by intelligence. The more you understand certain things, the more you wish you didn’t understand them.

(Charles Bukowski)

Conviction is the prerogative of those who don’t have to bother with everyday economic reality.

(Ian Rochester, Judge John Deed: Political Expediency, 2002)

As you might expect from such polling, the seat projection shows the Great British Public ready to grant Labour a substantial majority. More substantial than a Scotch egg was, according to Michael Gove, during Covid restrictions. Voters can't escape the obvious, that the Conservatives have lost all sense of proper direction, and are improvising. Divisions and rebellions mar them deeply, and all they have left is scorched Earth policies with a distinct fin de règne stench. Everything they do is designed to make the situation even shittier that it already is, and make things more difficult for the next government. Which begs the question, where the fuck is this new narrative about restoring conscription or whatnot coming from? Since only The Torygrpah seems to be making a big fuss about that, you have to assume it's straight from the basement of CCHQ, using a soon-past-his-shelf-date general as their sock puppet. But the deterrent does not seem to work, as current polls still point to a massive majority for Labour, again beyond Blair-like territory. England alone would grant them a bigger-than-Johnson majority. But not needing the Welsh and Scottish seats does not mean they will not be fighting for them, and indeed they are.

Projections from other prognosticators, from Focaldata to Electoral Calculus, and including YouGov having a go at the now renowned Multilevel Regression with Poststratification (MRP) modelling, plainly show where we are heading now. Labour have been on a winning streak since the spring of 2022, when Boris Johnson was still believing that he could lead the Conservatives to the sunlit uplands of a New Empire. There have been ups and downs for Labour since, but the public mood is still a strong one of rejection of the Tories. And it is quite the lesson of Instant Replay TikTok Age politics that organised chaos does not work, but concerted obfuscation does. Keir Starmer is a lucky man indeed. Even if the Great British Public don't really know what he is standing for, they know all too well what the Conservatives are up to. And that is repellent enough to propel Labour to power, for not really better or for just slightly worse.

In the meanwhile, a number of MPs have smelled blood on the tracks. Their own blood on the campaign track, that is, if you pardon the gory image some viewers may find upsetting, as the BBC's disclaimer claims. And have thusly decided not to stand again. So far, 85 have done so, and another 12 have been deselected by their parties. This is not a record, as 149 incumbents stood down in 2010, when hints of dark clouds started gathering on the horizon. But 62 Conservatives are already out of the game this year, and that is a record for them in the Third Millennium. Their earlier record was set in 1997, when 75 Tories chose to retire preemptively, as they realised that resistance was futile. The same pattern of disillusioned retreat is already at work in their ranks this year, in the run-up to impending doom., and their Prime Minister posturing as a part-time eater is probably not the morale booster they are expecting. It definitely looks like Rishi Sunak has a fucking lot of work on his hands now to, in Margaret Thatcher's immortal words to the police forces during the 1984 miners' strike, "stiffen the resolve" of all his backbenchers. And of some frontbenchers too.

Well, I think, stiffening the resolve means that you don't want to see people falling down on their duties through some timidity or lack of effort.

(Robin Butler, Baron Butler of Rockwell, Miner's Strike 1984, Channel 4, 2024)

Alas! have I often said to myself, what are all the boasted advantages which my country reaps from the Union, that can counterbalance the annihilation of her independence, and even her very name?

(Robert Burns)

We have had three more datapoints added to the Independence Referendum trendlines in January, one from Find Out Now, one from Norstat, The Pollster Formerly Known As Panelbase, and one from Survation, that was unlucky enough to attract the attention of The Scottish Pravda and their Pontificator-In-Chief. One has Yes ahead by four points, the next one is a tie, and the last one has No ahead by four points. This is actually good news, as the first poll conducted this year had No ahead by one point, so the overall picture takes us closer to a tie than last year. We may not have reached the tipping point yet, but every bit of good news is welcome, with the hope it will only be the first of a long line. The red and green trendlines have not crossed yet, because there is always some inertia embedded into moving averages, especially when you have a lot of unfavourable polls at the back and only a few good ones at the front.

The snapshot of current voting intentions at an hypothetical Independence Referendum is also quite heartwarming. We have reached a tie, as a 1% difference is statistically a tie on the kind of sample sizes we have here, at last freed from the 48-52 deadlock we witnessed for so many long months. But this is not the end of the line, this is just a start. We have a tie on less than a handful of polls over a month. The next steps may very well not be as favourable, especially if some Unionist outfit throws one of its own into the broth. The next really meaningful step is probably a new release of the Scoop Monitor, conducted by YouGov on behalf of Scottish Election Study. Interestingly, Scoop have always found better results for No than other surveys conducted in the same timeframes as theirs. So, if they find a low single-digit lead for No in their next survey, it won't signal a shift away from Yes in the polling trends, but an improvement, no matter how paradoxical that sounds. Just wait and see, then.

But, no matter how much we love the findings of current polling, the second Independence Referendum is not yet in sight. It is possible, and even plausible, that Humza Yousaf has already extended feelers towards Labour, and possibly discussed holding an Independence Referendum during Keir Starmer's first term. The only real reason that Sly Keir still has to refuse it is that Jeremy Corbyn had promised to hold one if he had become Prime Minister. And Starmer can't do what Corbyn said, can he? Or is Humza negotiating Full Fiscal Autonomy, an option that was the cornerstone of the old DevoMax plans, from Labour themselves? But FFA is obviously something to handle with care, as it could end up like unleashing a Pandora's box of worms in the middle of the minefield, because of the snowball effect. You can't have FFA for Scotland without having it for Wales too. You can't have FFA and keep the Barnett Formula. You would actually have to engineer a Reverse Barnett to pay from the Scottish Treasury for services provided by the English State. Putting that in motion is probably way further than Yousaf and Starmer are willing to go, so could that lead them to conclude that actually holding that fucking referendum would be a simpler fallback option? Now, that would be ironic.

As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.

(John Fitzgerald Kennedy)

Even your average five-year-old has enough awareness to know that reality cannot be whatever you want it to be.

(John Crace, The Guardian, 17 January 2024)

The next Scottish Parliament election will obviously be a key moment, and may even be a turning point, in Scottish political history. More and more Scots are convinced it's time to boil the lance, and kick some extraneous influences out of government circles. But the question remains, could the cure prove worse than the infection? If the cure is the Conservatives, the answer is an obvious Yes. If the cure is Labour, the answer is that we don't know, and it's a hazardous gamble. Especially as the perverse workings of the current electoral law dictate that the next government is again a coalition, and we have to face another tail-wagging-dog situation. The current deal is indeed triggering discontent, even among SNP MSPs, and the defence offered by both the Greens and the SNP is quite feeble. Quite amusingly, they react in pretty much the same way as Keir Starmer, not addressing the points actually raised, and deflecting attention towards some that were not. And the updated trends of Holyrood polling, with the Norstat and Survation polls appended at the tail end, as Find Out Now surveyed just the Independence Referendum, won't make things any easier for anyone.

The Holyrood part of both polls is better for the SNP than for Labour, and also better for the SNP than the earlier Redfield & Wilton poll. The trendlines thusly look more like a "collision averted" situation now, rather than the collision course we had a handful of polls ago. But it still does not look like the SNP could be conclusively back on track any time soon, to a lead of the same magnitude they enjoyed in 2021. Both polls even deliver a situation that has happened before, in 2007, but that the current mood of Scottish politics wouldn't accommodate as easily as they did back then. A genuinely well hung Parliament. I'm including only my model's seat projections here, but uniform national swing, most commonly used by the Scottish media, points to the same sort of outcome. And we are fortunate that, for once, two polls fielded simultaneously are quite consistent in their findings.

Unlike the earlier Redfield & Wilton poll, both new polls have the SNP ahead of Labour on the aggregate of the two votes by the same amount, 3%. Which has direct consequences on where the swingometer stops in term of seats, and begs the follow-up question, where would they find a majority? Don't even think of saying a Unionist coalition, even if they would bag an average of 74 seats. Remember this election is supposed to happen two years into Keir Starmer's first term at Number Ten, and any sort of coalition with the Conservatives would be a massive No Go from Labour HQ. On the other shore, a pro-Independence coalition would be down to an average 55 seats, and incapacitated by the fallout of a massive drubbing for the incumbent Yellow-Green Axis. So there's no way this one would be allowed to even try. My usual fallback option, the Traffic Light Coalition, would bag an average 60 seats, also short of what would be needed for a strong and stable government facing two opposing oppositions. Then there is but one option left, SNP-cum-Labour, sitting on an average super-majority of 88. Don't howl with laughter at the thought just yet. I'm quite sure that, in the specific context projected by these polls, it would have the best odds of all, as quite politically expedient for both parties at a time of Labour in charge in London. Sleep on it and you will see it too.

We’ve got the sky and the sea, and razorbills and kittiwakes. What more do you want?

(Jimmy Perez, Shetland: Red Bones, 2013)

To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.

(Thomas Paine)

Of course the biggest Scottish news of the month, if not the century, was Ian Blackford announcing his candidacy for a seat in the House of Lords, despite the list of SNP candidates being already full for the whole duration of Keir Starmer's first term. The most ridiculous part in this new episode was Ian arguing it would grant the SNP more influence on legislation made in SW1, which implies that Independence is not even a prospect for many years. How an SNP MP and former Commons Leader could say something so blatantly stupid is beyond belief, but definitely fits with the pungent fin de règne smell following the SNP wherever they go. The trendlines of voting intentions for Commons are quite distinct from the Holyrood ones, and likely to be even more so as we get closer to the election. Here, a state of collision has already been reached, with the SNP and Labour in an anacondan embrace and taking turns in the top slot.

We just see the continuation of two conflicting and mutually exclusive priorities, that have been at the heart of Scottish politics for quite a while. You might want to push for a quick resolution of the constitutional debate, however unlikely it is to happen, and thusly favor an SNP vote. You might want to secure the Conservative defeat at the election, as well as an alternative government after it, and a Labour vote is the option then. The Scottish electorate is still oscillating, or vacillating, between the two. But the last Survation poll sheds some light on that. Asked which party they would vote for to kick the Tories out of Scotland, 43% of Scots choose Labour and 41% the SNP. The seat projections from the most recent polls may seem to prove conclusively which side the swingometer has gone, but I don't take that as Scotland's last word. Even small swings can displace several seats here, and the confrontation between the SNP and Labour in the Central Belt has hardly begun. Not to mention the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, who are admittedly watching from the public's gallery, but have enough residual strength to preempt their fair share of seats, even plausibly higher than in 2019. So it's still all to play for here, and no poll has yet removed the element of unpredictability, even if Labour have made a lot of inroads over the last two years.

Even The Scottish Pravda are now offering you a special page, widely advertised on their front page, to check where the constituency you live in is likely to go at the SNP Drubbing election. Sorry, but the animation gizmos work only on the original paywalled page. They base it on just one poll, the MRP thingy from YouGov that was already past its sell-by date when it was released. This is probably the only way they have found to hide that it can very plausibly get worse for the SNP. That and avoiding discussion of later and less favourable polls. There are multiple layers of inconvenient findings in recent Full Scottish polls. Another example is when Norstat probed their Scottish panel about how well they think some political leaders are doing their job, and how much trust they have in them. The results are quite consistent, and nobody comes out of it unscathed. Which you could say is fully deserved, and I couldn't possibly disagree.

It is quite interesting to see that Nicola Sturgeon still receives a higher level of trust than anyone else, even if the numbers rate her as the "least distrusted" rather than the "most trusted". The spotlight directed at the Scottish part of the Covid inquiry probably hasn't had the negative effect that the mainstream Unionist media want us to believe. We were there and we remember what happened. No matter how badly Nicola acted on other issues, the Scottish Government did a far better job than the UK Government with Covid. In hindsight, their biggest mistake was probably to not have conclusively broken away from from the London-based "Four Nations approach" that saw everything through a Very English Prism, and gone our own way. But the second important lesson is that Scots have summat of a Fox Mulder approach to politics. Trust No One. Humza Yousaf even gets a worse net rating than Anas Sarwar here, which is surely yet another bad omen for the SNP's future electoral prospects. But there is still a way out of electoral disaster. Like summat along the lines of making the most out of all devolved powers, which is still not the case right now, and using them as the starting blocks for a turbo-charged Independence campaign. If only...

If we want to be an Independent Country, we need to act like we already are.

(Alex Salmond)

Human emotion is energy. You can’t always see it, or hear it, but you can feel it. Ever had déjà vu? Felt someone walk over your grave? Ever felt someone behind you in an empty room? Well, there was. There always is.

(Jack Harkness, Torchwood: The Ghost Machine, 2006)

After weeks of an unbearable suspense, Redfield & Wilton have at last released the results of their last probe into the inner feelings of the Good People of Wales. I'm overplaying it a wee smitch here, but that was still a six-week gap since their last Full Welsh of 2023, instead of the ritual four weeks. But we will come to that later, as there is more in Welsh polling this month. Plaid Cymru have commissioned Survation to survey specifically two of the new Welsh constituencies, Carmarthen and Ynys Môn. Carmarthen is indeed new, being the merger of 84% of the old Carmarthen East and Dinefwr, and 41% of the old Carmarthen West and Pembrokesire South. One Plaid Cymru seat and one Conservative seat, and the new one is notionally Conservative. Ynys Môn is in fact unchanged as it is one of the Protected Island Constituencies, and has been held by the Conservatives since 2019. The verdict is merciless. The Conservatives drop to third place in both, and Plaid Cymru gain both, even with disgraced MP Jonathan Edwards included in the prompts as an independent in Carmarthen. That's probably the results Plaid Cymru wanted to hear, but neither is implausible. Both are reasonably likely to happen at the snap general, even if Labour have better odds than the poll says in Ynys Môn, which they held most recently between 2001 and 2019, longer than Plaid Cymru who held it from 1987 to 2001.

The Westminster voting intentions part of the Redfield & Wilton poll is very good news for Labour, after a couple that were less stellar. They're bagging their biggest lead ever over the Conservatives in any Redfield & Wilton poll, on 28.7%. Only YouGov have transiently found bigger leads since the 2019 election, but they were soon found to be outliers, so this one is more conclusive. The strong showing by Reform UK is also manna from Bevan for Labour, as it weakens the Conservatives more than UKIP ever has in Wales. There is nothing Welsh-specific here, as Redfield & Wilton's contemporary GB-wide poll of voting intentions, released the day before their Full Welsh, found the highest proportion ever of former Tory voters switching to Reform UK, which was found newsworthy enough for a full column in The Torygraph. The trendlines don't fully reflect that yet, as moving averages have the agility of a fully-laden tanker at the Gate of Grief, but you can feel it coming already.

What matters more for Labour HQ, in their feverish quest for a parliamentary majority, is how many fucking seats this will allow them to bag. Projections from the last four available Full Welsh hint that Welsh Labour might well succeed where the SNP will fail. Make their nation Tory-free after the next election. That Reform UK is aiding and abetting this achievement is irrelevant. The outcome is the punishment here, not the process. And now the plausible outcome is an unprecedented Labour landslide on 91% of the seats, better than the 34 seats out of 40 bagged under Tony Blair, that were "only" 85% of the seats.

This poll also included Senedd voting intentions, which I will again neither reveal nor discuss, for the reasons already mentioned earlier. Nothing relevant can be said now, as long as we don't know the full details of the projected electoral reform, and the pollsters adjust their probes to it. I can only imagine that we will see the current Senedd voting patterns survive, that see Labour doing less well than at Westminster elections because the electorate want to grant Plaid Cymru a bigger seat at the table. Or the Liberal Democrats, episodically and summat serendipitously. As I pointed out already, the new rules with six-member constituencies on chemically pure proportional representation will unavoidably reduce the number of parties represented in the Senedd. It is quite revealing that the Expert Panel consulted by the Welsh Government in 2022 favoured the dreaded Single Transferable Vote. But Labour and Plaid Cymru allied to reject it and impose the basic D'Hondt method. They've obviously done their homework and the math, so they know. Better safe, with only the Conservatives to deal with, than sorry, with a rainbow bunch of assorted loonies sneaking through the holes of STV.

I was brought up never to speak ill of the dead. Even if they’re still among us talking for themselves.

(Ianto Jones, Torchwood: Something Borrowed, 2008)

You've only got to do one thing to win this battle. to remain united and determined. And if you do that, you'll be able to say to your sons and to your daughters, with pride in your eyes, that, "in 1984, I stood alongside my trade union, and in doing so was able to be part and parcel of the greatest victory in trade union history".

(Arthur Scargill, March 1984)

All recent polls show that Labour's Reconquista Del Norte under Keir Starmer is succeeding. But there are some dark corners there, that make it less complete than he probably hoped and less stellar than the absolute domination achieved under Tony Blair. Spanner in the cogs often come from unexpected directions, and there is plenty of evidence of that right under our eyes in the North of England. Labour probably did not have it on their 2024 Bingo Card that Reform UK would do better in GB-wide polls than the Liberal Democrats, and that their biggest successes would be in the North. Though there were warning signs in 2019, when the Brexit Party stood in most Northern constituencies and did quite well, but they tended to be forgotten later when Reform UK failed to make an impression in by-elections and local elections. But now they are back with summat of a vengeance, leading to polls showing that the Labour comeback in their former heartlands in unexpectedly stalling.

Labour were wrong to dismiss warnings that the socially conservative Eurosceptic Northern working class, who helped Boris Johnson take down the Red Wall, could also now be seduced by Reform UK. After all, they are the very voters who made Leave win in the North, and the Brexit Party get eight out of seventeen Northern MEPs at the unnecessary European Parliament election of 2019. And now Reform UK have excellent odds at claiming their first seats in the House of Commons, all snatched from Labour. On top of that, the Liberal Democrats also enjoy quite a counter-intuitive surge here, most surprisingly in the North East. Even if it does not wreck the rebuilding of that section of the Red Wall, the end result is less gratifying for Labour, as they can't match their 1997 result, which is certainly what they are expecting from the actual election.

There are of course limitations on the plausibility of this projection, embedded in the method itself. The starting point is the results of the 2019 election, with no tweak introduced from the results of later local elections. Which are not predictors of a general election, even when they are held in the same year. It is thusly quite tempting, and legitimate, to set the local elections aside when they create a background noise that is quite different from the signal received from the voting intentions polls. Especially when the last time the North East voted at local elections was in 2021, and locals in the North West and Yorkshire were spread on two years in 2022 and 2023. The Reform UK surge in the polls being quite a new phenomenon, over the last few months, it is quite natural to take it at face value for now, without any filters. I'm not sure the 2024 local elections will change that verdict, as they don't happen in the whole of the North. Reform UK also notoriously had difficulties finding enough candidates at previous local elections, let alone credible ones, and it's unlikely to change this year. Finding candidates for a general election is certainly easier, as you need far fewer of them and they don't even have to be especially smart, and that might help Reform UK affirm and validate what the polls hint at.

We need the support of everyone in this battle which goes to the very heart of our society. The rule of law must prevail over the rule of the mob.

(Margaret Thatcher, September 1984)

They wanted everybody out of way, who was prepared to stand up on that picket line and stand up for their selves. They wanted everybody out of the way, no matter where it was. They wanted shut of them.

(Denise Oscroft, Miner's Strike 1984, Channel 4, 2024)

There is quite a contrasting situation in the Midlands. Labour are now doing exceptionally well, not just because of their strong positions in the metropolitan areas, or because Reform UK is biting off a fair share of the Conservative vote there too. Recent polls show a massive swing towards Labour, higher than the English average, and putting them in a much better position than in 1997 in both regions. Even the quite unexpected Liberal Democrat surge, in these regions too, can't get in the way and endanger Labour. This was not always the case, and the Midlands looked quite often as the real battleground of the next election. But this is probably not the final version of their voting intentions, and I wouldn't be surprised by other unexpected swings in any direction in the next batch of polls.

The seat projections reflect Labour's returned lead over the Conservatives quite brutally, especially as Reform UK are not strong enough here to be a genuine threat to Labour incumbents. This is quite different from the Brexit Party's performance at the 2019 European election, when they bagged half of the Midlands seats and topped the popular vote in 100 of 105 Commons constituencies in the Midlands. Single-digit vote shares are definitely not enough to allow Reform UK to leave their mark this time.

Right now, polls translate into a full slate for Labour in the old mining counties of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, quite fittingly on the 40th anniversary of the Great Miners' Strike that saw these counties on opposite sides of the NUM's civil war. But it does not stop here, as Labour would clear the landscape of Tory MPs pretty much all across the rural areas of the Midlands. As it stands now, the Conservative Party would salvage only one seat in the backwaters of Staffordshire, and two more down the coast of Lincolnshire, near the borders with Cambridgeshire and Norfolk. The latter two seats (Boston and Skegness, South Holland and the Deepings) were also the darkest blue of all England in 2019, and the predicted last two surviving Tory seats in the extreme scenarios of near-total electoral wipeout of the Conservatives. Then we will have a live test soon with the by-election in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire. Unless, of course, the very special context of this by-election has it already marked as an unmissable Labour gain.

Just absolutely gutted. We'd fought for a year, gone without so many things and us heart was really in, wanting to win this battle and keep the pits open. And now, we'd lost.

(Denise Oscroft, Miner's Strike 1984, Channel 4, 2024)

It's like, "what the fucking Hell are they doing?". Forgive me language, but what do you expect?

(Arthur Critchlow, Miner's Strike 1984, Channel 4, 2024)

On current polling, the Leafy South again looks like the area where the fine tuning is done, between a massive Labour victory and just a Labour victory. Or they are just being the most volatile electorates in England. Whatever it is, the recent Labour surge, or return to shape, has improved their standing in the South, even if it has not returned them to their spectacular results of the Truss era. The plausible vote shares at the next election, as deduced from my current Poll Mash, may not fully reflect that. But, as most often happens, the devil is in the details and there is more here than meets the eye. The Reform UK vote share is one of these things, that couldn't be measured in 2019, as they sat out most Southern seats, that were in Conservative hands. All I have to do now is to tweak the model to simulate a Reform UK candidate in every seat, and they spring to double digits. The Labour vote is also summat subdued, compared to what we had in earlier polls. Though there is an exception in the South West, where the rejection of the Conservatives benefits Labour much more than in 1997, and also much more than the Liberal Democrats, contrary to Ed Davey's hopes.

To add some spice to the broth here, the Boundary Commission has delivered something quite peculiar across parts of the South. They are surely not immune to the general political climate, if not to subtle political influence. The challenge here was that they had, purely because of basic maths and proportionality to the size of the electorates, to cram thirteen additional constituencies in areas that were already quite crammed geographically. Because the most visible increases in population, and hence electorate, were in the various corners of Suburbia, with a lot of them in London's Concentric Commuter Belts. The most unintended consequence was that they thusly created many seats with weaker notional Conservative majorities, quite ready to become marginals and ultimately switch to Labour as their position in the polls strengthened. Even if Labour's lead in the three regions is not extravagantly spectacular, it is still enough to deliver lots of gains and make the next election a better harvest than 1997.

There are some disappointments for Labour here, as they would not decimate all of the top rungs of the Tory food chain. James Cleverly, Sue-Ellen Braverman, Jeremy Hunt, Tom Tugendhat and Kim Badenoch would hold their seats. And that would surely make for another interesting Tory leadership brawl. But Jacob Rees-Mogg, Grant Shapps and Penny Mordaunt would lose theirs. With the added benefit that both the looniest born-again Victorian and the lead resident Stonewallian would be removed from the proximity of any position of power within the Conservative Party. There's also a by-election down there next week in Kingswood, South Gloucestershire. Or Avon in old money. This one will probably be a better revelator of the public's mood than Wellingborough, as it is the fallout of political dissent, not of a sex-based bullying scandal. What it lacks in headline-grabbing inflammatory backstory of entitlement and nepotism, it certainly makes up for in truly ideological content. And will thusly be more meaningful if it turns out to be the tenth successive Conservative defeat at a by-election since 2019.

Political graveyards are full of people who were loyal to idiots.

(Catriona Bailey, Secret City, 2016)

Old Father Thames was also the source of the spread of diphtheria, cholera and scrofula. Killed tens of thousands. Leave it male?

(Nikki Alexander, Silent Witness: Grievance Culture, 2024)

On the 2nd of May, Londoners will go to the polling stations, even if Rishi Sunak hasn't called a general election, for two votes, that are technically actually three. They have to elect a new Mayor, who will probably be the old one playing his own continuity candidate, and also the 25 members of the London Assembly. For which they have two votes, as it is elected by the same dreaded Additional Member System (AMS) as the Scottish Parliament. It has 14 members elected from constituencies on first-past-the-post, and 11 elected at-large from a single list on tweaked proportional representation. The Assembly is one of those political oddities England loves so much, as it has de facto no powers at all. The real powers are in the hands of the Mayor and the Borough Councils, which are defined by law as unitary authorities like the Scottish Councils, and there is very little wiggle room in between for the Assembly. Unless it can find a two-thirds majority on a very limited range of issues, which the electoral system was designed to make impossible. This is the interesting part, as the sequence of votes shows that Londoners understand AMS in a very different way to Scots.

The way Londoners play AMS is actually true to the original intentions, as they clearly don't use it as first and second preferences, but as two distinct votes having different purposes. Unlike Scotland, there is no pattern of using the list vote as a "second choice" vote, like granting compensatory seats to constituency losers. The most obvious potential beneficiaries of such "pity votes", the Liberal Democrats, have even bagged fewer list votes than constituency votes at all six elections held since 2000. The same happened to the Greens, the second choice for a second choice, at the last two elections in 2016 and 2020. The most obvious pattern is that "lost" votes don't go to a second choice, but to the whole array of fringe topical parties that stand vanity candidacies on the list vote. The Christian People Alliance on the reactionary right side and Women's Equality on the pretendy progressive side are just the least unsuccessful examples. The political make-up of the Assembly through the ages shows that it followed broader trends within the London electorate.

These results show the impact of disillusionment with New Labour in London, including the Liberal Democrats enjoying their brief moment as standard bearers of true progressivism in the aftermath of the Iraq War. They also show a fully intended consequence of the London variant of AMS. Unlike Scotland, where there is no threshold for representation on the lists, the London version includes a 5% threshold. This doesn't always keep the loony fuckwits out of the Assembly, but they have at least to prove some semblance of popular support. The BNP managed it only once, and just transiently, and the lefty loonies of George Galloway's Respect never cleared the hurdle. Interestingly, for a body with only a semblance of power, the London Assembly has attracted quite a number of apprentice politicians. David Lammy and Meg Hillier on Labour's side, before they found a better job as MPs in the same area they had represented in the Assembly. But also James Cleverly, Kit Malthouse and Kemi Badenoch on the Conservative side, who all had to migrate to sunnier uplands far from the Imperial Capital for their MP seats. Now the obvious question is what this year's election can possibly deliver, and that's where some fact-based guesswork comes into play.

The difficult part is that there hasn't been any voting intentions poll for the Assembly so far, only polls of the Mayoral race. So I endeavoured to transpose these to the Assembly election to the best of my ability, in an inductive as well as in a deductive way. Mayoral polls are merciless, with the implied plausibility of a swing as big as 10% from the Conservatives to Labour, which I think will not happen at the Assembly elections. The first factor is that a lot of the Tory slump comes from the obvious inadequacy of their Mayoral candidate Susan Hall. This won't be duplicated at the Assembly elections, as all but one of the other Conservative incumbents have signaled they will stand again. They should benefit from the incumbency bonus, no matter how voters feel about Hall. The second factor is that the political offer covers a broader and more diverse spectrum at the Assembly election, where the temptation of vanity candidacies on the lists is stronger. So I expect a lower swing from the Conservatives to Labour, plausibly around 5%, with a surge for Reform UK and a slump for the Greens. In the end, we thusly get very little change, with just one seat migrating from the Conservatives to Reform UK, and one from the Greens to Labour. Can't wait now for Assembly voting intentions polls, to check if that scenario stands the test of time.

We should cherish all the stupid people in the world. Without them we wouldn't be considered so clever.

(Ricky Gervais)

The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.

(Antonio Gramsci)

Second only to the English local elections, the most important event of 2024 will obviously be the European Parliament elections, held in the 27 member countries of the European Union between the 6th and the 9th of June. Common wisdom is that it is bound to be quite a shocker, with a rise of the various shades of the far-right and significant losses for the Left and Greens. Polls have been conducted in only eleven countries so far, fortunately including four of the Big Five (Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Poland, which has not been polled). But the Europe Elects site still publishes its estimate of the EU-wide voting intentions, and the seat allocation they project from them. The rise of the far-right is measured by the combined votes of the Identity and Democracy (ID), Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) parliamentary groups and Unaffiliated MEPs. The latter, dubbed Non Inscrits in European Parliament lingo, are not a proper political group, but just the convenient grouping of MEPs who aren't affiliated with any of the seven proper political groups. Fate and coincidence have it that the bulk of them are far-righters that were considered too extravagantly loony to be accepted into either ID or ECR. And all three are actually progressing, even if the trends of voting intentions are not as dramatic as headlines in various countries would make you think.

When you put it all in a bar chart, instead of the slightly jumbled trend lines, you do get an increase of the extremist right votes, and a general shift to the right. But the sensationalist headlines don't tell you that the European People's Party (EPP), which represents the more conventional conservative right, is doing well too, and that the social-democratic Socialists and Democrats (SD) have in fact not lost much ground since the last election five years ago. As I mentioned earlier, those who are predicted to lose the most are The Left and the Greens. This may seem odd at a time when the people are more and more concerned with climate change and social crises that impact everyday lives, like the cost of living and the cost of energy. The problem seems to be that a lot of the parties in these two groups have fallen into the trap of identity politics and woke politicking, instead of the classic class politics and ecological activism of bygone days. And thusly failed to tackle the migration of some of their own voters to the other brand of identity politics commonly peddled in the opposite corner of the ideological spectrum, xenophobic racist nationalist identity politics, that have been the hallmark of the far-right for decades.

What will matter more is how these voting intentions will translate into seats. We have a general trend EU-wide, and national polls from the Big Four, the four most populated EU member countries and those who send the highest number of MEPs to Strasbourg. Note that the year of reference for the votes is 2019, when the last elections were held, but it is 2020 for the seats, after Boris Johnson got Brexit More-Or-Less Done, and part of the formerly British seats were reallocated to other member states. In the meanwhile, the total number of seats has also been increased from 705 to 720. Among the Big Four, only Spain has benefited from this, with their seats rising from 59 to 61. Germany, France and Italy remain on 96, 79 and 76 respectively. The Big Four thusly represent 43% of the Parliament's seats. This would rise to 52% if we had data from the Big Fifth, Poland and its 53 seats, but sadly we haven't any just yet. MEPs are elected by proportional representation, as prescribed by European law since 2002. But member countries have a lot of leeway in the way they translate "proportional" into their own language. It might be a single national list of candidates, or regional lists in multi-member constituencies. It must have a threshold for representation, unless the local Constitution bans it, as is the case in Germany. The threshold must be 5%, unless you are granted an exemption on the basis of using regional lists, in which case you are allowed to lower it to 3%. Anyway, when all of this is factored in and ironed out, this is what the best interpretation of current polls says about the allocation of seats after the election.

There is undoubtedly a rise of the far-right in Germany and France, as is widely predicted, with the Alternative für Deutschland and the Rassemblement National respectively, both members of the ID group. It's more subtle in Italy, where Georgia Meloni's Fratelli d'Italia are affiliated to the slightly less openly batshit ECR, which was also home to the British Conservatives from 2009 to Brexit. The big bloc of Unaffiliated Italian MEPs are from the populist Movimento Cinque Stelle, who were denied membership of any established political group after the 2019 elections. Odds are they would be joined in the Naughty Corner by the French MEPs from the recently-created Reconquête after the next elections. There is also an interesting situation in Spain, where the far-right Vox is predicted to make only little progress, but the traditionally conservative Partido Popular is expecting big gains. Globally, far-right parties could bag about a third of seats at the next elections, up from less than a quarter in 2020. But the historic political axis of the European Union, the alliance of the centre-left, centre-right and liberals, is still currently predicted to hold a majority of seats, thought their combined shares would fall below 60%. But that would still be enough for them to pass the kind of liberal-oriented legislation that has been the trademark of the European Union for ages. But we in These Isles now have Brexit to protect us from the excesses of liberalism, haven't we?

We cannot possibly adjust enough to please the fanatics, and it is degrading to make the attempt.

(Christopher Hitchens)

Jeremy's Den

06/02/2024

Give The People What They Think They Want

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