Jeremy's Den: May 2024

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, and summer’s lease hath all too short a date.

(William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18, 1609)

There comes a moment in the electoral cycle where you put on your best suit, stand up and march towards the sound of the guns.

(Ben Wallace)

Don't forget to click on the images for larger easier to read pop-ups.

British pollsters generally avoid polling local elections, because they always get it wrong when they try. Which is kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy emerging from a vicious circle. If you don't poll local elections, you will never catch the factors that differentiate them from general elections, and then you always get them wrong because you can't figure out their specific patterns, as you don't have the experience of past polls. So what has happened in the past is bound to happen again. Only Opinium ventured into that territory this year, and their findings looked instantly suspicious, as they were very close to the general election voting intentions that they found in the same poll. Of course, there were some mitigating factors here, like including Independents and Residents in the poll's prompts, which no other pollster had done before, and is a way to get a more reliable picture. But surveying both the general election and the locals in the same poll definitely did not meet the criteria for full reliability, as the comparison between the poll and the actual votes cast on the 2nd of May shows. Being asked about the general first obviously influenced what the people said about the locals, and tainted the results. So that's like an A for effort and methodology, but an F for timing and delivery.

The poll missed a lot of things for practical reasons. They did not catch the unique feature of these elections, a protest vote against Labour, probably because nobody had ever seen a protest vote against the opposition before. They also vastly overestimated the Reform UK vote, because the basic premise of a poll is to assume that all parties compete in all seats. But Reform UK did not, as they never found enough suitable candidates, and even had to sack some for offensive speech. And you now have to wonder if the same could happen at the general election and alter what we believe the results will be. In the run-up to the 2023 local elections, CCHQ 'inadvertently' leaked that they were expecting to lose 1,000 council seats. Because, ye ken, losing just 900 would make them look good. At the end of the day, they lost 1,063 and that 'leak' made them look like fucking morons. So, this year they said fuck all, which was just as well as they barely had more than 1,000 seats in play to start with. But the massive defeat we have witnessed two weeks ago had been totally anticipated for a long time, and incorporated into the narrative and the gloomy mood. It was indeed quite a blow, even if Labour did not do that well voteswise. But a lot of voters also deserted the Conservatives simply by staying home, and it sealed their fate in many wards.

A precision is needed here. My numbers differ from the BBC's, which are reproduced verbatim on Wokopedia, because the BBC has this strange habit of not always using the 2021 elections as the benchmark for comparisons and seat changes, though they were the natural predecessors of this year's elections in the electoral cycle. I always go back to the 2021 data, to have a clean comparison between the two elections. The BBC also publish "reconstituted" vote shares in an imaginary general election held on the same day, which are probably as accurate as Victorian "reconstructions" of dinosaurs, while I use the actual votes cast. Which have mostly to be collected ward by ward from the Councils' websites, and that's the most tedious part of the process. The results of this year's elections, compared to the 2021 elections, show the extent of the disaster for the Conservatives, and how it spread all across England like Wi-Fi. The vote shares reflect only the votes cast in the various shades of Council elections, excluding the Mayors, the Police and Crime Commissioners and London. And they reflect exactly what the people did, not what someone in the metropolitan media bubble imagines they could have done at another election with different motivations. Though there appears to have been one strong motivation in common, getting rid of the Tories. Which took different paths across England, as you will see when I get into more detail for the regions and types of Councils.

And at the end of the evening, the LibDems had won more Councillors than the Tories. Now that's BAD.

(Ian Hislop, Have I Got News For You?, 10 May 2024)

Oh, we are very pleased with ourselves, aren’t we? Right, it’s time to worry the black sheep.

(Andy Dalziel, Dalziel And Pascoe: Demons On Our Shoulders, 2006)

Unlike Opinium, YouGov did not field a generic voting intentions poll ahead of the English locals, but relied on a targeted MRP poll of sixteen Councils that might, or might not, be bellwethers. Five in the North, five in the Midlands and six in the Global South. It's a bit of a gamble to try this at local elections, where so many factors are in play, that are totally irrelevant for the more commonly polled parliamentary elections. So, the first thing now is to check how well the poll did, compared with the actual results. And their select quintet of Northern Councils is as bad a start as you can get. They got Sheffield about right, but totally missed the other four. They underestimated the rejection of Tories, and also did not catch how the Liberal Democrats and above all the Greens would become the refuge of the anti-Labour pro-Palestine protest vote. And their selection did not even include Councils with a strong presence of ex-Labour independents, who made the anti-Starmer vote even more successful. They also failed to include Independents and Residents explicitly in their prompts, unlike Opinium, which was a rookie mistake when dealing with local elections. Big miss here, mates.

There is quite a pattern emerging in the North. The Conservatives finally had nothing to fear from Reform UK only because Reform UK fielded candidates in only a small number of wards. Where they did, they came ahead of the Conservatives in a huge number of them. The best case to support this is Sunderland, where Reform UK stood in all 25 wards. In the few wards where the incumbent was a Conservatives, Reform UK came a distant third, beating all others except Labour. In 12 out of the 17 other wards, Reform UK came ahead, and gained 6,000 votes while the Conservatives lost 13,000. But the results in the North West and North East are quite a letdown for Labour, as they lost votes in both regions, and did not get very convincing results in terms of seats and councils. It was not helped by some Councils taking the opportunity of a boundary review to reduce the number of wards and seats, which of course worked more against Labour as the party with the biggest number of seats before the elections. Gaining back control of Hartlepool Council, after five years of No Overall Control, was thusly the only really good news of the night for Northern Labour, amidst a string of mostly disappointing results.

But the results in the North also show that Labour have their very own self-inflicted problem. Rebellion of some of their Councillors against Keir Starmer's stance on Israel and Gaza. Many of them stood as independents and it worked quite well, resulting in Labour losing their majority in two Northern Councils, as well as seats in many more. On the other hand, George Galloway's all out assault failed miserably, as his Friends-Of-Hamas Party gained only four seats from Labour. Even in Rochdale, which Catman specifically targeted after his by-election win, it totally flopped as they bagged just 12% of the vote and two Council seats. But this is surely and sadly not the end of that movement. In today's Britain, there is sadly a very thin line between political support for the Palestinian people's unalienable rights and endorsement of terrorism, and from there a direct line to promotion of radicalised political Islamism, that is no better than radical theocratic Zionism. George Galloway's Wankers Party were not the only ones to dive headfirst down that rabbit hole. The Green Party in Leeds also did, and you don't have to be a far-right bigot to find this disturbing.

The results in Yorkshire, as well as the overall results for the Global North, show that there was little indeed for Labour to celebrate there. Heavy Conservative losses came by serendipity and proxy, while Labour stagnated in all measurable criteria. They gained Hartlepool, which is definitely symbolically and sentimentally significant, and Hyndburn, which is neither. But they also lost Kirklees and Oldham, which is politically significant, as well as losing seats in Blackburn Borough Council and half the District Councils in Lancashire, which also has political meaning. Just as the Greens emerging as the alternative progressive vote is politically significant, even if it looks suspiciously similar to the Liberal Democrats becoming the metropolitan middle-class's pet vote to protest the Iraq War and look enlightened and progressive. What happens at the next electoral cycle for the same seats will surely be fun to watch, as the Greens never last long in positions of power. People try them because it's the thing that makes you look smart at the moment, then dump them after one term because they're shit at the job. It has happened before, it will happen again. Even the university-bred middle-class has only so much patience for people thriving on fashionable luxury beliefs, but unable to run bin collections properly.

Here's a tip for you. Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. I know. I need to work on my catchphrases.

(Lee Mack)

Start of the week I was feeling a bit rough and then I bought myself an air fryer. As the week went on, I played some of my best snooker.

(Ronnie O'Sullivan)

YouGov's polling of their select quintet of Midlands Councils is better than their Northern polling, but there are still a couple of pretty embarrassing misses. They misread Solihull by such a wide margin it is almost laughable. Missing Walsall also shows the penalty for failing to poll Independents separately from the dominant parties. It's actually even more unprofessional to have mispolled this one, as the situation there was pretty predictable after eight Labour Councillors left the party in November 2023 in protest against Keir Starmer's fumbling and waffling statements about Gaza. It was pretty predictable that those up for election would stand again as Independents, and that the move would encourage other like-minded independent candidates to try their luck against Labour incumbents who remained faithful to the party line.

Labour rebels probably expected that the uniquely unprecedented protest vote against the opposition would extend from the North to the West Midlands, as the Metropolitan Boroughs there have lots of similarities with those in the North West. But it did not go much further than Walsall, and failed to make a massive impression even there. The Council's Conservative majority resisted, the Official Labour group ended up worse off than after the 2023 elections, and the Independents failed to become the leading opposition. This being said, it was indeed a principled an respectable expression of dissent, unlike George Galloway weaponising a very serious and painful issue for personal glamour and the pursuit of an obsessive hatred of the Labour Party. Interestingly, Catman's Wankers Party was nowhere to be seen in the Midlands, and Labour thusly did massively better than in their Northern Heartlands.

The West Midlands results are quite impressive indeed, and can only make the local Constituency Labour Parties more buoyant and confident in the run-up to the long-awaited general election. The East Midlands results are obviously less relevant and conclusive, as only one Council was up, in Lincoln, and then only for a third of its seats. But Labour had reasons to be cheerful there too, as their majority was strengthened at the expense of the local Conservative opposition. I nevertheless must stress again that local elections are not reliable predictors of a general election. Just look at what happened in 2017 and 2019 if you have doubts. This did not deter Sky News, who projected the general election from the results of local elections held only in part of England. This was of course highly unprofessional and pro-Tory gaslighting of the highest magnitude. Fortunately this stunt did not get coverage from the other media, who totally saw the complete ineptitude of it. All but one, The Scottish Pravda, who resorted to one of their shocker clickbait headlines, complete with capitals, just as they do when parroting asinine propaganda from Stonewall and Associates. But even them had to admit, in the noticeably short article proper, that the thing was probably just fucking bollocks even if it perfectly fitted their own obsessive anti-Labour stance.

One interesting feature of the Midlands votes is that the Green Party totally failed to capitalise on the discontent against Labour, and cosplay the "progressive" alternative as they managed to do elsewhere in England. The Midlands are indeed the only meta-region of England where the elections were an unquestionable conclusive success for Labour on all possible criteria. The only nuance to that is that the Conservatives started with a high share of the vote from the last election. So, no matter how far down they fell, and they did by 10%, they still managed to hold quite a large number of seats. Which will help them only as an opposition party mostly, as they held their incumbent majorities only in Solihull and Walsall. But lost Nuneaton and Bedworth, Redditch, Dudley. These losses are obviously seen as highly significant at Labour HQ because these Council areas are home to eight Conservative MPs and only one from Labour. Even if you remind yourself that it says nothing about the incoming general, and that the rural Midlands, that did not vote at these locals, remain an expectedly hard-fought battleground, Labour surely love every little boost to morale they can get.

The thing about Birmingham is, no one spends their evening looking over your shoulder thinking, "Is that Nick Grimshaw?", and wondering if there's a better night they could be on. Because there isn't.

(Joe Lycett)

There’s a poo museum on the Isle of Wight, and they’re desperate for a celebrity wall.

(Sally Phillips, QI: Upbringing, 2024)

Labour's most significant victory in the South, or at least the one they chose to mention the most on Election Night, was taking control of the Rushmoor Borough Council, technically a District Council in Hampshire, after 24 years of Conservative dominance. They celebrated it beyond reason because the Council area is almost coterminous with the Aldershot constituency, which has been a reliably Conservative seat for 106 years. A tiny district deep in the backwaters of Hampshire would hardly register on the radars if it wasn't home to Aldershot, the proverbial Home Of The British Army, and Farnborough, the site of the world's second largest military airshow. So Keir Starmer's PR were able to claim some sort of newfound bromance between Labour and the British military, definitely a blow to Conservative morale in these times of international crisis and debate about The Realm's defence. Which is another plotline I will explore later. Rushmoor was so far away from anyone's "races to watch" that it wasn't polled by YouGov in their survey of meaningful battlegrounds, which included six other Southern Councils.

YouGov's polling of the South was much better than in the North of Midlands. They were quite close in five out of six selected Councils. But they still underestimated the real weight of Independents and Residents, which explains their massive miss in Peterborough. At least YouGov were honest enough and transparent enough to reluctantly admit their polls mostly failed, and provide all the gory details. Meanwhile, there are some interesting twists in the ways the South East and South West voted. Namely that the biggest winners are the Liberal Democrats and that, relative to where they stood before the elections, the Greens did better than Labour. Both of which are in complete contradiction to the trends of general election polls in either region, but will obviously be used anyway to undermine Labour's position.

Don't forget that the South East, and the South West even more so, are expected to be friend-on-friend Labour-LibDem battlegrounds at the general election, as the Conservatives' position looks untenable even down there. If Labour and the Liberal Democrats don't sort it out, which would involve concessions from both sides, they may quite asininely offer some Conservative incumbents a path to survival on less than a third of the popular vote. But Labour have a bigger, and more pressing, problem on their hands in Bristol, where the Greens have unseated seven incumbent Labour Councillors, and are now just two seats shy of a majority. The big bone of contention is now the redrawn Bristol Central constituency, where Shadow Culture Secretary Thangam Debbonaire will face co-leader of the Green Party Carla Denyer at the general election. Debbonaire's position is quite difficult, to say the least, as the Greens held 12 out of 14 Council seats in the constituency prior to the last election, and now hold all 14. Odds are that it could be Labour's only loss at the general, in a massively left-wing constituency where splitting the vote does not risk handing it to the Conservatives. The situation is surprisingly hardly better for Labour in East Anglia, where general election polls so far put them in a much more favourable position.

The overall result is quite the picture of the Upside Down Global South 2.0, where St Mary Mead is represented by a Green Councillor and Causton District Council has a Liberal Democrat administration. But it is also the paradoxical picture of the South as a mahoosive three-way marginal, where Labour do not have the competitive edge they will need at the general election. This is a genuine surprise, as it does not fit at all with what the most recent general election polls have led us to believe. The Conservative vote share somewhere in the twenties makes sense, but Labour's lead over the Liberal Democrats has to be in the double digits to be conclusive. Could it be that the post-Covid extension of the Commuter Belt resulted not so much in gentrification as in hipsterification? With its mandatory side-order of hare-brained performative student politics that would not benefit even those who promote them. If that's the case, and Labour miss the two dozen seats they need for a decisive majority in the Wild Wild South, the inescapable conclusion is that they would have to go hunting for them in Scotland. Which is another story that will be told later in the day.

I haven’t been to Rwanda, but I’ve been to Swindon. And I just think, tell the asylum seekers that they’ll be going there, and that’s enough of a deterrent.

(Chloe Petts, Have I Got News For You?, 3 May 2024)

Where's Liam Neeson and his special set of skills when you need him?

(Frankie Oades, The Brokenwood Mysteries, 2023)

I will not bore again with a full precis on the niceties, oddities and atrocities of local government in England, as I have done that already three months ago. So let's go straight to the deep end and look at what these elections delivered in the Metropolitan Boroughs. As you remember, these are definitely a Northern and West Midlands things, so we will find many features here that I have already identified when I went geographical. Thirty-one Metropolitan Boroughs held elections this year, thirteen in the North West, four in the North East, eight in Yorkshire and six in the West Midlands. So we started in mostly Labour territory, ended up in mostly Labour territory, but with a mixed bag of results in the middle. The kind that show Labour must always be careful what they do and say, as a positive sequence may be quickly followed by a highly negative backlash about something totally different, and see its fallout nullified.

There were interestingly different patterns at work in the North and the Midlands. Remember that the areas of the North covered by these councils are like heartlands within heartlands, with a Labour-heavy representation in Commons. While the West Midlands County, where the Midlands' Metropolitan Boroughs are located, is bound to be a serious battleground, as the 2019 election was worse there for Labour than Thatcher's 1983 miracle landslide. And there are paradoxes in the results for both regions. A stagnating vote share in the North might in fact be enough for Labour to score significant gains, so long as the Conservative vote sinks to subterranean levels, as it has just done at the locals. But a 7% swing in the West Midlands, despite looking quite good at first glance, is far less than what Labour needs for a reversal of fortunes there at the general. Or the change in Commons seats could look like the change in Borough Councils seats, quite below Labour's expectations.

All in all, Labour should not feel too buoyant because they emerged better than expected out of unexpected challenges. Alarm bells have nevertheless been heard loud and clear in those thickly urbanised areas that should be the core of Labour's revival in the infamous Red Wall. Reform UK may be less of a credible threat now, but a new one is just on the event horizon, with George Galloway explicitly targeting major Labour figures in the North. Angela Rayner in Ashton-under-Lyme is the most obvious target, though far from the only one. The fake Left pro-Hamas and pro-Putin Workers Party will stand in half the seats in Greater Manchester, prioritising harming Labour incumbents. Targeting Labour-heavy seats with a diverse population is surely the cleverest part of Catman's sneaky strategy to help the Tories at the detriment of the working class, and Rayner us definitely a prime target as she has a rather weak majority of just over 4,200. This would be enough for a safe return without competition from the Loony Left, but looks far more fragile now. Which is the whole point of Galloway's strategy, and he surely sees Rayner as a prime trophy if voters are dumb enough to fall for his stunts. He should just be aware that he may be trying to bite off more than he can chew, as none of these seats is even remotely likely to be a repeat of Labour's Rochdale fiasco. Catman will end up with no seat and the shame of being just a Tory-enabler.

Of course I know Ibsen. I saw him play once. Scored a hat trick against Leeds.

(Andy Dalziel, Dalziel And Pascoe: Bones And Silence, 1998)

Keir Starmer's theory is that he needs to get all kinds of people to vote Labour. So getting the most bonkers right-wing person possible to join the party can show what a broad church they are.

(Helen Lewis, Have I Got News For You?, 10 May 2024)

Then we move on to the Unitary Authorities, who have this strange name only because of English love for bizarre nomenclatures, and especially stressing the difference between urban and rural, or county and borough. Obviously they could not label these councils County Boroughs, in opposition to Metropolitan Boroughs, as it would have been an oxymoron at odds with the Commons nomenclature. So they went for Unitary Authorities, which is a technical label that would fit Metropolitan Boroughs and London Boroughs too. And Welsh Councils and Scottish Councils as well, as all have united the authority previously vested in two levels of local government into just one. There are only a handful of these in the Midlands, and none was up for election this year anyway so the competition took place only in the North and South. The Northern part was better for Labour than the Metropolitan Boroughs, as it was mostly away from the densely urbanised areas, with one exception. Blackburn in Southern Lancashire, which saw the same pattern of Labour incumbents pushed away by ex-Labour dissidents standing in opposition to Starmer's stance on Gaza. And again doing it the principled way, as Independents, instead of joining Galloway's Faux Left party.

The results in the South were, well, Southern, with the already seen pattern of becoming a big three-way marginal. This year, no Southern Council witnessed something as brutal as the massive Tory Cull seen last year in Maidenhead, but one in the North surprisingly did. North East Lincolnshire. I can hear you grumbling now, as Lincolnshire is obviously in the Midlands. Everybody knows that except, of course, the TikTok Generation. Well, Lincolnshire is in the Midlands, but North East Lincolnshire isn't. It's in Yorkshire. In the extended meta-region of Yorkshire and the Humber, more precisely, that has annexed the short-lived Humberside County. Which had earlier annexed the Northern reaches of Lincolnshire so that it actually ruled over both sides of the Humber. So North East Lincolnshire now belongs to the North, formally if not in spirit, and has just sent three quarters of its Conservative incumbents back home. Which is definitely good news for Labour in the newly-carved Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes constituency, which replaces the two old ones of Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes. I'm not fucking with your brain here, the Electoral Commission did name the new seat by concatenating the names of the two previous ones. Serious lack of creativity here.

All in all, it was quite a good year for Labour in these Unitary Authorities, better than the vote shares would let you think at first glance. But there is still one disturbing part. The Liberal Democrats and Greens both progressed more than Labour in votes, even if Labour bagged more additional seats thanks to the Conservatives' collapse. This would be a very awkward situation if it repeated itself at the general election, and some would even again invoke the possibility of a hung Parliament. It is unlikely to happen, now as ever during the last two years, but some love to mention it to sow doubt within the Labour electorate. Oddly, Keir Starmer even acknowledged it as a possibility a few days after the elections, which was not his smartest move. But it could also have a welcome effect, if it revitalises a Labour electorate that might otherwise feel complacent. Because, whatever you make of New New Labour, a compromise-prone hung Parliament is the last thing we need.

I like dirt and rocks and facts. You can’t just sit back and admire the view. I’ve learned you’ve got to grab the present by the balls.

(Frank Underwood, House Of Cards, 2017)

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

(Franz Kafka)

Then we finally come to the District Councils, which are as close as you'll get to revealing England's guts and soul. These have been abolished in Scotland a whole generation ago, but they still live on in Wessex and Mercia, and then there's Lancashire too, the lone residual area of two-tier local government in the North. The only way to dive deeper into the darkest corners of England's psyche is to look at the Paris Councils, but there are just too many of those, and their elections are more like an endless list of "Independent gain from Independent" anyway. The results in Lancashire and Mercia are in the same league as what we have already seen for the other types of councils in the North of Midlands. Stagnation and serendipity in the North. Moderate progress and luck in the Midlands. But, thanks to the more parochial nature of this type of councils, Labour dissenters are far less present here, seriously damaging the Mothership only in Pendle.

But the bulk of the District Councils that were up this year is in the South, 44 out of 58. And the tectonic plates are shifting under the Conservatives' feet there too. Maintaining the antique two-tier variant of local government in the bluer parts of England, especially the Global South, was always a rather transparent way for the Conservatives to reign over a large reservoir of elected positions for friends. But it has now severely backfired. The Tories have lost more than half their seats in Southern Districts, and it has benefited the Liberal Democrats more than Labour. The South has thusly played a big part in the Liberal Democrats' unexpected and stunning achievement, bagging more seats than the Conservatives at these elections.

There was another especially revealing result in East Anglia, Southern Essex more precisely. Castle Point now has no Councillors from any of the three main English parties, as all seats went to organised independent candidates. Which is a wee smitch of an oxymoron, and they are probably best described as non partisan residents' associations, who are indeed a presence in many parts of England. But they rarely manage to get a majority in a Council, and even more rarely to eliminate all mainstream parties from the Council, unlike in Scotland. Even if the situation in Castle Point is reminiscent of Monty Python's rival Judean Fronts, this is still quite a success for these libertarian-cum-nimby local organisations. Throughout these Councils, we also have the familiar situation of Labour progressing less than the Greens and Liberal Democrats in the popular vote. Which may have some influence on the general election in the South, as Ed Davey is always searching for strong evidence that the LibDems are better placed than Labour in key marginals, despite their mediocre performance in generic polls. And that could lead to some interesting scenes in hypothetical negotiations for hypothetical local deals behind the backs of the national parties.

If you don’t acknowledge it, it doesn’t exist. I’m not a loser.

(Frankie Oades, The Brokenwood Mysteries, 2016)

Well, we know there's a recount. So we know either that Andy Street has won, or that he has nearly won.

(Andrew Mitchell, Sky News Election Night, 2 May 2024)

Ten Mayors have also been elected on the 2nd of May. The Mayor of London, and we'll come back to that one a wee while later, and nine Mayors in various parts of the North and Midlands. Six of these positions have existed for many years already, and three were new creations first filled this year, in the East Midlands, North East and York and North Yorkshire. The West Midlands election attracted more attention than any other for various reasons, not least because the Conservative incumbent Andy Street distanced himself from the national Conservative brand, and made it summat of a very personal affair. Polls here were not very helpful as they contradicted each other, and only said that a race that had been pretty close three years ago would be even closer this year. With the added spice that a Conservative hold, in a region that is otherwise more and more conclusively leaning back towards Labour, could be sold to the media as a major success that could shield Rishi Sunak from yet another backbench rebellion. In the end it didn't happen, though it was definitely close and a nail-biter, with a recount along they way that gave us the funniest soundbite of Election Night.

A handful of other races were polled, but none was as attention-grabbing as the West Midlands race. Polling the three new positions created since the last elections made sense in a way, but polling Greater Manchester definitely did not. It would have if George Galloway had thrown in a candidate, possibly even himself, Andy Burnham's way, to somewhat capitalise on the Rochdale by-election. But he didn't, and that removed every element of competition from that one. In contrast, probing Tees Valley did make sense, and the real surprise was that pollsters did not go there again and again, as often as to the West Midlands. It's quite strange that they lost interest in that one after just two polls that dutifully contradicted each other.

At the end of the day, Labour emerged as the unquestionable winner of these Mayoral elections. That was definitely not a surprise, as eight out of ten were obvious shoe-ins right from the start. Even the North East election was never in doubt, despite Jamie Driscoll standing as an independent after the cavalier way Labour HQ ejected him from the selection. It could have been different if Driscoll had chosen to wage a really aggressive Gallowayian campaign against the Official Labour candidate, but he did not, and came out as a rather subdued run-of-the-mill Corbynite. It did not work and Labour won in all council areas in the region, including the three contained within Driscoll's now-defunct North Of Tyne mayoralty. Globally, it was a clear success for Labour, with no reason to be disappointed after some challenging moments during the campaign. The 2021 results I include for comparison are those of the first round, or the one round when the count of second preferences was not needed.

From a Conservative perspective, the key point was that Labour won only one of the only two competitive races, and then by the weeest of margins. The one Labour lost, Tees Valley, provided comic relief twice. First when CCHQ claimed that the night was a massive success for Rishi Sunak, because Ben Houchen still won despite a 16% swing against him. And then when Kemi Badenoch congratulated Houchen for his victory in "Tees and Tyne". Then I guess all these Northern neighbourhoods look the same seen from Essex. But Ben Houchen probably outfoxed them all with his victory speech, when he conspicuously did not wear his blue rosette, and just as conspicuously failed to mention either the Conservative Party or the name of the Prime Minister. But it may not have been what hurt the most. What did was probably Houchen's final remark, that if he had to work with the Prime Minister, "to be frank it doesn't matter to me who that is". With friends like these...

The number of female Mayors has for the first time overtaken the number of Mayors called Andy.

(Bill Bailey, Have I Got News For You?, 10 May 2024)

I would listen more to a politician if one stood up and went, “I’ve got this weird idea that if I let crime go up a bit, the police will get better at solving it”. At least then you’d go, “All right, I’m going to vote for you”.

(Jon Richardson, 8 Out Of 10 Cats, 2011)

England and Wales also voted to elect their Police and Crime Commissioners, a position that does not exist in Scotland, and may even gradually disappear in England, with its powers transferred over time to the elected Mayors. This has already been the case for years in London, Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire, and was implemented this year in North Yorkshire and South Yorkshire, leaving only 37 elected PCC positions, 33 in England and 4 in Wales. I will not bore you with the full details of all 33 elections in England, as you can find it on Wokopedia which, unlike the run-of-the-mill Council elections, had the complete set in a couple of days. Just the evolution of votes and seats, since the positions were up for election for the first time in 2012, testifies to the massive and sometimes abrupt changes in the voters' approach. The most important being probably that any semblance of belief that these positions are "non political" has long been dropped, and they are now fought as totally political positions by all parties. This year's results clearly show it, with a strongly more conclusive shift of the popular vote from the Conservatives to Labour than at the Council elections, and wee gains for the Liberal Democrats too, who seem to have benefited from the smaller number of independent and minor party candidates.

When you look at the detailed results, it is quite striking that these PCC elections are the only ones where the change from Instant Runoff to First Past The Post actually favoured the Conservatives. Or you could say it was the opposition's unwillingness to fully adapt their tactics to the changes brought by FPTP. Do the maths and you will see that Green vanity candidacies, that never had the tiniest chance of success, cost Labour the Leicestershire, Suffolk, Sussex and West Mercia seats. While some sort of tactical voting deal between Labour and the Liberal Democrats would have secured LibDems gains in Dorset, Gloucestershire, Hertfordshire and Surrey. And also made Labour gains likely in all other seats that were held by the Conservatives. That was a full display of missed opportunities that did not happen in Wales, as the results there show a remarkable stability.

With only four seats in play, I can give you the full details here. Quite astonishingly, the aggregate national vote shares for both the Conservatives and Plaid Cymru were almost unchanged from 2021, on 28% and 23% respectively. And Labour progressed only minutely from 35% to 38%. But these tiny changes ensured that the two seats that would have gone to the Conservatives if the first round results of 2021 had been repeated (Dyfed Powis and North Wales) did not change hands this time. Interestingly the Conservative vote went down in both truly competitive seats, while it went up in Gwent and South Wales, albeit without endangering the Labour incumbents in either. It does not seem that any sort of deal was struck before the elections between Labour and Plaid Cymru, which we should probably have taken as a serious hint that there was trouble in woke paradise, so it appears they owe the status quo only to the voters' common sense and own feelings that a wee smitch of tactical voting was the way to go. Or the Welsh proving more practically-minded than the English, which is not really a surprise.

On Christmas Eve 2018, North Yorkshire Police revealed they had a call from a woman in Harrogate reporting the presence of carol singers in her area. She said she believed they were from Leeds and therefore up to no good.

(Sandi Toksvig, QI: Season Greetings, 2021)

We have to be very careful with liberal-minded do-gooders. Especially on a Saturday night.

(Andy Dalziel, Dalziel And Pascoe: A Clubbable Woman, 1996)

The elections in London, for both the Mayoralty and the redundantly powerless Assembly, were both massive slaps in the face with a wet fish for the pollstertariat. Savanta loved to pat themselves on the arse for getting two Mayoral races "right", the real truth is that they only got them less wrong than the rest of their lot. Seven different pollsters polled the London Mayoral race seventeen times over a year, and their findings said that Sadiq Khan had gained a lot of votes, was likely to cruise to an outright majority of the popular vote, and would crush the London Tories into avocado purée. On Election Day, it was a lacklustre win, on a wee 3% swing from the Conservatives to Labour. This with Susan Hall as the Conservative candidate, probably the most unhinged shit candidate they could find after scraping the bottom of the barrel, and finally having to scrape from the slime under the barrel. Just imagine what could have happened if the Conservatives had had a real candidate with real ideas and real charisma...

The Mayoral results are even more remarkable when you consider what the general election polls found in London the week before the election. That includes two Full Londoner polls with samples of around 1,200 each, and five London subsamples of GB-wide polls. The weighted average of these is 49.6% for Labour, 19.9% for the Conservatives and 12.2% for the Liberal Democrats. Not only does Khan underperform, compared to generic Labour candidates for Commons, but he also incites a fair share of Liberal Democrat voters to switch their vote to the Conservatives. If the general election votes in London duplicated the Mayoral election votes, the Conservatives would even gain two seats. We have a undeniable case here that Khan is a liability for the Labour Party, and Keir Starmer spared him probably only because he does not want another internecine feud in his own backyard after Corbyn, Tarry, Abbott... Khan might not be so lucky next time. Elections for the ultimately useless London Assembly also took place on the 2nd of May, that had been polled just once by YouGov. And it was again a massive miss, in the same league as their multiple failures to get Council elections right.

There is a common trait between the Mayoral election and the Assembly elections. The message sent by both is the status quo. The Labour and Conservative vote shares for Mayor have barely changed, Labour's vote shares at the Assembly elections are the same as last time, only one Assembly seat has changed hands and it does not alter the left-right balance of power. And, before I forget, polls were just as wrong in both cases, and ridiculously over-estimating Labour. So, at the end of the day, we can't avoid the obvious question. Why are seasoned pollsters, with years of credible general election polling behind them, still unable to do an even remotely correct job with local elections? England has had them every fucking year for decades, and yet no pollster could be arsed to do some serious research on them, and list all the factors that make them different from general elections. Or are they waiting for some Chinese AI to do it for them? Next year's locals in England will involve the County Councils, yet another England-specific component of the residual two-tier local government, that haven't been up for election since 2021, as they were the regularly scheduled part of the two-years-in-one elections. So I totally expect just another batch of wildly off polls, if any.

Thousands of British policemen will travel to Paris to support the security operation surrounding the Olympic Games. It will make the streets safer... for women walking around London.

(Alexander Armstrong, Have I Got News For You?, 19 April 2024)

Have the Conservatives got a new lettuce out? Just a sort of preemptive one.

(Chloe Petts, Have I Got News For You?, 3 May 2024)

On the same day as the local elections, the good people of Blackpool South voted to elect their new MP, after the resignation in disgrace of Conservative Scott Benton. The Great City of Blackpool was not scheduled to vote at all on that day, as their Council was elected in full last year and is not up for re-election until 2027. There was thusly no incentive to save taxpayers' money by having the by-election on the same day of the locals, as it would be an extra cost anyway, no matter which Thursday it was held. So the date was certainly chosen to drown a predictable and inevitable Conservative defeat in all the noise from Conservative defeats at the locals. This is quite an interesting result as the grand-predecessor two-member seat, North Lancashire, was in Conservative hands from 1832 to 1885, with the occasional Liberal sneaking in as the second member. Then the predecessor seat, Blackpool, was again Conservative territory from 1885 to 1945, except a short Liberal interlude in 1923-1924. Finally Blackpool South itself was Conservative from 1945 to 1997, then Labour from 1997 to 2019, and again Conservative again since 2019. You can't say there is a strong Labour tradition in that constituency, yet it turned back Red on a 26% swing, the kind that would totally wipe out the Conservatives at a general election.

By-elections are usually a golden opportunity for the creepy-loonies to crawl from under the woodwork, and I'm not talking Monster Raving here, and it did indeed happen there and then. Reform UK coming within a hare's breadth of outvoting the Conservatives is not a surprise, as all recent polls show them in a strong position all across the North. And this invalidates what we saw at the local elections, a very poor showing by Reform UK. Apparently, all it takes is them getting the suitable candidate in the right place at the right time. But it also validates the not-so-paradoxical point that Labour may find themselves in a much better at the general election if they win back the Leave voters in the Red Wall constituencies. Which is what happened in Blackpool South, that voted almost 68% to leave, but now gives only half of that to the Leaver candidates on the right. That alone should incite Labour to not jump to hasty conclusions, based on the local elections' results only, but to stay focused on the national concerns and priorities expressed by the electorate in various polls, and that have nothing to do with potholes, bin collections and gender-neutral loos in primary schools. In the same timeframe, Techne moved us from the South in the North to the North in the South, with a poll of Portsmouth North, Penny Mordaunt's constituency. And their findings are not quite what we expected, or what Labour wanted to hear.

Common wisdom, the punditariat's verdict and Labour's expectations all are that Starfleet Admiral Mordaunt is inevitably bound to lose her seat, and her hopes of becoming the next Conservative leader. But that's not what the Portsea Islanders told Techne. Penelope would hold the seat, even with a strong Reform UK vote across her path, while another Conservative candidate would lose it by a hare's breadth. There is a lot to unroll here. Starting with the mathematical evidence that a Green vanity candidacy would wreck Labour's prospects in a constituency that the Greens have fuck all chance to win. And also that it would make sense for the Liberal Democrats to sit this one out without asking for anything in return, as they will never get it in a million years. They should realise that it is in everyone's best interests to unseat Mordaunt, as she is the least repulsive of all wannabe Tory leaders in the eyes of the Great British Public. And thusly the one they must absolutely get rid of at the general, so the Tories have no choice but endorsing an unpopular far-right loony, and lose all chances of a quick recovery. QED. Simples, innit?

Everybody saw a Tory rout coming, and it was indeed a Tory rout. They lost 500 Councillors, they lost the West Midlands mayoralty, the lost the Blackpool South by-election. And they lost their passion for life.

(Helen Lewis, Have I Got News For You?, 10 May 2024)

You know your approval rating is low if someone would rather see a picture of your cock than your face.

(Jon Richardson, Have I Got News For You?, 5 April 2024)

The Labour Party have every reason to be happy bunnies with the current trends of voting intention polls. 231 weeks have passed since the 2019 general election, and we have had 1,362 polls on 227 of these weeks, after pollsters took a month off to recover from the shocking results. That's an average of 6 polls per week, and the rhythm has sped up recently, with about 8 polls a week this year. What matters more, from Labour's perspective, is that they have been continuously in the lead in 959 polls conducted over the last 893 days. Almost two-and-a-half years so far. Boris Johnson was predicted to lose, then Liz Truss was predicted to lose even more, and now Rishi Sunak is predicted to lose with very little hope of recovery. It may be a wee bit exaggerated to predict a Tory Extinction Event, but you can feel the panic in the way Rishi Sunak's allies are literally begging the loony wing of the Conservative Party to cut him some slack, and not kick him into a ditch before the election.

Before the local elections, the Conservative MPs' mood was not made better by Rishi Sunak not ruling out ruling out a July general election, or was he ruling out not ruling out a July election, or summat just as clear, like not ruling out not ruling out a July election? Which won't happen anyway, as the House rises on the 23rd of July for its hard-earned Summer Recess, and Rishi surely does not want to anger MPs even more by forcing them to cancel their all-inclusive in Magaluf. But the Great British Public seem ready to accept a general election just before the summer break, because they have had more than enough of that government, and can't wait to see the door hitting them in the arse on their way out. Since the Westminster System has gained clear shades of presidentialism in recent years, Brits also make it summat personal against Rishi. Redfield & Wilton sensed that and polled it. There is a lot to unroll in that poll, but the first question is the best and surely the most meaningful. What do Brits think Rishi Sunak has achieved as Prime Minister?

There is quite a consensus here that Rishi has achieved jack shit, or very close to that. Even Conservative voters of 2019, those who voted for Boris Johnson, think so, and that's surely why so many of them have now deserted the Nasty Party. Surprisingly, there is reverse generational divide here, as the younger generations are the most likely to cut Rishi some slack and credit him with some sort of achievement. Though I have a hunch it is safer to not ask them which exactly. Of course nobody would want a totally useless Prime Minister to come back for another term, especially when you also think he has fuck all plan for the future. Except perhaps his own pension plan from a seven-figure sinecure in the USA, I would venture. It's obviously what his wife wants, so it's no surprise that there is already speculation that the very first by-election in the next term will be in Richmond. If Rishi holds the seat, that is, and does not deliberately throw the election to secure an earlier one-way trip to greener pastures. Whatever the actual plan is, it's definitely not an incentive to vote Conservative, innit?

Tory MP Dan Poulter said he was crossing the floor to the Labour Party because, as an NHS doctor, "I found it difficult to look my patients in the eye". Well, that's proctology for you.

(Martin Clunes, Have I Got News For You?, 3 May 2024)

It’s not a crowbar they’ll need to get him out of here, it’s a forklift truck.

(Peter Pascoe, Dalziel & Pascoe: Soft Touch, 2004)

Rishi Sunak looks more determined than ever to defy common sense and sound advice, and limp on until it's too late. That may not be the stroke of genius he thinks it is. Because there's also an interesting trend in the classic 'Preferred Prime Minister' polling. The recent chain of events has not hurt Keir Starmer's standing at all, quite the opposite in fact. When Brits were feeling less kind towards Sly Keir, they did not flock back to Rishi Sunak, but to the safe haven of undecidedness. And when Rishi once again fucked up something that even the local Parish Council would have got right, the Great British Public swung again towards Starmer, and in greater numbers than before. So now both prospective leaders' personal ratings are getting closer and closer to their parties' voting intentions. Which is definitely a good omen for Starmer, and more bad news for Sunak.

There was a funny subplot to the competition between Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak, after Sly Keir turned full-time flagshagger to seduce the likes of Rory Stewart. Of course, you could argue that England desperately seeking their Flagshagger General is better than Scotland looking for yet another Witchfinder General, and I certainly won't challenge you on that. Especially as it had some comic relief value in it. Inevitably, someone had to poll the Great British Public's love of flags, so Lord Ashcroft dutifully did it, and even thought it was newsworthy enough to warrant a full column in The Daily Fail. Of course, it was not a totally open competition with like, the EU or the Palestine flags competing. Options were restricted to just the Union Flag, which you remember is a Jack only when wet, and the national flags of the Main Isle nations. The results were, as you would expect, quite interesting.

If Keir Starmer got the idea that flag-shagging is a vote-winner from Peter Mandelson's focus groups, he might want hit pause now and think it through. Labour voters endorse the Union Flag, which, as you surely remember, is properly called the Union Jack only when flown from a ship, more strongly than average. But those in Scotland and Wales still prefer their own national flag, even if Wales is technically "too close to call". In England, 6% overall, and 10% of Labour voters, think that the Cross of St George is racist and divisive, and should not be displayed. Which probably represents nothing more than the proportion of dyed-in-the-wool revisionist wokesters in England. That's quite hilarious when you consider the actual history of its use through the centuries, which is partly mythical, but surely doesn't point to any institutional racism. It can be considered divisive and offensive only through the prism of political appropriation by far-right activists, that only occurred in the late 20th century. It thusly looks like Keir Starmer has just opened a new frontline in a culture war only within his own electorate, which is probably not the smartest move six months and change before a landmark general election.

Rishi Sunak's ban on cigarettes will have a profound effect on children under the age of 15, many of whom will have to give up smoking.

(Alexander Armstrong, Have I Got News For You?, 19 April 2024)

All you’ve got to do is lie constantly, get every big decision wrong, decimate peoples’ lives, and after about fifteen years people go, “That’ll do, that’s enough of that”.

(Jon Richardson, Have I Got News For You?, 5 April 2024)

Here you have the current weighted rolling average of voting intentions, based on the last ten generic polls for which the detailed results are available. I deliberately trawled in everything that came out over the last weekly polling cycle, so you won't believe I cherrypick polls based on what they deliver. I no longer include Northern Ireland here, because English pollsters never venture there, except Savanta and Survation. Who have ridiculously small NI subsamples of around 50, and then rate them as 100% for "Other parties". Totally fucking useless. So I will now show the overall result for Great Britain, the national results for Scotland and Wales, and the regional results across England. If and when there is a new real poll from Northern Ireland, I will deal with it separately and, of course, always include Northern Ireland's seats in the Commons projections, based on the proper polls fielded there. My current GB-wide super-sample is 21,777, with a margin of error of 0.66%, mashing together polls fielded by Savanta, Redfield & Wilton, Lord Ashcroft, Deltapoll, newcomer Whitestone Insight, Techne, YouGov, People Polling, Opinium and We Think between the 9th and the 17th of May. And it's kind of a new high for New New Labour, leading by 22% overall and by 7% in Scotland.

Now there is a new wildcard in the game, that promises to be quite wild indeed, George Galloway's Workers Party of Britain. They will be fielding around 500 candidates, a rather interesting mash of former Conservatives and UKIPpers, some rejects from Labour or the SNP, some shameless homophobes and anti-Semites. Then it's probably an apt cross-section of the current British Loony Left who support Islamo-Nazi terrorism and Russian imperialism, with the sole goal of making Labour fail to gain seats from the Conservatives, or even making them lose seats. The Workers Party has been featured in just one poll so far, and was found to weigh 0.48% GB-wide. But they're the textbook case of a fringe extremist party for which an average vote share means fuck all, as their success, or hopefully failure, depends exclusively on the demographics of the constituency, more precisely its ethnic and religious make-up. Because they are just professional shit-stirrers who thrive on stoking the fires of division with a discourse of permanent victimhood and grievance. All this means their chances of success are limited to constituencies with a similar profile to Rochdale, and more specifically the two seats in Tower Hamlets, where Galloway himself was once an MP. But the next Parliament will be a better place if their strategy of performative disruption totally fails, and Galloway loses the seat he never intended to truly represent.

There simply wasn't any sense that the end would come as quickly as it did.

(Liz Truss)

I’m getting out of this game. It’s too cut-throat. I’m going back to contract killing. Which is still cutting throats but, you know, there’s a level of honesty in it.

(Betty the Beast, Murder, They Hope: The Bunny Trap, 2021)

Mark Menzies, the Conservative MP for Fylde in Lancashire, just next door to Blackpool South, has announced he is leaving the Conservative Party and standing down at the incoming election, after a new batch of accusations against him proved too much for even the Conservative Party to ignore or excuse. He was the 99th to give up on re-election, and we have now reached 102, 70 of them Conservatives. This is not yet the all-time record, which was set in 2010 with 149 retirements, but odds are we will cross that bridge before the election is called. Jumping ship before the axe falls is certainly a sensible career move for Conservative MPs this year, as the writing is already on the wall for a lot of them, including plausibly half of the current Cabinet. The pattern of polls is changing very little over time, so we are very probably heading for the best ever result for Labour (more than 418 seats) and the worst ever for the Conservatives (fewer than 131 seats). There is even a very plausible scenario in which Labour bag the best result ever for any party (more than 459 seats). We're well past that this week, but it probably won't last. Or will it?.

A remarkable feature of this year's election is that it is making things harder for the punditariat and the psephologists, and even more so for the likes of John Curtice, who wear both hats at once. The swing towards Labour is so big and unprecedented that it has shattered all certainties and pre-scripted talking points, because it has moved the proverbial "seats to watch" into uncharted territory. No more pontificating about marginal seats when the marginals of yore are now firmly in the red column. Marginals have become safe, and safes have become marginals, in the blue column, that is. But there are still dozens of potential marginals, they have just moved from one corner of the compass to another, and to different regions of the Realm. On my current Poll'O'Polls, 140 seats will be decided by a margin of less than 5%, which some would consider as ultra-marginal. That's more than one in five seats, and the range of projected seats you get when you factor them in, or out, shows that there are still lots of unknowns in this election.

The most striking result here is that even Labour's worst case scenario gives them as many seats as Tony Blair in 1997, so the Conservatives will not be able to deny Keir Starmer a strong and convincing mandate to do what he wants. Provided that he actually knows what he wants, and does not have to consult Peter Mandelson's focus groups too often. Then we already know what will happen during the first year of the next term. Labour will blame the Conservatives for anything that does not get better fast enough, and the Great British Public will totally buy it. The Conservatives will blame Labour for anything that still goes wrong, and the Great British Public will tell them to fuck off to the sea. The SNP will be like the Tartan Nostromo, learning the hard way that in Westminster no one can hear you whine when you bagged your worst result since Alex Salmond resigned. Then 2026 will come, and it will be the Year of Reckoning. Or the Year of the Gathering when, in the end, there can be only one.

Yeah darling, gonna make it happen, take the world in a love embrace

Fire all of your guns at once and explode into space

(Dennis Edmonton, Born To Be Wild, 1968)

You know what they say in China. If you want to catch a fish, first stir the water.

(Peter Pascoe, Dalziel And Pascoe: A Death In The Family, 2006)

The British media love a good story, even when it's a wee bit tired, and so do the pollsters. The most popular this month is still who could possibly be an alternative Prime Minister to Rishi Sunak, and lead the Conservatives to a certain defeat. Of course the story has lost a lot of its momentum since the usual suspects decided to do jack shit to eject Rishi after the local elections, and we've pretty much reached the point in time where it's too late to do anything anyway. Nevertheless, More In Common clung to that bone, and asked their panel who they thought would make a good, or bad, leader of the Conservative Party in the run-up to the already lost general election. Their actual list of prompts was actually twice the size of what I'm showing you, but I could not be arsed to display those for whom the dominant reply was, "What? Who?". Including Nigel Farage may have been just MIC taking the mick, but his fairly good result is quite interesting nevertheless, and I will soon show you why.

So the top contender, other than those who can't or won't, or can't and won't compete, is Starfleet Admiral and soon-to-be former MP for Portsmouth North, the Right Honourable Penelope Mary Mordaunt. The one who quipped, after Natalie Elphicke defected to Labour, that she would be a bad recruit for them because she is not right-wing enough. Take that, Sly Keir, if you believe a zebra can change its spots! Penny also saw fit to play down rumours that she would be "installed in Number Ten rather like a new boiler". Which was a wee smitch offensive, but also quite appropriate as she would be just a seat-warmer for Keir Starmer. The second choice is Kemi Badenoch, who managed to transiently become an icon for some rather deluded blokes, when she proved that she knows what a woman is, which my dog also knows. Her star does not shine as brightly now, after she found her way back to her true right-wig persona, that would make her a better recruit for Labour than Penny. Penny's assessment, not mine, lads. Anyway, More In Common tested two alternative general elections, one with Penny leading the Conservatives to the slaughterhouse, and the other one with Kemi doing it. And it doesn't make the outcome any better.

As you can see, the baseline from the same poll, with an unspecified person sitting at Number Ten, who I only assumed would be Rishi Sunak, is not the best for Labour, with a lead of only 17%. Penny would make it better and Kemi would make it worse, but neither would survive to fight another day. The interesting part is that a Penny-led Conservative Party, there beneath the blue suburban skies, would shrink Labour's lead to about the same level as Tony Blair's in 1997. And that would deliver a Johnson-like majority, which is probably not what Keir Starmer is hoping, but would nevertheless be a conclusive mandate for whatever change he decides not to implement. So we know that what would look like a rather lacklustre performance by today's standards and expectations would still lead to an unquestionable victory. JL Partners tried a different alternative scenario, with Nigel Farage replacing non-entity Richard Tice as the leader of Reform UK. And it does indeed have some effect.

The baseline is again not very good for Labour, leading by only 15%, which is way below the current trend of polls. But Farage's come-back would have both predictable and unexpected effects. Of course, it would boost Reform UK and grant them a significant number of MPs. But, unlike any other poll, especially those who already toyed with the Farage scenario, it would hurt the Conservatives and favour Labour. So far, we had become used to the common wisdom that a Reform UK surge would hurt both main parties equally, especially in the Brexit-supporting constituencies of the working-class North. But it does not work in that poll, as the Labour vote is barely changed and they gain seats, while the Conservatives lose a lot thanks to Reform UK pushing them to second place in marginals. This gives credence to the aforementioned new thesis, that Labour has gained back the Northern Leave voters who deserted them in 2019, and are now on a safer path to a landslide. Keir Starmer will obviously welcome the good news, and the SNP would be well advised to pay attention too. If Labour are on thicker ice in the North of England, they will be tempted to reroute resources to somewhere else. And guess what is the most obvious destination? Aye, you guessed it. Scotland, what else?

I think, I personally think we should have a constant lettuce going, rather than getting them in for the new leaders. And ironically, Constant Lettuce sounds like the name of a Tory MP.

(Chloe Petts, Have I Got News For You?, 3 May 2024)

If you're in politics and you can't tell when you walk into a room who's for you and who's against you, then you're in the wrong line of work.

(Lyndon B. Johnson)

I would be in blatant crass dereliction of duty if I did not mention the most important event of last month, which has become an ongoing story into this month. That the Hate Monster proved to be a massive bad luck charm, and Scotland has descended into fucking chaos. Well, not the whole of Scotland, but the Holyrood Bubble and the Glaswegian political establishment certainly have. I'm quite sure you have followed all the episodes, so I will spare you the recap, which would make less sense that Season Six of Lost anyway. Or Owen Jones' first column about it in The Scottish Pravda, that even he/him doesn't have the fuckiest scoobie what it's actually about. Not that the second one makes more sense, other than throwing some familiar buzzwords into the broth. Of course, somebody had to speed-poll the whole fucking clownshow, so YouGov did it. Sadly for them, they shot too quick and probed the mind of Scotland before Humza resigned. Otherwise, some hypotheticals would have become certainties, and some new hypotheticals would have opened more lines of inquiry. Then it still sheds a light on the Great Scottish Public's knee-jerk reaction, first about the welcome demise of the Bute House Agreement.

Political affiliations here reflect the Holyrood constituency voting intentions, as found elsewhere in the same poll. It's not overwhelming, as many just can't be arsed to give a flying fuck, but binning the Bute House Agreement is seen as a smart move, that the Greenies should have made anyway if Humza had not beaten them to it. There are interesting differences between the political tribes, though, with an undercurrent to the left of Doogie Ross, that it would have been better if Humza had let the Greenies shoot first. Which would not have happened for two weeks or more, so it's definitely better that it happened that way, even factoring in the massive amount of shit that has hit the fan since. YouGov was unlucky here, as Humza Yousaf resigned before they published the results of their poll, which asked Scots what the Scottish Parliament should do at the vote of no confidence that will never happen now. The Great Scottish Public's answer to that was nevertheless unmistakably unambiguous.

Even SNP voters reluctantly admitted that Yousaf's position was untenable, but still wanted to keep him. But Yousaf for once read the room correctly and admitted he had no choice, pretty much like Liz Truss in her last days at Number Ten. YouGov did not crosstab Green voters here, so we will never know what they actually thought of the situation. I seriously doubt that they shared the whiny venomous acrimony displayed by Harvie and Slater after they lost their ministerial bikes, and an initial statement that sounded almost adult and reasonable. But the punditariat's attention almost instantly shifted to the next clownshow, the choice of a new leader of the SNP and First Minister. Speculation about whom might be in the competition lasted for only six hours, until it became clear that the Sturgeonite Old Guard were still at it and had already earmarked the position for a continuity continuity candidate, cosplaying the unity candidate. Notwithstanding the dice being already loaded, IPSOS probed their Scottish panel on The Day After, and their choice for the best next First Minister turned out to match what the media had already picked for their headlines.

I have selected only the four most quoted names here, but IPSOS tested many more, who all received ridiculously low scores. The prospect of a Forbes vs Swinney contest meant that Patrick Harvie smelled blood, and again felt he was in a position to blackmail the SNP into anointing the candidate he had selected for them. That was apparently enough to convince the SNP Grandees that their best choice was to cut the competition short by having no competition at all. The Scottish Parliament's rules for the election of the First Minister make it painfully clear that the SNP's candidate could be defeated, unless they got some opposition MSPs to at least abstain instead of voting 'against'. But the opposition parties took that threat off the table when they decided to each field their own candidate, instead of lying a common trap across Swinney's path. It was quite revealing that the core argument was about Kate Forbes's religious beliefs, which she kept mostly distinct from her political choices, while Paddy Harvie never saw anything wrong with Humza Yousaf's very ostentatious public displays of faith within government premises. Double standards and all, but only about women in public life. And then there was one, as John Swinney became Seat Warmer By Default, which is still an improvement over his predecessor's Witchfinder General persona.

Humza Yousaf's disastrous fallout with the Green Party was described by The Telegraph as "one of the greatest miscalculations in recent political history". To which Liz Truss responded, "Hold my pint".

(Martin Clunes, Have I Got News For You?, 3 May 2024)

The First Minister has resigned. He’s had to resign because he annoyed the Greens, and then he didn’t realise how annoyed the Greens were. And he said, “Well, I didn’t mean it”, and they said, “You did’, and so he had to leave. That’s the latest political analysis from me.

(Paul Merton, Have I Got News For You?, 3 May 2024)

There's a strong case to be made that the SNP, instead of cuddling the Greens for their support against Labour's motion of no confidence in the Scottish Government, should pay more attention to the polls who clearly show that the Scottish people are losing confidence in the Scottish Government. Not to mention the massive irony in the Greens saving a government led by Humza Yousaf just two days after they literally hounded him into resignation. If the SNP could be arsed to look at what's happening outwith the Holyrood Bubble, they would have noticed that the week of clownshow has left its mark, and not in a good way. So far we have had a triad of May polls, probing the Great Scottish Public about their voting intentions and stuff. In chronologiconormative linear-time order, one from Norstat for The Sunday Times, one from Savanta for The Scotsman, and one from Redfield & Wilton for nobody in particular except public enlightenment. The updated trends of Holyrood voting intentions are definitely not a surprise, as this has been a long time in the making.

The constituency votes for Labour and the SNP are on a collision course. In fact they have already collided, it's just that the six-point rolling average here has some built-in inertia. And the SNP no longer have the fallback safety net of the infamous Both Votes SNP, as Labour has also overtaken them on the list vote. The Greens are also losing ground now, which will be welcome news for the supporters of real equality and free speech. That they may also end up behind the Liberal Democrats is not such good news though, as the Scottish climate seems to have odd effects on LibDem brains, like mushing them worse than peas at a Yorkshire chippy. The voting intentions from our three Full Scottish clearly say that we are witnessing The Decline And Fall Of Summat, and also the possible emergence of an alternate path that may be not as bad as the SNP's talking points want us to believe. There is a constant feature here, that the pro-Independence parties are well below a majority of the popular vote.

Again, the seat projections for the next Holyrood election illustrate the oddities of the Additional Members System, that will soon survive in Scotland only, as the Senedd has voted to transition Wales to a cunningly tweaked proportional representation in multi-member constituencies. Labour are really benefiting of the geography of their vote, which sees them serendipitously underperforming in regions where their odds are wee, and overperforming where they are in a one-on-one with the SNP. And that's how they bag all the Glasgow constituencies, unseating Nicola Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf. But also all but one in Central, unseating Neil Gray, Jamie Hepburn and Christina McKelvie. Among lots of others. Ironically, even the Conservatives would get their pound of flesh thanks to the SNP's dismal performance on the constituency vote, most notably unseating Gillian Martin and Karen Adam. But the mysterious ways of AMS mean that the Greens, even on their poorest performance, would manage to hold their seats and snatch a few. So we haven't seen the back of Mad Mags Chapman and Ross Greer yet.

Now these three polls lead to a couple of things, a triad of things actually. The strongest coalition would be Labour and the SNP, which will not happen because Labour HQ would never allow it, and secondarily it would cause an Exodus of the Sturgeon clique towards whatever party, that would kill the SNP and the plan. The second strongest is the classic Unionist coalition of Labour, Liberal Democrats and Conservatives, which sill never happen either because Labour HQ would forbid it too. Some issues with the optics, innit? Which again leaves only the third strongest coalition, and my personal darling, the German-like Traffic Lights coalition of Labour, Liberal Democrats and Greens. After all, Paddy and Lorna have been dealing for this in smoke-filled backrooms long before Humza kicked them out of Bute House, so it would be cruel to deprive them of it, not to mention some summatphobic that hasn't been invented yet. But that would require First Minister Anas Sarwar showing some baws and taming the Greens, or else the Green tail would wag the Red Dog the same way it wagged the Yellow Dog, and that would condemn Anas to an untimely and pitiful exit just like Humza before him. Then Anas might want to think twice and gamble on a riskier and at the same time safer option, a Traffic Light Redux of just Labour and Liberal Democrats. It could bag 63 seats according to the most recent poll, just two shy of a majority, and might be a risk well worth taking.

It’s the leader of a country who’s had to resign because he’s useless. I mean, that’s not going to be a good precedent.

(Ian Hislop, Have I Got News For You?, 3 May 2024)

The better people are from Glasgow. We all know that, right? Edinburgh's posher.

(Jean Johansson)

Our new trio of Full Scottish have also polled voting intentions for an hypothetical second Independence referendum. Which we know will not happen in the foreseeable future, unless John Swinney has a file on Keir Starmer as thick as the one the Greens have on Angus Robertson. There's a familiar pattern in these polls, as it's pretty much the same "two steps forward, one step back" move we often see, alternating with the more annoying "one step forward, two steps back". The more surprising thing, though, is that the nation is still split down the middle about independence, and that the SNP's and Greens' shenanigans have not turned more to a No vote. The trendlines do indeed show some stability over the last few months, which the weighted average confirms. Still stuck on 52 No to 48 Yes, after we started to believe it was slowly transitioning into a tie.

This still high support for independence is a nice surprise because the polls also show a continuity of the SNP crashlanding. The last three polls show an even more conclusive result. Labour is now steadily ahead and the SNP on yet another downward spiral. There are clearly no reason to be cheerful about these trends at Bute House, because they are far worse than before the disastrous 2017 general election, and that year's results showed that polls had actually overestimated the SNP vote and underestimated the Labour vote. A similar situation this years would be worse than doom and gloom for the SNP. It would mean annihilation.

The ironic side of the most recent sequence of polls is that they show the Conservatives poised to lose a lot of votes, but oddly holding their seats in most projections, or even gaining one. But it's not paradoxical as there is a really simple explanation for this. There are no Conservative-Labour battlegrounds in Scotland, which the Tories would obviously lose. Their only battlegrounds are one-on-ones with the SNP and, so long as polls show the SNP losing more votes than the Conservatives, there is actually a swing towards them in these constituencies. The same counter-intuitive pattern works for the Liberal Democrats too, who could plausibly gain as many as three seats.

But the main attraction is, of course, what is now hinted to happen in the numerous SNP-Labour battlegrounds. We already know that there are two major factors at play here. The geography of the vote helps Labour as their vote is less evenly spread, and they overperform coast-to-coast in the Central Belt, precisely where most battlegrounds are located. The Greens' vanity candidacies, that have exactly jack shit chance of propelling one of them to Westminster, help Labour as the Greenies would snatch twice as many votes from the SNP as from Labour. So the combination of the two could drive the SNP down to a result closer to October 1974 than to 2017. And what was an outstanding and unprecedented success half a century ago would be an unmitigated disaster this year. The most significant part would obviously be Labour bagging a full slate in Glasgow, missing just one seat in Central Scotland, and two each in West Scotland and Lothian. That would be a worse bloodbath than at the Holyrood election, and a richly deserved one, if you consider the total lack of any notable achievement by the SNP contingent in Westminster.

As they say, it's not the cough that carries you off, but the coffin they carry you off in.

(Claudine Griffin, Dalziel And Pascoe: A Death In The Family, 2006)

I found out a few years ago that all British nuclear submarines run on Windows 98, and they can’t update the operating system. It’s better if you don’t think about it.

(Helen Lewis, Have I Got News For You?, 10 May 2024)

It seems that we now have a new debate on our hands, this time about defence spending. It must be real, as it has already been polled from various angles and with varying depth by More In Common, Redfield & Wilton and Lord Ashcroft. It's a quite rational move when we now have two wars withing touching distance of our shores, and one more in the brewing. The flip side is that, if this debate reaches Commons, we will have the usual displays of nationalism, English exceptionalism and nostalgia of Imperial grandeur. Most of them from the Labour side of the room, now that Keir Starmer has anointed himself the Greatest Patriot Of All Patriots. But there must be an adult way to conduct this debate, and listening to the Great British Public may be a start, or at least listening to what the polls say the people want. Ancient Rome already knew that si vis pacem, para bellum. So we shouldn't allow the Kremlin-bribed faux pacifists to gaslight us into thinking otherwise. Having a sound defence policy first requires that we identify the threats facing us, and More In Common probed their panel about that. I have a fleeting suspicion that some of the items in their list may have been included in jest, you never know, but the replies are nevertheless not that far-fetched.

It is indeed quite entertaining to see that the Great British Public consider woke ideology as a threat on par with resistance to antibiotics and the ageing population, and Donald Trump as a slightly more serious threat. Though I guess there is nothing even a Trident submarine could do about that one. Or could it? Of course, the results of the More In Common poll are quite the laundry list of totally unrelated threats, some of which may not even be actual threats, like in having the capability to trigger catastrophic events. We even had a column by Kathleen Stock in The Times making the case that the wheels are falling off under the wokesters, though we may need some time to totally eradicate their ideology from positions of influence. Redfield & Wilton instead chose to go straight for the harder stuff, asking their panel how likely, or unlikely, they think we will be 'involved in a direct military conflict' with a select list of foreign nations. Their wording, not mine. And the Great British Public are quite pessimistic about what may happen.

Let's first swipe left for Argentina, who won't seek to retake Las Malvinas in any credible scenario, and we don't really believe they will dare, do we? I'm also not really worried about a conflict with North Korea and Iran, even if both have nuclear capabilities. China would certainly rein in North Korea or Iran, as their overall strategy makes them averse to open conflict, because it is bad for business. Open conflict with China themselves is a likely scenario only if they try a military operation against Taiwan. But would their risk assessment prove without a doubt that it's worth it? Probably not, I hope, especially as they have better ways to extend their influence worldwide, like infiltrating the German far-right ahead of the European Parliament elections. That leaves us with Our Friends In The East, Russia, with whom an open conflict is much more likely. Newsweek even warned us of which shape it will take, based on information from the Institute For The Study Of War, and they even have the maps to prove it. Russia has of course denied it all, and we know how reliable and trustworthy they are. If you buy the ISW's war scenarios, the obvious questions for our politicians is whether or not we are ready for it. Redfield & Wilton asked their panel how they feel about it, and they don't really exude confidence.

Even the subtle variation in wording, from 'facing potential challenges' to 'fighting a major war', does not change the replies in any significant way. Even just a third of Brits agreeing that we are ready to face whatever comes our way is flabbergasting, when you consider the well known and much publicised state of decay of the British Armed Forces. It is an extraordinary situation when you contextualise it within the broader picture of military spending across the world. The usual benchmark is the percentage of GDP spent on defence, but the actual amount is a better indicator of the defence effort, especially between countries with similar economies and not too dissimilar costs of military hardware. The UK spends 22% more than France on defence, yet has a weaker Army and Air Force, and the Navy is about equivalent. The UK spends more than twice as much as Italy, yet the overall number of military personnel is only 10% higher. Only Russia has a more inefficient use of its military budget, and it's the world's worst kept secret that the main reason is corruption and embezzlement. The situation in the UK is hardly better, as it is the Realm's worst kept secret that the main reason for massive waste of funds is crass incompetence, on top of the usual English arrogance leading the military Establishment to believe they always know better than anyone else. Spoiler alert: they don't.

I would rather have questions that cannot be answered than answers that cannot be questioned.

(Richard Feynman)

There's a greater threat to our independence and sovereignty, our whole way of life, our very Englishness, than at any time in the last 500 years. Time for all good men to stand up and do their bit, whatever it may be.

(Andrew Goodenough, Dalziel & Pascoe: Child's Play, 1998)

The Redfield & Wilton poll is the most thorough of the three that have recently dealt with defence spending, but I can't discuss all its findings or I would bore you to death and beyond. I will focus on just a few key issues, as you can check the whole thing and the detailed results on their site. They even have a couple of 'gotcha questions' to catch the Great British Public's contradictions, which we know are a plenty. But there is also a clever foreplay question, about the UK's position in this Brave New World Order of ours. Which side you're on here is kind of a defining issue, and it looks like the Great British Public are not really sure. Then I guess defining one of the choices as 'a global power for good' was not that clever after all, even if it's catchy. It definitely has overtones of messianic overlordship, which is certainly not what the question-setters meant. But Brits are nevertheless on that side, albeit just narrowly, with the added surprise that Scots are more conclusively supporting it than the rest of the UK.

I'm definitely suspicious of people who say we should only defend ourselves against 'direct threats', because I fear that their definition of them will conveniently overlook very real threats that are not in the shape of blatant aggression. There is a very fine line between this and arguing that Russia is the victim here because NATO have been pursuing aggressive policies. Now the 'global power for good' storyline should not be a cover for delusions of grandeur, that are very common in circles on the opposite side of the compass. I take it more like the wish to see the UK being able again to play an important part on the world scene all by ourselves, rather than being subservient to choices made in the United States, which seems to be the true nature of the 'special relationship'. Which implies that we must spend more on defence, a position supported by 38% of Brits according to Redfield & Wilton, rising to 48% if you factor out undecideds. But the real 'gotcha question' is how you fund it, by cutting other spending or by cancelling tax cuts? You guessed it, the Great British Public are not happy bunnies about the idea of not getting their tax cuts, even hawkish Conservative voters. Which explains why Rishi Sunak is defending the totally unsustainable position that you can spend more while earning less from taxes.

Of course Rishi does not really care, as he won't be here next year to square the budgetary circle. But Labour will, so they should be careful what they pledge to do. You may not have noticed it, but Labour are now committed to increase our defence spending to 2.5% of GDP, above the amount generally suggested by NATO guidelines, though it is in no way an obligation, and many NATO members spend less. Even Sly Keir's commitment to the proverbial 'independent nuclear deterrent', which is actually anything but independent, should have surprised nobody, as he already said just that three years ago when there was no general election in sight. The fun part is that it gave Rishi Sunak the incentive to nick the idea from Labour, just like he had nicked the abolition of the non-dom status earlier. But the real challenge, especially when you keep in mind the systemic mismanagement of big defence projects, is not to spend more, but to spend efficiently. There's a lot you can do with £87bn a year, but there's also a lot you can waste on overheads and delays, the real British trademark. Whatever the future has in store, the Great British Public now trust Labour more than the Conservatives on defence matters, which is definitely a recent trend. Redfield & Wilton and Lord Ashcroft have both polled it, with different wordings, and found matching patterns.

If you squint hard enough at the chart, to unsee those who trust no one and those who don't know whom to trust, the headline figures are actually the same, 47% trusting Labour more and 33% trusting the Conservatives more. And all crosstabs are also quite similar, even the unexpected finding that Scots and SNP voters do support Labour here, even if Ashcroft's more doom-and-gloomy wording pushes a high proportion into neutrality. If even defence is now an asset for Labour, especially in electoral terms, they have every reason to maintain their more hawkish stance when in power. But they can't avoid the obvious fact that the UK can neither ride alone, nor in the USA's sidecar, if they really want to exert some influence. And they will soon find out that the best way to achieve that is cooperation with the European Union. Not just because there is strength in numbers, but also economies of scale in joint development projects. Keir Starmer would only have two hurdles to clear. Brexit ideology from the political spectrum, and the Not Invented Here syndrome from the military sphere. But all it would take is Keir showing some baws and putting them on the table, wouldn't it?

The road to hell is paved with compromise and triangulation.

(Liz Truss)

It should have been easier. We should have gotten there sooner. But in the end, we did what America has always done. We rose to the moment. We came together and we got it done. Now we need to move fast and we are.

(Joe Biden, 24 April 2024)

It's been a long time now since YouGov have comprehensively polled all the issues around the war in Ukraine, but We Think have stepped forward to fill the void in their 19 March omnibus poll, adapting their line of questioning to the new context. Which, since the 7th of October, has become summat of a Ukraine vs Israel conundrum for the West, of which Vladimir Putin was prompt to take advantage. I'm not saying the Vlad The Butcher actually asked Iran to order Hamas to attack Israel. But he just had to mildly suggest it to make it happen, knowing what sort of disproportionate revenge killing Israel would resort to, and how it would divide Western public opinions and embarrass Western governments. Seen from Kyiv, the real backstory was how the whole mess rebounded in the United States House of Representatives, where the spineless Speaker Mike Johnson obeyed Donald Trump's direct orders and delayed a vote on further military aid for months. It finally came to a vote on the night of the 20th of April, with Joe Biden's original omnibus aid package split into four bills. This was actually a victory for Procrastinator in Chief Biden, though he didn't claim it, as Trump had to back down to pressure from prominent 'moderate' Republicans, and anyway had bigger fish to fry with his trial in New York. The results of the House's votes are quite interesting.

Interestingly, Mike Johnson first submitted a procedural resolution "providing for consideration" of the actual bills. Which was just a stunt to assess the baselines of opposition to the bills proper in both parties. Unsurprisingly, the real Trump zealots on the right were joined by the Loony Wokesters on the left to oppose consideration of the bills. The ones who want Putin to win in cahoots with the ones who don't want to call Hamas terrorists, pretty much the same unholy alliance as in the UK. Several amendments designed to jeopardise the aid package for Ukraine, including one from the infamous Trumpist Marjorie Taylor Greene, failed miserably. The unamended bill then passed overwhelmingly, with $28bn out of 61 ringfenced for the fast-tracked production of advanced weapon systems that Ukraine desperately needs, and that will reach the frontline before the end of the year. In anticipation, the American military had already pre-positioned huge amounts of equipment in Eastern Europe, which means the first deliveries to Ukraine are already happening now that Joe Biden has signed the bill into law. This is a genuinely historic development, that will probably not turn the tide of the war yet, but will avoid the worst case scenario of a Ukrainian collapse. This will be welcome news for the Great British Public, as the We Think poll has found that our priority is protecting Ukraine from Russia, not protecting Israel from Iran.

The support for prioritising Ukraine is overwhelming, and fortunately shared across all demographics, even if there are a few weak points. Other polls have found that the support for Israel has gone down quite sharply and quite quickly in the UK. Which was unavoidable when the war in Gaza became the same kind of accumulation of war crimes against civilians that Russia is committing in Ukraine. Now Israel will still get $17bn out of the $26bn approved under the HR 8034 bill, only a quarter of what Ukraine will get, but still a considerable amount. Which is even more shocking when you contextualise it, as we are often summoned to do by the Loony Left, and remember that Benjamin Netanyahu refused to share the Iron Dome technology with Ukraine, because it would have angered Vladimir Putin. Quite appropriately, We Think also asked the Great British Public what they expect from the United States Congress. And we do want them to support Ukraine, and not prioritise Israel, in the same proportion and the same patterns as we do ourselves. There might even be a very unexpected twist now, if Joe Biden is true to his newfound baws and blocks the delivery of offensive weapons to Israel. There would possibly be some sort of legal vacuum here, but the most likely option is probably that an Executive Order would be enough to reroute all the stuff to Ukraine.

Expecting American lawmakers to think and act like us is of course wishful thinking, as the influence of Kremlin-bribed lobbyists is far greater in Washington DC than in Westminster. The Ukraine vote also showed that the MAGA appeasers have considerable weight within the Republican Party, so there is every reason to be worried by the possibility of a Republican victory at the USA's November elections. To nobody's surprise, the Kremlin and their bribed enablers in the West went ballistic after the House's vote. They know that the vote was actually a double whammy for Putin. Ukraine will get the long-awaited American aid and, in an unintended consequence, America procrastination has also sped up the resurgence of Europe's military industries and convinced several European nations to show more muscle and increase their own support to Ukraine. The Patriot air defence systems can be expected to arrive quickly, as Germany has already pledged one, and the USA have a lot stored in reserve. Ammunition is likely to follow, and the final step will be the F-16 fighters at last arriving, probably in June. But this will not be the end, and Ukraine will still need the kind of support the Great British Public are willing to offer. There is a definite sense of urgency now, as the new Russian offensive towards Kharkiv is already gaining momentum, and all the Americans have done is jargoning about the "changing trajectory" of the war. Could that last aid package also have been too little too late?.

Why don’t you go talk about Jewish space lasers and, really, why don’t you fuck off? How about that?

(Marjorie Taylor Greene, to Emily Maitlis)

It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog. Ukraine will win.

(Boris Johnson)

Funnily, The Hipstershire Gazette found it wise to publish a column by Jeremy Corbyn, just as the USA and Ukraine had reached an agreement about the delivery of ATACMS missiles with full capability, instead of the limited-range ones delivered earlier. Jezza's column is mostly about Gaza, and I can only agree with him that we now have a duty to stop Israeli war crimes there, and should have done so months ago already. But Jezza can't help also mentioning ending the war in Ukraine, almost like an afterthought, and this is where I definitely part ways with him. Because ending that war now could only happen on Putin's terms and send a massive message of cowardice and weakness. It's no coincidence that the German newspaper Die Welt am Sonntag also chose this moment to publish 'the secret document that could have stopped the war in Ukraine'. Which is in fact not that secret, as it is a draft that Ukraine rejected in April 2022 because it meant capitulation to Russia. And is only useful in the context of German domestic politics, as it offers an oven-ready, albeit lousy, cover for Olaf Scholz's unholy mix of cowardly prevarication and faux pacifism, ending in abject submission to brute force. Just the message Chamberlain sent to Hitler at Munich, when he chose to appease the appeasers. Fortunately, the Great British Public do not buy that, and massively approve of support to Ukraine. The aforementioned We Think poll even shows that more people want support to Ukraine to increase than when last polled by We Think two months ago, while fewer than ever before want it to decrease.

Interestingly, Labour voters and Londoners are more supportive of Ukraine than the average Brit, so Jezza is not even convincing his party comrades and his next door neighbours. The replies from Scotland are intriguing, as the average Scot is less supportive of Ukraine than the average Brit, but SNP voters are more supportive. This is not an outlier as the previous We Think poll asking the same question two months ago showed the same pattern. Once the firm support for Ukraine was established, We Think probed which options would be approved by the Great British Public, cleverly extending the scope to the whole West, not just the UK. They selected what appears to be the two most prominent options now on the table. Direct engagement in Ukraine, which was triggered by Emmanuel Macron's infamous rant about boots on the ground in late February. Fortunately, a majority of Brits don't want the West to go that far, and no sane government would consider it anyway, so long as Russia does not attack any NATO country. Then there is the supply of Patriot air-defence systems, which Ukraine has be vocally requesting for months, and here Brits agree it should be done.

There is some irony in this last question, as the British Army has never operated Patriot systems, and actually has nothing even remotely equivalent. The Royal Navy has a Patriot-like capability, ironically from French-built Aster-30 missiles fitted aboard the Type 45 destroyers, but we obviously can't remove them to send them to Ukraine. The most obvious supplier thusly remains the United States, who reportedly have more than 600 launchers in reserve, about six times what Ukraine needs for an adequate protection of both its major cities and the frontline. Germany has already pledged to deliver a battery of four launchers, and the Netherlands have one in reserve that could plausibly be delivered. And that's about it, as other European countries that have Patriots (Romania, Sweden, Poland) could be reluctant to send them to Ukraine as they fear a growing threat from Russia. Further away, Greece and Spain also operate Patriots, but haven't so far signaled any intention to part with them. The massive irony here is that the biggest oven-ready source of Patriots may be Israel, who have always refused to help Ukraine as it might strain their relationship with Russia. But now Israel are phasing out their Patriots from the Iron Dome, and replacing them with home-built Kela David batteries. Then their Patriots will be returned to the United States, who can transfer them to Ukraine. In a wholly different dimension, there is an interesting side-plot to all this, and we knew we could count on YouGov to poll it. That's of course the existential issue of Russian and Belarus athletes competing at the Olympics as 'neutrals'. Oddly, the Great British Public's position on that is quite a mixed bag.

I am glad to offer my unpopular opinion here, that they should not have been allowed to compete, under any subterfuge and whatever hissy fits Putin and Medvedev would have staged about it. I think it takes a special kind of cretin, or bleeding-heart do-gooder, to believe in that outrageous fiction of 'neutrality'. And please spare me the asinine lecture about 'sport should not be politicised' or 'this should be a time to forget our differences and celebrate', because that's fucking bullshit. Sport is political, has always been politicised, and has always been used as a tool of nationalism by authoritarian regimes. You may entertain the asinine delusion that these people from Russia and Belarus will compete as 'neutrals', but Putin and Lukashenko never believed in that fiction. It's a given that, if one of the Russians wins any trinket, Vlad The Butcher will have it celebrated all across the country as a Russian victory. And he will use it to boost Russian supremacist nationalism and support for his plan to restore the Soviet Empire. It's so obvious it's not even open for debate, and only the stupid and deluded will whine that they have been misled when it happens. While the Putin-enablers will grin and take the piss out of the morons who fell for the stunt. You've been warned. And, while the eyes of the world shift to Paris after an unexpected detour through Malmö, Vlad The Butcher will go on with his war crimes against Ukraine, desperately hoping he can score wins before the long-awaited reinforcements arrive.

There's a feeling I get when I look to the West, and my spirit is crying for leaving

In my thoughts I have seen rings of smoke through the trees, and the voices of those who stand looking

(Robert Plant, Stairway To Heaven, 1971)

Jeremy's Den

19/05/2024

Then Came The Second Day Of May

Welcome To Their Nightmares