Is The Song Over, Already?

People say it gets better but it doesn't. It just gets different, that's all.

(Maggie Smith)

© Pete Townshend, 1970

There’s no need to be so gleeful. You sound like Robespierre lopping off the head of Marie Antoinette.

(Violet Crawley, Downton Abbey, 2011)

Back to the UK this time, with The Who's Who's Next as today's soundtrack. Or rather Pete Townshend's projected rock opera Life House, reconstructed in its near original form, with all the songs actually recorded during the Who's Next sessions, and in the intended running order for Life House. With the stunning "Naked Eye", that predates all of this by a few months, and was like the precursor of it all, as your opening bonus track. And also a live version of "Pure And Easy", as the 'unedited' studio version actually is and misses a whole verse in the middle, that is present in this version recorded during one of the last two Life House dress rehearsals at the Young Vic Theatre in London, on 25 or 26 April 1971.

You're still strongly advised to click on the images for larger and better versions.

We have to go back in time a little for some of the juicy events of the last few weeks. One of the funniest non-events surrounding the Labour Conference in Liverpool was Owen Jones sucking his own dick, which is French for blowing his own trumpet, in another instalment of his asinine rants for The Scottish Pravda. Here we had Shitweasel painting himself and the Loony Woke Left as the clairvoyants who enlightened the Great Unwashed about the true nature of New Model Labour. Except that absolutely everybody, myself included, saw it coming and wrote about it long before the election. That it would be a landslide-by-default for Labour. That Keir Starmer's greatest achievement would be to allow the Liberal Democrats to reposition themselves to the left of the Tory-Lite Labour. Nobody said it better than Rosie Duffield, the MP for Canterbury, in her furious letter of resignation from the Labour Party. Which had nothing to do with her stance on 'trans rights' and everything to do with her genuinely social-democratic politics and dedication to serve her constituents. It was so precisely damning that even Shitweasel had to admit he totally agreed with her, even if it visibly hurt his wee woke feelz to say it aloud. And then we had an Opinium poll the next day saying that the Great British Public agree too.

The proportion of people thinking that Labour are doing well is lower than their vote share at the general election on all issues, and lower than their worst current voting intentions on all but one. The worst blow, from their perspective, is obviously that only a minority trust them to provide hope and optimism for the future. What Opinium found here is only part of the bigger picture, that shows both Keir Starmer losing support and the Labour government losing credibility faster than any Conservative government since VE Day, and obviously much faster than Tony Blair during his first term. YouGov's last comprehensive poll of the political bubble revealed the unbelievable. Labour collectively and Keir Starmer personally are now almost as unpopular as the Conservative Party and Rishi Sunak. Starmer's two main sidekicks, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner and Chancellor Rachel Reeves, are also easy targets for the people's discontent. Both bag more negative replies that any of the four Conservatives who still stood for leader before their last round of heats, and similar net negatives to Kemi Badenoch, the one they seem to fear most as the next Leader of the Opposition. The rest of YouGov's list, on both sides, can actually consider themselves lucky that most of the public have no opinion of them, which is always the best shield against mass negatives.

I must confess that I haven't found a fully convincing explanation yet, to how and why the Labour government turned into such an epic fail in such a short time. In the Conservatives' case, there was an oven-ready explanation: Boris Johnson fired all those who were smarter than him so, in the end, all that was left was Liz Truss. Starmer's purges, on the other hand, were ideological and none of the purged really shone as an intellectual heavyweight. The problem is that none of the survivors do either. Sly Keir must have thought that frankensteining New Model Labour from bits of Old Blairism and bobs of sanctimonious woke posturing would make it GOAT 2.0, but it clearly doesn't, as being in power has exposed lots of their agenda as vacuous bollocks. A clear sense of betrayal, and not just from pensioners whose houses have transitioned into fridges, is also dragging Keir Starmer's ratings down at flank speed. I have singled out just the polls fielded after he moved to his current well-heated flat, as his level of popularity as Leader of the Opposition doesn't really matter anymore. And it just keeps getting worse.

Starmer's personal credibility has also suffered a massive blow from his decision to fast-track Kim Leadbeater's Private Member's Bill about 'assisted dying', and then puzzling everyone by justifying an obviously hasty and ill-advised move with a promise he had made to Esther Rantzen. As if the Prime Minister's agenda could be dictated by any random past celebrity lobbying him solely on the basis of her personal needs. Don't get me wrong, I am totally in favour of a major overhaul of current legislation, to align it with the best international practice and the clear evolution of British public opinion on this most sensitive of all sensitive issues. But Leadbeater's record and politics make me fear we will not get that, but instead an alignment on the worst international practice, namely that of Canada, that has become a tool of eugenics and social engineering, rather than of respect and dignity. Polly Toynbee's drooling praise of Leadbeater in The Hipstershire Gazette has done nothing to reassure me. Quite the opposite in fact, with her reference to 'millions' waiting for new legislation to be enacted, or that weird idea to bring Harold Shipman into the discussion. Mentioning Scotland as the example to follow doesn't make it better, as we all know the SNP's uncanny ability for poorly drafted legislation that opens major loopholes and areas of concern, not to mention the very real possibility that this one too will be struck down via Section 35 of the Scotland Act for infringing on reserved matters. For once, I find myself in full agreement with another of The Hipstershire Gazette's columnists, taking down the usual woke narrative of 'us kind vs them bigots'. Let's just hope that Starmer will come back to his senses, and restart a true Parliamentary process, with all the consultation and scrutiny needed, because it's not about ticking a box on some MP's Bingo Card of 'progressive' achievements.

The sleaze, nepotism and apparent avarice are off the scale. I am so ashamed of what you and your inner circle have done to tarnish and humiliate our once proud party.

(Rosie Duffield MP, letter of resignation from the Labour Party, 28 September 2024)

© Pete Townshend, 1971

Don't be defeatist, dear, it's very middle-class.

(Maggie Smith)

The British pollstertariat are still not all back from their post-election slumber, or was it more of a post-election stupor? YouGov still haven't fielded a voting intentions poll, though they have found time and resources to probe our minds about all sorts of stuff, including extremely futile non-issues. The ones I miss most are Redfield & Wilton, whose Monday polling was useful in identifying trends and moods, but they have moved their operation to the United States for now, until the Clash Of Titans there is over. So we now have only 15 GB-wide generic polls since the general election, with more than a hint of pure Brownian motion in them, the stuff pollsters call 'random sample variations' as if it made the whole thing look better. Expert eyes can nevertheless still discern a semblance of trends in there, and a rather plain verdict. Labour are really not doing well, even the Conservatives are showing tiny signs of recovery, and Reform UK will probably stun us in the not-too-distant future, with a better sustained standing in polls that any loony far-right outfit that preceded them, all of which were Nigel Farage's already as far back as memory will take you.

If we agree to face the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the fucking truth, we can't avoid the obvious conclusion, that the whole British political system has been thrown off-balance by the events of the last twelve months. I'm not in any way trying to groom you into thinking that changing our electoral law to proportional representation (PR) would help. Just look at France, whose two-round majority system has also fallen apart when the country shifted from a two-bloc to a three-bloc configuration. Now they have the worst of both worlds. A hung Parliament, very close to what PR would have delivered, coupled with a very confrontational political culture quite similar to our own, antipodean to the 'consensus' culture that allegedly makes PR work. And it's absolute fucking chaos. They won't have a budget without the government using some constitutional stunt to bypass Parliament, and the government are not even sure they will still be here on New Year's Day. That would happen to us too if we were daft enough to change an admittedly unfair, but still fucking efficient, electoral law. Back to our current polls, the detail of the last six shows how bad it is going for Labour.

Seat projections from this sextet of polls also say that even chemically pure First-Past-The-Post will not be enough to save us from severe turbulence. We even have one that is eerily reminiscent of the headcount we had after the 2010 election, and even worse, just with Labour now being the first party and two or three dozen seats shy of a majority. And the remedy would be the same as back then, a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. And if you think the current Labour government is a fucking nightmare, just imagine what it would be like with a coalition partner whose sanest figure is Ed Davey, and certifiable screwballs like Layla Moran or Christine Jardine would have a genuine influence on government policies. Starmer might as well appoint Nadia Whittome to the Cabinet too. Err... wait... checks notes... they already have Ed Fucking Miliband. Don't get me wrong, I'm the last to want the return of the Conservatives, and they surely have it in them anyway to make that impossible for a generation. But we are facing a very sherlockian situation here and now. When you have eliminated everything that doesn't work, all you have left is what you have never tried. Namely the British Union of Putinists, otherwise known as Reform UK. I'm not even joking here. A huge proportion of Brits would approve of a 'strong leader', and who's stronger than one bought and sold for Russian gold? Mark my words, mates.

The most damning indictment of Keir Starmer's leadership, or lack thereof, is that it took Tony Blair nine years to reach a similar stage, despite all he had done to totally wreck his credibility and the Labour brand. Ironically, the first hints of impending doom came when David Cameron, of all people, became leader of the Conservative Party. And, even after that, Gordon Brown could probably have salvaged the brand if he had called a snap election as soon as he became Prime Minister, as polls got really better for Labour then. One can only wildly guess what the UK would have become if Gordzilla had had the baws to take that gamble, and won his own full term on his own mandate. Probably not worse than what it has actually turned into, though, and plausibly better. Don't judge Brown on just the grumpy old ghost he became after losing power, that was not his golden years. He was the last social-democrat in charge, and we would all benefit greatly from a rebirth of true social-democracy and the repudiation of faux-progressive woke social-liberalism that has become the defining trademark of New Model Labour.

Right now, I cannot look my constituents in the eye and tell them that anything has changed. I hope to be able to return to the party in the future, when it again resembles the party I love, putting the needs of the many before the greed of the few.

(Rosie Duffield MP, letter of resignation from the Labour Party, 28 September 2024)

© Pete Townshend, 1971

The greatest bit of advice I ever received was, “No one else knows what they’re doing either”.

(Ricky Gervais)

The Conference season has come and gone again. It's a really odd time of the year, when the punditariat and the metropolitan press corps are shaking with excitement, and running wild in the halls at such exotic places as Manchester, Brighton, Liverpool and Birmingham. Or, for the most dedicated and those with a lot of time on their hands, the Beacon Arts Centre in Greenock. Then you have countless headlines, and countless trees massacred, for the pressies to report on what they have heard, what they think has been said, what they think will be said, and what they have been told in the strictest confidence in the nearest pub's car park. Nobody cares about all that's printed, and nobody bothers to correct it when total bullshit is printed, because the people who are really 'in the know' never say a word and avoid the pressies like a flight of locusts, and everybody knows the Great British Public doesn't give a fucking shit. And we have a two-fold YouGov poll to prove it again this year.

The overwhelming majority of the Great British Public were quite determined, before the series of non-events took place, to not pay the slightest attention to any of it. Oddly, the TikTok Generation were more likely than their elders to be paying attention. What the fuck did they expect? Another of those videos of Owen Jones dressed like a teenager at the beach, and getting his arse skelped again by a pre-pubescent Tory Youth and a patronising Labour MP? Because that's basically all the fun you can expect from those things. That and counting the empty rows at the SNP conference. It is surely not a coincidence that Scots are the least likely of the Three Nations to be willing to pay attention to the whole circus. The feeling doesn't get warmer when YouGov's panel are asked if past experience makes them believe that the shows will be interesting after all. In a word, it doesn't.

Now, has anything interesting ever come out of any Conference in, let's say, the last twenty years? Simply answering 'yes' is not enough, you also have to say very specifically what the interesting bit was. And that does not include Theresa May dancing or Liz Truss ranting about selling pork in China. It may have been funny, though neither aged really well, but it was in no way interesting even by the fanciest definition of the word. Again, the TikTok Generation are the most likely to expect something of interest to happen, though their definition of that is probably the ten seconds on TikTok with the lad glittering Keir Starmer the last time aboot. Again too, Scots are the least expectant, probably because most of the stuff comes from Conferences of English parties, and we have long ceased to expect anything from any of them. We don't even expect anything from our own 'Party Of Independence', for fuck's sake. Now, for people who wouldn't be paying attention to stuff they didn't find interesting, the Great British Public nevertheless had an ex post facto opinion of what happened at the fucking Conferences, or so BMG Research told us.

That's the part Labour HQ will like least. To sum it up, the public think the Conservative conference went rather well and it hasn't changed their opinion of them. But they think the Labour conference was rather bad and it changed their opinion of them for the worse. Since this comes from people who got only second-hand news about the whole circus, you have to wonder where that information came from. It's safe to assume it was neither The Guardian nor The Telegraph, but probably a mix of The Daily Mail and vaguely heard snippets of BBC or Channel 4 news. And I'm not trying to sound elitist here, as I didn't really pay attention myself, and didn't even know about some of the Conferences taking place until I checked the venues on Wokopedia. That's to solve the Greenock riddle for you. My point is that we don't really need the Conferences anyway, only the donors need them for photo-ops with their pet politicians. Otherwise, we see more than enough of this lot in the media every day. And, if I really want to know what they want the public to think they think, I can still look up their web sites. And so can you. It can be fun reading too, occasionally. Especially when they U-turn and fail to update the relevant page for a day or two.

Keir seems cross whenever people dare to question him. That is not only a really weird human attitude, it's also terrible politics.

(Rosie Duffield MP)

© Pete Townshend, 1971

Machiavelli is frequently underrated. He had many qualities. But so did Caligula, not all of them charming.

(Violet Crawley, Downton Abbey, 2019)

The most common expectation about the Conference Season is that all parties will manage to show their best side, and feed a sense of joyous buoyancy among their membership. That and Owen Jones being handed his arse on a platter at every Conference. The latter always works, even after he has shifted his looks from teenager-on-hols to summat of a Hugh Laurie impression, but the former does not. Not that it would when there is only talk of black holes and the loss of the Empire. The parties also hope to see their public image improve, which is definitely off the table when all they offer is chaos and contradiction. It does not inject any sense of optimism into the public's mind, as Savanta found out when asking their panel if 'political parties are currently presenting optimistic or pessimistic outlooks for the UK'.

Only the Scottish subsample were asked about the SNP, and the Welsh subsample about Plaid Cymru, for more relevance. The Great British Public don't feel any party unquestionably oozing optimism, not even Labour, who should be doing just that after their summer landslide. But things are never as dark as they seem to be, not even in the hour just after the dawn, and the public's perspective on New Model Labour seems to be more cautious than deeply pessimistic. This is what you can deduce from Savanta's follow-up question about the New Boss. They asked their panel when, if ever, they think there will be a noticeable improvement in the quality of each of the Realm's most pressing issues. And it's definitely not as bad as you would expect from the otherwise sombre assessments of the government's work.

Only a tiny minority believe nothing will ever get better, and majorities concur with D;Ream's now off-limits hit of yore on all five topics. There is even a sense of pragmatism in these replies, as optimistic majorities are reached only at the five-year event horizon, or the full length of a standard Parliamentary term. Which will save Keir Starmer the bother to stress that manifesto pledges are like puppies, not just for Christmas. Besides, it makes sense and good politics to save some for later, if you anticipate a need to boost your popularity in the second or third year, and not just as soon as the third month. On the flip side, not delivering everything at once can be your escape hatch, the oven-ready excuse to not deliver at all on some manifesto pledges. Because, ye ken, it's been three years since the election and you need to bear with us and contextualise, what we found on arrival was so much worse than we expected and we are so sorry we can't achieve this or that now. The only question then being how long the public will have the patience to lend an ear to the blame game. Savanta asked and found out it won't last longer than a year, if even that.

Every government has always blamed the previous one for all the bad things in life. Sunak blamed Truss, and the people mostly agreed, until they remembered they were pups from the same litter. The Great British Public still found it very or fairly acceptable for New Model Labour to blame the Tories until the end of their first month. It's already more debatable after three months, and will become unacceptable in the summer of 2025. Which is not unreasonable, all things considered. Rachel Reeves cannot even rely on the traditional 'No Money Left' note. Jeremy Hunt seems to not have bothered with it, as it was too painfully obvious already. And it would be very suspicious if one suddenly popped up from behind the same sofa where Rachel found the £22bn black hole, or was it £40bn? Whatever happens now, Britain expects Labour to own it, and quite rightly so. But they will need to dissipate the stench of amateurish improvisation first.  Nothing here that a timely and smart reshuffle can't cure, but just not this one. Or they should address the real most pressing issue, in these Four Nations where we have like one thousand times as many angels-without-wings, that's French for dogs, as men who were assigned-the-wrong-body-at-birth, or summat, the skyrocketing costs of vet care and total inadequacy of pet insurance, that looks more like opportunistic highway robbery. There's more votes in it, mates.

Your promotion of those with no proven political skills and no previous parliamentary experience, but who happen to be related to those close to you, or even each other, is frankly embarrassing.

(Rosie Duffield MP, letter of resignation from the Labour Party, 28 September 2024)

© Pete Townshend, 1971

I am sick and tired of logic. If I could choose between principle and logic, I’d take principle every time.

(Violet Crawley, Downton Abbey, 2015)

The unintended upside of YouGov sitting out voting intentions polling for now, is that they can't afford to let their staff go idle, and thusly have plenty of resources for other lines of polling that they wouldn't even touch in a 'normal' period. I'm not talking about testing your sewing abilities here, which is just as pointless now as it would have been in the run-up to the election, but about their series of polls probing the Great British Public on their feelings towards the five main parties represented in Parliament. The five main English parties, that is, as they left out the SNP. Maybe that was considered too niche to justify a £10k poll. And they made it more relevant by using the exact same set of questions for all parties. They even devoted full articles to their findings except, oddly, to the public's view of the Greens. Let's see what Britain has to say about the Labour Party first, dutifully starting with the standard generic favourability question.

The results say it quite clearly, their is no honeymoon in sight, you could even say there is little love lost between the public and New Model Labour. There are even signs of early-onset buyer's remorse, as a quarter of last July's Labour voters already admit they feel unfavourably to the party they sent into government. The generational divide is not a surprise, as it has pretty much always been there, but is still not a reliable predictor of where future elections may lead us. Unsurprisingly too, Scots have the most unfavourable opinion of Labour. Is it a clear sign of massive buyer's remorse after we voted for a Red Tsunami? Well, you did, I didn't. There is a recipe for disaster in these numbers, especially if you add the results of YouGov's follow-up question. Which they astutely did not phrase as Labour doing well or doing badly on some select issues, but as whether or not the Great British Public think Labour cares for this or that category. With some enlightening results.

There are undoubtedly traces of far-right propaganda here, like Labour caring more for immigrants than for the, subliminally obviously 'British', working class. Could be lifted from Laurence Fox's timeline. This is also evidence that New Model Labour have a really hard task redefining themselves as anything really appealing to a winning coalition of political and cultural tribes within the British electorate. The results we have here also point to a fair deal of confusion in the public's mind, making them prone to contradictions and inconsistencies in their opinion of Labour. There is an odd mix of traits that fit Old Labour, like being the party of trade unions and benefit claimants, and others that almost caricaturally fit New Model Labour, like caring for businesses and rich people. Or you can make it all fall into place nicely, if you take that as defining one of the factions within Labour and then the other. But the most damning finding here is that only a quarter of Brits think that Labour care about 'people like us', while two-thirds think they don't. So what's the point of having them in government?

There are nevertheless some ironic twists in that poll. Like the public thinking that Labour care more about the South of England than about the Midlands and North. My opinion is that they really cared about Southern votes, until the Liberal Democrats proved better at snatching those, but probably not that much about Southern people now. It's also revealing that the people think that Labour care more about the LGBT community than about women. I won't even waste your time arguing that there is no such thing as a 'LGBT community'. I think this basic truth is becoming more and more obvious with time, as more and more LGB personalities and common folk realise the massive toxicity of the extremist T component, and raise their forks in revolt against its establishment-sponsored dominance of the narrative. You can't blame just Labour for that mess, though. The establishment media, starting with the BBC and faux progressive outlets like The Guardian and The Independent are part of the problem too. Sadly, they embolden proponents of gender ideology within Labour, as it is seen as the 'fashionable feel-good' option to cuddle the tiny metropolitan middle-class fringe that indulge in those luxury beliefs. They are obviously not representative of the electorate as a whole, and Labour may very well find that a vote-killing issue at some point in the future.

Your managerial and technocratic approach, and lack of basic politics and political instincts, have come crashing down on us as a party after we worked so hard, promised so much.

(Rosie Duffield MP, letter of resignation from the Labour Party, 28 September 2024)

© Pete Townshend, 1971

My mum’s family came here from Sierra Leone in West Africa in 1966, and my dad’s family came here from Northern France in 1066.

(James Cleverly)

The Conference Season again highlighted one of many similarities between New Model Labour and the Conservatives. This time that the most significant event does not happen at the Conference, but outwith it. Labour had Rosie Duffield's resignation. The Conservatives had The Daily  Mail serialising Unleashed, Boris Johnson's totally fictional memoirs, that look like the ghostwriter agency fucked up the assignments, and Bozo got the one who had been hired to write the reboot of Yes, Prime Minister for Netflix. Then the most worrying Conference plotline is that we're seeing a party drifting to the right, that had already drifted to the right before the election, up to the point they become undistinguishable from Reform UK, just like Man and Pig in Animal Farm. YouGov have submitted their panel to the same array of questioning about the Conservatives as about Labour, and the overall picture is oddly reassuring for Labour. As in, "it's even worse for the Tories". And YouGov have the poll to prove it.

Of course, the Conservatives are more unpopular than Labour, with only one Brit in five liking them. They're not even popular with Reform UK voters or Leave voters, but surely the next leader of the Conservative Party will find a way to fix that, in a William Hague-ish sort of way. Of course, it will not improve their image in the public's eyes and is more likely to offer Labour an unexpected lifeline. One of the Conservatives' problems is that they can't shake off their ancestral status as the party of the privileged. Which YouGov's array of possible categories they are seen as caring for would narrow down to old and middle class. Though the deliciously outdated William Hanson, who is barely older than me in the traditional linear time-space continuum but would have been Violet Crawley's perfect companion, is here to remind you that being 'middle class' is not necessarily something to be proud of. Aye, mates, it's all about tie clips and sneakers.

I'm quite sure that there has been a Conservative leader, some time in the recent past, who has tried to make the party more 'modern', or at least look it. They're still seen as hostile to the young, though it is understandable if, by that, you mean the pink-haired TikTok Generation. But also to trade unions, benefit claimants and immigrants, definitely traits that will be overplayed by the next leader, whoever finally wins. The still alive-and-kicking 'old boys club culture' is still haunting them as they appear quite misogynistic, despite being the only party that ever elected a woman Prime Minister, and the infamous two-child benefit cap has also made them look uncaring for families, not something you would have associated with a right-wing party just a generation ago. Is it just all about the image, then, or about how the image reflects the ideology? Surely the latter, I'd say, and the second half of YouGov's list goes in that direction.

Nobody will be surprised to see the Conservatives coming out of this as the party of the rich Southern business owners. They are also still seen as, to put it bluntly, racist despite being the only party that ever elected a Jewish and an Asian Prime Minister. Though the latter did not come really naturally, did it? There is no way the current variant of the Conservative Party can overturn this kind of negative image, as they're even doing their best right now to make it even worse. Whoever prevails at the end of their ongoing clownshow will probably not last long in office, due to the neverending factionalism, but surely long enough to make the party even nastier than it is now. Then we may also see the unlikely scenario of the centrist One Nation bloc running to the escape pods and founding a new reasonably centre-right party that would directly challenge the Liberal Democrats and Labour all along what was once the Blue Wall. It would be an uphill gamble, as the British electorate has never been kind to breakaway parties, but it could be worth a try, if only to prevent the whole of the British right from sinking into complete madness. 

I understand women because I've got three daughters, a wife, and my two dogs are female.

(Robert Jenrick)

© Pete Townshend, 1971

The Suella gang have got Jenrick by the balls. If he tries to tack to the centre, they’ll say we’ll destroy you.

(Anonymous Conservative source, The Guardian, 6 October 2024)

Let's not forget that the Conservatives also have yet another leadership contest on their hands. Their MPs had already shrunk the contest to four names before the Conference, after eliminating Mel Stride and Priti Patel. Some were soon calling for shortening the ordeal, which would have meant convincing Tom Tugendhat and James Cleverly to give up, as they were supposedly the least likely to survive the last two rounds of MPs' ballots. And then leaving Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch to court the party's membership before the deciding vote. The first poll fielded after the first round of heats, on behalf of Popular Conservatism, had Jenrick on top, but not by much. The second one, from Conservative Home, and the third one, from YouGov, quite naturally said the opposite. YouGov also polled the other head-to-heads with Cleverly and Tugendhat, but I chose to not include them, as they were really unlikely to happen. Besides, Jimmy Dimly and Captain Tom were both predicted to lose against either SpongeBob or Kemi. The fourth poll, again from Conservative Home, kind of puzzled anyone who cared, as it put Cleverly second and on the final ballot, which may have had some influence on later events.

Whatever the plan actually was, the Conservative MPs then managed to deliver two shocking curveballs back to back in the final duet of votes. First they put Jimmy Dimly first by quite a margin, and Captain Tom had to abandon all hope. Then Captain Tom's voters split neatly down the middle between Kemi and Robert, with two more switching from Jimmy to Kemi out of the blue. Whips' orders, anyone? Or was this absolute shocker not a fucking shocker at all after all, because all the whips did was to put the runaway train back on its proper pre-ordained tracks after it came dangerously close to sliding off-piste? Or maybe it was just Captain Tom and his band playing mind games with everyone else, and totally fucking it up because they're not even good at counting, let alone Vulcan 7D-chess. Funnily the Great British Public, when asked, really didn't give a fuck but, if they absolutely had to, would have picked Cleverly. And the last two polls fielded before the axe fell showed that Conservative voters would have chosen him too. And MPs would surely have done the same if some hadn't tried to be too clever by half for their own good. Then the Ghost Of Iain Duncan Smith Past flew over the cuckoo's nest, and the rest will be a footnote in history.

Now that MPs have once again demonstrated their total inability to read the room, even a small one, the final head-to-head is bound to be quite a dilemma for the Tory grassroots. On one hand, they are naturally inclined to support the one most to the right, and that would be Badenoch. Because they all know that Robbie is just faking it to win the election, never has been and never will be genuinely and sincerely Farage-compatible. On the other hand, they also have a massive urge to always pick the white one, the same impulse that made them pick Truss over Sunak. They're not helping themselves either when their main concern is to choose the one who could gain back votes from Reform UK, which is basically narrowing their politics to a zero-sum game within the right and a dead end, and not the one who could gain back votes from the Liberal Democrats and Labour, which is the Tories' only credible path to winning a future election. If they really want, which is by no means a certainty. There is another pending issue if Badenoch wins. That her position about women's rights and 'trans', which is basically no-bullshit common-sensical and shared by many others like true social-democrats, will be easily bundled by the establishment Left with the rest of her more radical discourse as 'far right'. And thusly become inaudible, while the whole political spectrum needs, not just to hear it, but also to listen to it, instead of prioritising the whims and demands of an extremist fringe. That's the one part of her agenda that would make the UK a better place while it's still time.

The thing about Kemi is we know she’s Mrs T. The question is whether she is Mrs Thatcher or Mrs Truss.

(Anonymous Conservative source, The Guardian, 6 October 2024)

© Pete Townshend, 1971

You are quite wonderful the way you see room for improvement wherever you look.

(Violet Crawley, Downton Abbey, 2010)

There is one thing you can't take away from Ed Davey right now. He is definitely living his best life after years being left alone in the cold. He conducted the silliest campaign in living memory, complete will all the cheap-BBC-sitcom props that didn't work, and it fucking worked wonders for the Liberal Democrats. In all fairness to all involved, it probably wouldn't have worked that well if the Conservatives had not preemptively conceded a busload of seats because their heart wasn't in it, and if the 'Gaza vote' had not taken some chunks off the Labour vote across England. At the end of they day, they thusly got the best result ever for the Liberal Democrats and, if I remember correctly, the best result for a Liberal-themed party since Herbert Henry Asquith. This was quite a success for a man who wasn't the party's actual first choice in the first place, and is still loaded with baggage from his days as the Post Office Minister in the Coalition government. But right now, they surely want it to look like Everybody Loves Mister Ed, if you allow me the mixed sitcom reference. Though the dedicated YouGov poll says that, like lots of stuff related to the LibDems, it's actually neither fish nor foal.

A quarter of the Great British Public don't have an opinion of the Liberal Democrats, which is actually a low proportion compared to other polls about them, and those who have one are split down the middle. There is some odd stuff too in the crosstabs, like the TikTok Generation being the ones who like the LibDems the most. Could it be the fallout of Mister Ed doing some really stupid stuff in videos? Or of the party as a whole indulging in a fair amount of student politics when it comes to the proverbial 'culture wars'? Interestingly, Scotland is the only nation that gives the LibDems a net negative rating. But Mister Ed should actually be grateful to us for that, as he would never have got his current job if the good people of East Dunbartonshire had not kicked Jo Swinson out of Parliament. But being liked, or rather not really disliked, doesn't say it all. You also have to consider whom and what the people think the Liberal Democrats actually care for.

And we are back to a familiar pattern here, as the largest group is those who don't have an opinion on anything LibDem. Surely they are more middle class than working class, but are they really? Surely they have an air of Southern woke poshism about them, but are we really sure that's all there is to them? Surely they are more St Mary Mead than Haliford, but where exactly is the centre of gravity of this incarnation of 'progressive liberalism'? The Great British Public don't see it near 'people like us', but more towards the more privileged layers of society, though there is nothing really conclusive in their assessment. We don't really know what the Liberal Democrats stand for, which could be quite a problem for them at future elections. But they can only blame themselves for that, as their attempts to position themselves to the left of New Model Labour still suffer from memories of the Coalition years, which are still fresh for a lot of people, especially among the middle-aged generations. In a way, they should consider themselves lucky they are not in government. This way, they have all the fun and none of the risk.

Sadly, YouGov did not specifically probe their panel about the LibDems' willingness to extend the olive branch of peace, love and understanding to paedophiles... oops, sorry... Minor Attracted Persons. Which is just the latest avatar of the woke metropolitan establishment's penchant for vociferously promoting stuff they will never have to face in their own sheltered lives. All in the name of kindness, diversity and inclusion. Of course, I don't want to reduce the Liberal Democrats to just this controversial issue, but some of their prominent members are quite strong believers in the Articles of Faith of radical wokeism, so you can't avoid bringing it up when trying to understand what the LibDems' agenda really is. We will probably not know in the immediate future, as their best strategy for now is to cosplay Opposition Incarnate, louder and more credible than the discredited Conservatives, and always ready to hold a fumbling Labour to account. No doubt they will take full advantage of their restored third-party status to push this in the coming months.

If you wish to understand things, you must come out from behind your prejudice and listen.

(Violet Crawley, Downton Abbey, 2013)

© Pete Townshend, 1971

What shall we do to be saved in this world? You must look to your moat.

(George Savile, Marquess of Halifax, circa 1685)

Then we have the British branch office of United Russia, now known to the Electoral Commission as Reform UK, after years of being known to Companies House as Reform UK LLC. Their main shareholder Nigel Farage recently bragged he was the most popular politician in the UK, which was a bit of a stretch as he bagged a net rating of -35, which is a massive negative in anyone's book but his. But you have to contextualise, haven't you? And it so happened that Keir Starmer was on -38 and Rishi Sunak on -43 in the same poll. Which did not feature Ed Davey, who would probably have got a Net Zero rating with 60% having no opinion. Now, having established that Nigel was indeed more popular than all other English political leaders, pretty much in the same way that Josef Stalin would have been more popular than Adolf Hitler in Poland on Christmas Eve 1939, YouGov's comprehensive study of Reform UK's appeal shows that they are not seen favourably by a majority of Brits.

The Great British Public's verdict is actually that Reform UK are now the second most unpopular party after the Conservatives, but they are also the most popular with their own voters by a considerable margin. Does Nigel Farage like getting better ratings with his own people than Vladimir Putin, and just slightly below Kim Jong Un? I must also stress that Nigel has an unfair and massive competitive advantage over the others. He, and none of his successive parties either, has ever been in charge of anything, not even the bin collection for a Parish Council in Rutland. So the very stupid component of the British electorate, 4.1 million of them at the last election, can tell you totally candidly that Nigel is clean and unsullied. Wait until they know how he has milked the European Parliament for years while agitating for the demise of the European Union and British Secession. On the flip side of history, the British public are not fully convinced that Nigel really cares for them.

There are some really predictable replies in the first half of YouGov's laundry list of topics, like Reform UK not caring for immigrants, benefit claimants and women. There is also a notable miss about where Reform UK try to position themselves on the class spectrum. They are seen as caring more for the middle class than the working class, despite all the populist rhetoric they deploy to target the socially conservative working class in Labour strongholds. This is also compounded by the Great British Public identifying Reform UK as the party of rich straight white Southerners. I'm not even stretching it, the second half of the laundry list says just that.

But the more damning result is surely that only a quarter of Brits think the Nigelistas care for 'people like us', and half think they don't. Nigel will certainly feel affirmed and validated because this is actually a better result than Labour and the Conservatives, but it also a worse result than the Liberal Democrats. And yet very few think that Ed Davey would be the ideal Prime Minister, and that also applies to Nigel Farage. The public are not buying the old parties' attempts to reboot themselves as something new, but feel it is more like a mash of something old, something borrowed and something blue. Tired old recipes lifted from a crudely conservative agenda. But the public are not really buying Reform UK's talking points either, that they are the ones with the real solutions everybody should agree with. Because their proposals don't sound fresher than the other parties'. The anti-immigration rhetoric is the same as in the 1930s and 1970s, the anti-EU rhetoric is the same as in the 1990s when James Goldsmith's Referendum Party paved the way for Farage's first attempt to make an impression with UKIP. Even Nigel's openly pro-Putin bias sounds like cold broth by now, as he has entertained it for years. Reform UK surely has very strong odds at winning a double-digit share of the popular vote and a double-digit number of seats at the next general, but Nigel should not delude himself into fancying he will be the next Prime Minister. Ed Davey has better odds here.

If you think about it, our entire nation is a castle. The white cliffs of Dover are our castle walls, and the English Channel is our moat. 

(Sam Willis, Castles: Britain’s Fortified History, 2014)

© Pete Townshend, 1971

In my experience, second thoughts are vastly overrated.

(Violet Crawley, Downton Abbey, 2015)

Now I'm moving to the opposite corner of the political compass, to what YouGov found about the Greens, to whom they devoted a poll but oddly no specific article. Despite their very different perspective on life, foxes and women, there are interesting similarities between the Greens and Reform UK. The most obvious one being that both are performative drama queens who never allow basic facts to come in the way of a well-oiled routine. Another one, which they would hate being mentioned, is a similar proclivity for simplistic solutions to complex issues, while mixing it with the totally incompatible tendency to paint very simple issues as complex, because they don't like the common sense solutions that everybody sees clearly. But the Great British Public are a bit blind to the obvious, as the Greens are the most popular of all parties tested by YouGov. Not just 'not unpopular', but really popular with a better net rating than the Liberal Democrats.

The fun part is that Scotland is the nation where the Greenies are the most unpopular, and we're talking really unpopular here. We have had them in government, so we know. Incompetent intolerant entitled arrogant metropolitan middle-class wankers, one and all. The good people of Brighton went through that too, interestingly, then recanted, relapsed and re-recanted. They gave the local Greens leadership of the Council, kicked them out after a disastrous experience of crass incompetence, then gave them a second chance because the local Labour were even more shit, and finally kicked them out again because the second time was worse than the first, and switched en masse back to Labour. That's the Queer Capital Of Britain for you, mates. But the Great British Public are not fooled and quite rightly believe that the Greens care more for the middle class than the working class. I think it is even worse than the poll says, they don't even know what the working class is because it's wholly outwith their own 'lived experience'. Then I totally agree that the Greens care about women, so much so that they want more of them around, including of the new variant with intersectional hairy baws.

The Greens also really care about young people, surely because they are the only ones immature enough to believe in intersectional post-modernist flat-earthism of the Thunbergian kind. Which is surely why they totally support keeping the most young by any chemical means necessary. Now, if you look at the entirety of the replies, the most striking feature is that the largest category is always people who don't know what the Greens care for, which could actually mean they don't really know what the Greens stand for, even less so than with the LibDems. Or maybe the public have a hard time separating the bullshit from the bollocks coming from a party that is the only one so far found guilty of discrimination against its own members because of their political beliefs. At least we know that they don't care about money, if they are ready to spaff so much up the walls on lawsuits they are bound to lose. And, even if they have a better opinion of the Greens than of any other party, the Great British Public still don't believe that the Greenies care for 'people like us'. Probably because they care too much about people totally unlike us, ye ken, the ones with ginger beards, bimbo make-up and a feather in the arse.

The interesting and revealing part of this poll, when you get past the cheerful first impression, is that public opinion does not have that good an image of the Greens when they have to assess them on specific issues. This has to be the price to pay for being so often at odds with basic common sense and common decency. Of course, the Greenies are granting us hilarious developments in Scottish politics too, like Paddy Harvie and Lorna Slater being dragged in front of the ethics watchdog against their will, by members of their own party who have had more than enough of the metropolitan woke posturing that has become the Scottish Greens' sole raison d'être. It will be interesting to see how the Toxic Duo wriggle their way out of the very precise accusations against them, with the added irony that the usually Green-compliant Scottish Pravda quoted the usually denounced-as-far-right Daily Record to support the case against their sweet darlings. Can't wait now for the arguments about Green Sleaze being brave, stunning and progressive.

That’s life, isn’t it? Getting past the unexpected. And perhaps learning from it.

(Violet Crawley, Downton Abbey: A New Era, 2022)

© Pete Townshend, 1971

When you talk like that, I’m tempted to ring for Nanny and have you put to bed with no supper.

(Violet Crawley, Downton Abbey, 2013)

As the last chapter of this series about the Conference Season, I have picked a YouGov poll about climate activism. Which is indeed a seasonal activity, as the middle-class metropolitan woke youth who stage the bulk of these protests are really averse to exposing their butts to the natural cold. YouGov polled this on behalf of Bristol University, which is obviously a nest of Thunbergian activism if the local result of the general election is any evidence. They tested the justifiability, in the public's eyes, of 15 different modes of protest, with a twist. Half the panel were asked these questions straight away, and half after an additional question asking them if they think climate change is an important issue. 82% opined that it is, and you can indeed see a slight shift between the two sets of replies to the main questions. About 2-3% shifting towards finding any means of protest justified. It's actually a smart and honest approach, to assess the impact of a more or less favourable contextualisation on the replies. For my own, and yours, assessment, I have calculated the average of both sets, and they indeed show vastly different attitudes to vastly different modes of protest.

Brits are quite supportive of what you could call traditional ways of protest, but far less tolerant of anything performatively disrupting, that might include infringing on working people's freedom of movement, damage to private property or even reckless endangerment of life. I'm deliberately phrasing all this in a way Just Stop Oil fanatics would label 'far right', because I think that's exactly how the proverbial Man On The Street would describe blocking access to a workplace or tampering with a gas main for show. The two items about Parliament are quite revealing in that respect. No problem with peaceful protest outside, which the Conservatives would have joyfully banned, but a massive No to blocking access to the Mother Of All Parliaments, even if MPs have an over-cautious approach to strong climate legislation. The second half of the questionnaire also shows some interesting red lines. The Great British Public are less supportive of marches in city centres, because that's when you start disrupting working peoples' lives when all they're asking for is a break and some quality time. They're also highly disapproving of the 'throwing food' routine. Which is actually misleadingly labelled, as the stuff used can be anything and not necessarily just food, just anything that can damage for damage's sake.

It's reassuring to see that Brits strongly reject the desecration of 'bourgeois' art. It has been fairly obvious for a long time that only brats who are typically 'bourgeois' themselves, with a class status that always granted them easy access to museums and collections, can consider it a good idea to damage works of art. It's pretty much like the Taliban blowing up the Buddhas of Bamiyan in the name of absolutist ideological purity. The poll's crosstabs show that even the TikTok Generation and the middle-class social grades strongly reject that sort of 'protest'. Sadly, there is one obvious question missing. The one we all expected, about blocking traffic on a busy motorway at peak hour. Maybe they don't have motorways in Bristol, who knows? Or maybe they did ask and did not publish it because they had like, 100% 'no fucking way I will ever tolerate that', or summat. It's quite clear that the public would sympathise with the old lady who missed an appointment with her oncologist and couldn't get another one for six months, the man who missed his father's funeral, or the young lad who missed a job opportunity because he couldn't show up for the interview, and not with the spoilt brats who made it all happen by blocking traffic on the M25. The poll says that a whopping majority of Brits consider climate change an important issue, but we're just not willing to accept activists drawing attention to it 'by any means necessary', especially when their actions are just self-serving performative wankfests.

Does it ever get cold on the moral high ground?

(Violet Crawley, Downton Abbey, 2014)

© Pete Townshend, 1971

The truth is neither here nor there. It’s the look of the thing that matters.

(Violet Crawley, Downton Abbey, 2011)

Something fun has happened to the Labour Party since the election. With seven MPs withdrawn the whip by Keir Starmer for social-democratic wrongthink, and Rosie Duffield leaving her party of thirty years, New Model Labour have now lost eight seats in fifteen weeks. As many as John Major lost in five years during the 1992-1997 term. Which, you surely remember that if you were old enough to care at the time, was construed as meaning certain doom for the Conservatives. But are there seeds of doom already for New Model Labour in current polls? I have already shown you where polls have been taking us, trendwise, so let's try a focused perspective now, snapshotwise. Spoiler alert: it doesn't look good, as even The Hipstershire Gazette's not overly enthusiastic 'inside story' fails to dissipate the feeling that something is definitely wrong with New Model Labour's first hundred days. Even their full list of the government's achievements over these fateful three months does not sound totally convincing, as the public's attention focused on the unpopular ones, as public opinion always does. So Labour shouldn't have been so surprised by their fall in voting intentions, as shown in the weighted average of the last six polls, and its breakdown in the nations and regions.

 

Labour can consider themselves lucky though, as the results of the July general have shown deep changes in voting patterns everywhere, and most significantly in Scotland. Now we have the SNP five points ahead in Scotland, Reform UK as the second party in the English North, Labour and the Conservatives tied in the Midlands, and Reform UK displacing the Liberal Democrats as the third party in the South. Overall, we have Labour leading by a very weak 4.5% over the Conservatives. If you remember my scenarios from just before the election, such a wee lead would have delivered a hung Parliament under the prevailing patterns of those days. It no longer does, mostly because Reform UK are really good at splitting the right-wing vote, thusly enabling Labour to successfully repeal boarders in many marginal seats, despite some strong showings by the Greens here and there.

What this super-poll of the last six polls would deliver is nevertheless quite nightmarish for the New Model Labour government. This projection gives them a 45-seat majority, which is enough so long as they are enjoying smooth cruising. But it would make them vulnerable to the kind of backbench rebellion we have already seen on the two-child benefit cap and the Winter Fuel Allowance. Any division where the Ayes would fall under 299, the combined number of opposition MPs, would put the government in a very awkward situation and possibly defeat them if the oppositions were smart enough, or mischievous enough, to forget their existential differences and vote en bloc against the government. Even without making too much ado about a single projection, Keir Starmer has already conceded that, in the real world, withdrawing rebels the whip is futile and he hasn't done it after the vote on the Winter Fuel Allowance. He knows that his wiggle room and margin of error are both limited, so I guess we can fully expect a sense of inconsistency coming from the government benches, on top of the usual amateurism and improvisation.

The Left, this great knocked-over corpse, where the worms have taken up residence.

(Jean-Paul Sartre, Foreword to Paul Nizan's "Aden-Arabie", 1960)

© Pete Townshend, 1971

If I were to search for logic, I should not look for it among the English upper class.

(Violet Crawley, Downton Abbey, 2013)

You have to be fair to Keir Starmer, though, he has not totally fucked up everything. Yet. We can only welcome that he has reopened a perennial debate, that is summat like the Loch Ness Monster of British politics and almost as old, the one about the future of the House of Lords. Keir hasn't announced anything stunningly progressive, and has no inclination to boldly go where no Prime Minister has gone before. He is only proposing to remove the 92 vestigial hereditary ermines, and that's just dealing with Tony Blair's unfinished business of a generation ago. I would have loved to see him also putting the removal of the Bishops on the table, but that would have met with massive faux outrage and real opposition, probably including from The Palace. Keir being so notoriously and noticeably risk-averse, we won't hear anything so revolutionary from him, even if the Great British public are ready for more. YouGov, with all the idle resources they have from staying away from voting intentions polling, have surveyed that too, with quite enlightening results. Starting with whether Bishops should or should not be kept in the Lords.

The Great British Public clearly want the Bishops out. Even Conservative voters support it and Reform UK voters, true to their disruptive credentials, are more bishopphobic that the average Brit. There are some oddities in the generational divide, mostly because a massive chunk of the TikTok Generation have no opinion, as they always do when there has been no rainbow-clad video about it on social media. But it also quite remarkable that the older generation, supposedly the most conservative, are also the most supportive of removing the Bishops. Scots too massively want them out, though you could argue that is not our problem, as they are sampled exclusively from the ranks of the Church of England. Now, the other vestigial verruca from the feudal times of Magna Carta are the hereditaries, those who have no qualification for any job other than just being born. Of course there are notable exceptions, like Tony Benn. But exceptions are not enough for the Great British Public, who have even less patience for those than for the Bishops.

Two thirds of Brits, including three quarters of Scots, think the hereditaries should go. This is probably a moot point now, as legislation to do just that is already underway. But will New Model Labour go further, and at last fulfil their promise of many generations, and tear down the House? Probably not. If Keir Starmer is so feart of trying any real reform, he has another way to deal with the ermines. Extinction by attrition, refusing to appoint any new ones and letting nature take its inexorable course towards a reduction in numbers. Which of course would take much longer than Keir can expect to stay in power, and he won't do it anyway as the plan is to pack the Lords with his own cronies at every Honours List. After all, Conservative Prime Ministers have been doing it all the time for 14 years, so what could be wrong with Labour considering they're entitled to it now? Well, other than principles, morals and ethics, which are surely not Starmer's main concerns, the fact that the Great British Public want another choice, and that surely should have some weight.

Nothing could be clearer, I think. Keeping the House of Lords 'as is' is the most unpopular option of those who can realistically be put on the table. Just kicking out the hereditaries, the least bold scenario of change, is the second most unpopular. Suck it up and man up, Sir Keir, because the most popular option is the most radical one, transitioning to a fully elected House of Lords. It is even the only option that is supported by a majority of the public. And also where the real problems start. If Starmer wanted to go down that road, which he won't, he would have to specify what this new house would represent, what its constitutional remit would be, how it would be elected, and what it would be called. The latter could even be the most controversial issue of all. We can also count on the usual lunatics to strongly push for proportional representation, which Starmer would surely approve so he would have one less lobby to appease. Or he could play for time and request a comprehensive review of the proverbial 'nest international practice', which would unavoidably conclude that there is none because countries who do have an Upper House of Parliament also have vastly different approaches to it. So I'm not holding my breath for any form of reform, and fully expect that we shall dwell with the House of the Lords for ever.

The real guardians of progress are not the politicians of Westminster, or even at Holyrood, but the energised activism of tens of thousands of people who I predict will refuse meekly to go back into the political shadow.

(Alex Salmond)

© Pete Townshend, 1971

Gone but not forgotten

Dame Margaret Natalie "Maggie" Smith

Ilford, Essex, 28 December 1934 - London, 27 September 2024

Alexander Elliot Anderson Salmond

Linlithgow, Alba, 31 December 1954 - Ohrid, North Macedonia, 12 October 2024

For Scotland, the dream shall never die