Jeremy's Den: Santa Keir Is Comin' To Town

We always think pollsters don’t bring their own prejudices to the polls, they’re somehow magically independent. They’re not. And repeatedly, I mean, we saw it with Brexit, and we’ve had it lots of times. People sort of believe what they want to.

(Ian Hislop, Have I Got News For You?, 8 November 2024)

I believe in the force of superstition. It is one of the greatest forces the world has ever known.

(Hercule Poirot, The Egyptian Tomb, 1993)

It's been Christmas for two months now, almost as long as Non-Binary Awareness Day, so today's soundtrack will be more festive. Provided by Slade, admittedly not in the same league as King Crimson or Roxy Music, but definitely my guilty pleasure from the Glorious Seventies. Most tracks are taken from their first compilation Sladest, with two from their first live album Slade Alive! and another three from later singles. To end on a bang, I will also gift you the official composite video for "Merry XMas Everybody", frankensteined from two appearances on Top Of The Pops, with every furtive glimpse of Jimmy Savile damnatio-memoriaed thanks to crafty editing. Grab your boyz and feel the noize, mates.

And don't forget to click on the images for larger and easier-to-read versions.

First of all, and as a matter of urgency, let's have a look at how the Great British Public feel about the Twelve Days Of Christmas now being the Hundred-And-Twenty Days Of Christmas. Of course, our dear friends at Savanta did poll that one, back in November on the First Day Of New Model Christmas, more commonly known as Black Friday. When it comes to Christmassy thingies, I wouldn't be against Wes Streeting imposing an indefinite UK-wide ban on carol singers, 'Love Actually' and Mariah Carey, just as he has recently done with puberty blockers. That would greatly benefit public health too, wouldn't it? And the whiners wouldn't be from the same corner of the political compass. The Savanta poll shows that there is quite a consensus against starting the Christmas Season in October, and generally little appetite for starting it in November. Except for buying presents, probably to avoid the massive last day queues and panic buying. So the Great British Public agree to confine most of the festive stuff to December, which is quite common-sensical when you think of it, if you are not part of the fanatical wing of wokeism who want to erase Christmas in the name of diversity and inclusion.

There's one item conspicuously missing from Savanta's laundry list, the perennial asinine controversy about "Fairytale Of New York". Looks like we won't have it this year, as it would be a waste of energy since Shane McGowan is no longer here to tell the wokos to fuck off. But Bob Geldof is still alive and somewhat kicking, so we've had an equally asinine fabricated controversy about "Do They Know It's Christmas?", which is a textbook illustration of how the woke hive mind works. For the record, I think it's a crap song, but that's not the point. What is is that all it took was one Z-lister, who wasn't even born when the song was released and is neither oppressed nor marginalised, starting to squeal bullshit about it. And instantly the usual choir of the perma-offended basement wankers started whining the full repertoire of the unoppressed and unmarginalised's fabricated grievances, and even received media coverage. What the fuck have we done to deserve that neverending tsunami of bollocks? Oddly, YouGov did not poll that one, but they addressed another of our most pressing concerns in these festive times. Is it acceptable to get rid of junk as Christmas gifts? Or, in their own terms, to gift second-hand items.

The probe was two-fold, first about the likelihood of people using second-hand stuff as gifts, and then about how they feel about it. As you might expect, the pieces don't really all fit together. Far more people claim they would feel good receiving a second-hand gift than would feel comfortable gifting second-hand stuff, so it obviously doesn't add up. Or maybe it does after all, as I have a strong hunch that a lot of those who say they would feel comfortable receiving second-hand stuff are actually lying. Because they have this feeling that saying that puts them 'on the right side of history'™. Or they think they have to make themselves look virtuous in the eyes of a pollster, which is fucking ridiculous as the lad doesn't give a fucking shit, and will instantly forget who said what anyway. It is also quite revealing that far more people claim they would be comfortable giving second-hand gifts than admit they are likely to actually do it. And that those who do are more likely to try it with a child than with an adult, probably because children are less likely to tell you that your fucking gift is fucking shite. Then I guess that none of this frivolous Christmas polling will change anyone's attitude towards the festivities, or whatever commercialised reboot passes as such. I know it won't change mine, that I don't really give a shit as these mandatory festive days are really not different from any other day of the year, when the most likely news item is that more innocents have been murdered by war criminals we are too cowardly to stand up to.

I do not see, mon ami, I shut my eyes and I think. One must always seek the truth from within.

(Hercule Poirot, The Disappearance Of Mr Davenheim, 1990)

You do not snog with overweight Hungarians. And if you do, you do so out of sight. As a spectacle, it has its limitations.

(Basil Blake, The Body In The Library, 1984)

2024 is not 1914 2.0. There will not be any Christmas Football Truce this year, especially not in Ukraine. Because that's what happens when one of the sides in the fight has given up any pretence of being a civilised nation, and even of ever having been one. But we'll come to that in a wee while. Because YouGov have fielded quite an interesting poll last month, about who the British public consider friends or foes. There's quite an oddity right at the beginning, that we trust Germany more than France. Which is probably not such a good idea right now, as anyone in Ukraine can testify. But that goes hand in hand with that bizarre British custom, that we don't mention "ze wor" with Germans, but we do with the French. Because making fun of the French is the only way the Guilty British Conscience can live with the memories of needlessly slaughtering 1,300 of them at Mers-el-Kebir. The European Union fare quite poorly too, not surprisingly coming from people who have not even begun to reframe their trauma from the Brexit nonsense, and have just elected a party who are too feart of fanatical Euro-sceptics to even admit that a special relationship with the EU can be the UK's lifeline out of managed decline.

Now, if I was the average Brit, I would think twice about the United States these days. They're trustworthy friends and allies only so long as you don't need them, and then the help comes with cable-size strings attached, just ask Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Gone are the days of Lend-Lease, and it will only get worse under the Elon Musk presidency. It is bound to be more like a regression to Cash And Carry, and with heavy price tags except for Israel, who will still get some billions of free hardware every year, no matter how many civilians they murder, all fully subsidised by the American taxpayer. That's Two-Tier Trumperica for ya, mates. It's sad to see that the British political establishment can't go past the myth of a 'special relationship' with the United States, which has been more of an abusive relationship for generations now. But it's far sadder, depressing even, that the only alternative offered by both the far-left and the far-right is submission to Russian interests.

Fortunately, the Great British Public don't fall for the revisionist narrative peddled by the FSB-sponsored Putin-sycophants. Poll after poll, Brits show that they see Russia for what it is, a hostile imperialist power and a major threat that understands only brute force. We are smart enough to not buy the fabrications of Putin's Propagandastaffel, be it the myth of a programmed NATO expansion or the new one about an imaginary gentleman's agreement between Gorbachev and Reagan, that NATO would never expand to the East, which Gorbachev always denied ever existed. And, even if it did, it would have meant fuck all, as only duly signed and ratified treaties have any standing. The only promise the USA ever made was to never set up bases in the former East Germany and, unlike Russia, they have never reneged on it. Recent events also prove that we should be more concerned about China, who have also been infiltrating the British 'elites' to serve their interests. We also have an exceptionally positive view of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, which will surely change when they decide to drop the monarchy and become republics. Which is not a matter of 'if', but of 'when', as they are probably just waiting for Jamaica to show the way. Opinium chose a different approach, surveying their panel about what we have in common with some foreign countries. Which is admittedly quite a foggy notion, but then we know what the public feel with their guts, instead of the more polished view from their brain.

The most surprising result here is Israel's. I genuinely didn't expect that the Great British Public would think that we don't have more in common with Israel than with Turkey. And there goes all your propaganda about our ties with 'the only LGBTQWERTY-friendly democracy in the Middle East', up in flames like the thousands of Palestinian homes you destroyed for revenge. But this is consistent with the YouGov poll, that showed the British public split between considering Israel a friend or a threat. Israel is certainly not a direct threat to us, as Russia and China are, but there is no doubt that their current policies are a threat to peace in the Middle East, and could easily turn into a much wider threat, for example in case of a direct confrontation with Iran, that Russia would unavoidably weaponise against the West. It's also reassuring that the British public see Iran as the country with which we have the least in common. If only that could convince our political establishment to adopt a tougher stance against the mass-murdering woman-hating theocracy, dropping their fear of being called 'islamophobic' by the usual suspects in the intersectional woke left.

Foreigners… Mind you, it’s plain boiled pudding that stumps them.

(Miss Hinchcliffe, A Murder Is Announced, 1985)

Hunts are a bunch of people that like dressing up in silly clothes and charging about the countryside blowing horns and shouting a lot. I have nothing against that. It’s just that they kill a fox at the end of it.

(Midge Cartwright, Dalziel & Pascoe: Cunning Old Fox, 2000)

An issue that we thought we had left behind us twenty years ago has made a flamboyant return to the spotlight. Fox hunting, and then all sorts of hunting. Thanks first and foremost to a petition started by Protect The Wild, for a Hunting Of Mammals Act that would make all variants of hunting with hounds illegal. It specifically targets the loopholes and exemptions in the Hunting Act 2004, that applies only to England and Wales, but they have also turned their attention to Scotland, where a supposedly more protective Act of the Scottish Parliament has also been found deficient and too easily circumventable. This has been supported by a massive influx of video evidence from hunt saboteurs, showing how the legal fiction of 'trail hunting' is turned on its head to become genuine fox hunting as it was before the acts were passed. And also of another concern raised by animal welfare groups, hounds being mistreated their whole life and summarily shot when the hunts deem them 'unfit'. YouGov felt this was the stuff juicy headlines are made of, and devoted a full poll and a lengthy article to it, first probing what kind of hunt the Great British Public deem acceptable.

YouGov's first five items are definitely a blow for the posh toff lobby who consider hunting inbred pheasants with shotguns, fox cubs with hounds, or lions for their head on the lounge's wall, is their unalienable birthright. Brits don't want any of that anymore, and mostly by overwhelming margins. The concept of 'hunting for food' is admittedly more ambiguous, as even the Eleventh Earl of Mar could argue that he had the stag served for dinner. The second half-dozen of YouGov's list also entertain a fair dose of ambiguity. Because only humans with a vested interest in the killings define which species are invasive or overpopulated. And it's not just about six billion rabbits in Australia, or elephants trampling people underfoot in the suburbs of Kenyan cities. If you ask rural Englanders, of course they will say foxes and badgers, whose mass murder does not actually make much sense if you look at it rationally, and before you know they will append stray dogs to the list. Slippery edge of the wedge, which YouGov made even worse by adding the very fuzzy concepts of 'tradition' and 'indigenous populations' to the broth. Does that imply that we should stay silent while the Faroese, who are as indigenous to the islands as Irish in New York, as their ancestors migrated from Norway or Denmark no earlier than the 15th century, go on slaughtering cetaceans because that's the way it was in 1650, even if they ceased needing dolphins or whales for food generations ago, as they have been importing all they need from Denmark at least since the Second World War?

Sadly, the British public find these two variants of hunting acceptable, and you certainly would have a valid point arguing that hunting for food is legitimate in countries that suffer from food insecurity. But we must never forget that food waste, mostly from our very own developed countries, is much larger than what would be needed to ensure food safety worldwide. That food insecurity is often weaponised by all sorts of abusive regimes, and is more often than not a political choice, rather than the immutable natural order of things. And that the key issue about food security is actually food inequality, which is obviously several parsecs outwith the scope of the YouGov poll. Then the very last item about alleged 'tradition' was probably intended as just taking the knee at the altar of intersectional wokeism, but it's obviously the thin edge of the slippery slope. To support my point, this echoes an outrageously hilarious campaign by hunting lobby group Hunting Kind, to have the mass-murderers of innocent animals recognised as an 'ethnic minority' with 'protected beliefs' under the Equality Act 2010. A claim so ludicrous that even The Torygraph had a hard time taking it seriously.

Hunting, can’t do with it. Posh pillocks with a sliver spoon up their jodhpurs chasing a sweet little fox. How would you like to watch your guts being pulled out of you steaming, and eaten by a pack of hounds?

(Andy Dalziel, Dalziel & Pascoe: Cunning Old Fox, 2000)

Those folks are just a big, bad part of the British elite that have kept us lads down for centuries.

(Andy Dalziel, Dalziel & Pascoe: Cunning Old Fox, 2000)

Fortunately, the Great British Public didn't buy this asinine argument, that the vestigial feudal privileges of the inbred posh toffs should grant them protected species status, especially as actually exercising them can only be achieved by openly violating the law. But the YouGov poll also showed that the public's views on who should be allowed to hound down and cull innocent animals are quite a mixed bag and not without contradictions. I have always felt that the 'let us hunt to fund conservation' soundbite is Chernobyl-grade hypocrisy, as it is a very lame excuse to still allow hunting by the privileged few who can afford licences, and will obviously not abide by any restrictions that might come with the licence. It's basically perpetuating recreational hunting under another name. just like the multiple loopholes in current laws already do, Likewise, I definitely will never trust farmers to have an objective view of what defines an 'agricultural pest'. I suspect that everything that moves and eats would qualify, so that should be proscribed too, no matter how many support it.

The positive point is that the Great British Public definitely don't want to see the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable, as John Steed once put it, which is quite an apt summary of the metropolitan parvenus posing as country gentry and hounding down innocent foxes into their neighbour's backyard. Because we know already that we can never trust hunt-crazy landowners to respect the boundaries of their own private lands. They are socially engineered to disregard such boundaries, and consider it part of their basic human rights to invade other people's properties, scare humans, spook flocks and let their hounds disembowel pets. Only a complete loophole-free blanket ban can prevent that from happening. Finally, YouGov asked their panel which animals they consider fair game, and we again have evidence here that logic is not of this world, and specifically not of Great Britain.

So we say that it's bad to hunt animals bred to be hunted, but it's fine to hunt pheasants, that are all bred to be hunted in today's England. We're against hunting with guns and hounds, yet a sizeable part of the public are still open to hunting deer, which every hunt-maniac will tell you can't be murdered without guns and hounds. Then I guess that allowing rabbits and pigeons to be hunted falls under the oven-ready 'hunting for food' excuse. But there would surely be an exemption for the Trafalgar Square pigeons, who are totally unfit for human consumption, as anyone who has ever tried to eat one will tell you. YouGov should also have added swans to the list, just for the fun of seeing how the Great British Public feel about having one for breakfast, as Henry VIII did on the morning of Anne Boleyn's beheading. My overall impression here is that it is reassuring to see the British public massively opposing the murder of innocent protected species in distant lands. but challenging to see our next door neighbours still need a lot of educating and convincing that the same compassion should extend to familiar beasts in our own countryside. All I hope now is that New Model Labour will resist the privileged toffs' lobby and at last enact a complete foolproof and failsafe hunting ban on their side of the Border, One that can't be circumvented as existing legislation routinely is. And that it will inspire the Scottish Government to close any loopholes that still exist in our own legislation, and have been exploited by illegal hunts, many of them crossing The Wall from England.

The uproar about fox hunting being banned is odd. You can still dress up and get drunk and gallop around shouting. You just can't torture foxes to death anymore.

(Ricky Gervais)

Two million is not a big number in the online world. I mean, you can guarantee that, on any given day, at around a quarter to midnight, there’ll be at least two million people sitting in front of their computers with half a bottle of Merlot inside them, who will sign up for absolutely anything.

(Andy Hamilton, Have I Got News For You?, 29 November 2024)

There was a petition making the rounds in November, demanding that Keir Starmer got us a snap election. Which was obviously going nowhere, because it's quite daft to campaign for that just five months after the last one, and it would have been even dafter of Keir to do it. That went actually quite well, though you may have wondered why Elon Muck was pushing it so hard, until somebody hacked it and made the details of the signatories public. Which revealed that most of them weren't British, so that was none of their fucking business, and lots totally fit the profile of Russian bots. That's definitely not the kind of backers you want to have, especially when expunging all the fakes reduced the headcount from two million and change to a few thousand true Brits. And then it vanished from sight quicker than it had caught our attention, leaving Elon Musk once more exposed as a fucking clown with nowhere near the brain he thinks he has. Nevertheless, the current trends of polls show that something wicked this way comes, as the usual two-party game seems ready to transition into a three-party game, with top players of roughly equal strength.

Thank Dog we have The Hipstershire Gazette to explain us why Reform UK is cruising to 20% of the vote at the next election. Potholes. No shit, Sherlock. But, with the very real prospect of the next election delivering a fucking mess of a Parliament, thusly proving that even the failsafe and foolproof first-past-the-post can be gamed into inefficiency, Keir Starmer felt he needed to reset his Premiership. Though you could say he was actually reframing his trauma. But whether it's Five Missions or Six Milestones, the Great British Public don't give a fucking shit and continue bashing Labour in opinion polls, so maybe Sly Keir should try the Seven Veils now. But even that would not be enough, as voting intentions from the last batch of polls show that the Great British Public have already fallen out of love with Labour, and not just in Scotland. Because Hell hath no fury like a voter scorned, and many are we in this state of mind. Bah! Humbug!

But it looks like Keir Starmer enjoys being the most ectoplasmic Prime Minister since Alec Douglas Home, and doubling down on the most stupidly outrageous stuff. When a loony MP stands up in Commons to demand you reinstate blasphemy as a criminal offence, and you don't instantly tell him to fuck off, it only says that you're a fucking weakling who will pander to all the worst loonies. In a word, that you are unfit to be Prime Minister in times of multiple crises. It seems thusly quite odd that Keir Starmer has chosen to open a new front, in the neverending culture wars with Kemi Badenoch, about the working definition of a proper lunch that should be inclusive of sandwiches. Of course this not the first time that food fights have been at the core of the British political debate, but that's probably not the actual point Badenoch wanted to make. It might have been, with all the necessary caveats, that Starmer is as lousy a Prime Minister as the nameless David, and that John McClane would be an excellent President of the United States. Or summat. Then KemiKaze (© John Crace, 2024) may be right, for once, as the last batch of polls foresee quite worrying results if a snap general was held on Boxing Day.

Now, with a real possibility of political chaos because of a hung Parliament, we should also wonder what the real purpose of Parliament is. I know the easy answer, it says so on the tin. They're lawmakers, so they make laws. Which is only part of the answer under the Westminster System, but let's stay on this for now. So Parliament needs to keep making laws, just like bratty kids need to be kept occupied unless they do some mischief, or like sharks need to keep swimming unless they die. Which, for all intents and porpoises, means that you want Parliament to keep reforming, no matter what level of instability perpetual change creates. What if Parliament decided to stop making laws, stop reforming, and instead focused on the minimum required to keep the country running? A caretaker Parliament supporting a caretaker Government whose sole task would be to pass Budgets and ensure day-to-day management. After all, Belgium once lived for 541 days under a caretaker government who did just that. Take care of the day-to-day operation of the government machinery, the day-to-day running of the country. And Belgians loved that. Polls conducted afterwards showed that they thought the country had never been run better than during these 18 months, without grandiose projects for the future, without reforms. So what now? What about trying this here? Wouldn't it be revolutionary? And that would ay least spare us petitions from permawhiners who are never satisfied with any government, whatever it is or does.

Keir Starmer likes a cheese toastie at lunch. Kemi Badenoch likes steak, raw, eaten off the floor.

(Stephen Mangan, Have I Got News For You?, 13 December 2024)

Kemi Badenoch gets steak brought to her at her desk. Which makes her working class, I think.

(Stephen Mangan, Have I Got News For You?, 13 December 2024)

In these Christmassy times, lots of Brits surely think that what we need now is Divine Intervention, to save us from Keir Starmer's dreaded 'tepid bath of managed decline' that awaits us if we let the Civil Service roam free in the corridors of Shitehall... oops, sorry... Whitehall. But More In Common have come up with a much better alternative, Canine Intervention. No shit, mates, they actually fielded a poll about which dog would be the best Prime Minister. Of course, they could have spared themselves the bother and just asked Larry. I guess some sort of Empire nostalgia propelled the wee British Bulldog to the top, but he wouldn't have been my first choice. We definitely need someone more impressive like a Wolfhound, though the Woke Left would surely call that colonialist cultural appropriation from the Irish. Then it's fucking hilarious to see the German Shepherd as the Great British Public's second best choice, knowing how disgracefully we treated them 110 years ago. Always see the bright side of life though, this one would never menshun ze wor. Or bore us with endless rants about 1966. But would be fully entitled to call Olaf Scholz "Putin's lapdog".

In our real-life kennels, the Labour government is now facing a two-pronged assault, from The Enemy Within and The Enemy Without. Ironically, The Enemy Within is the government itself, who have form on fuelling discontent and making the opposition's job for them, with the ever successful mix of broken promises and mixed messages. With an extra topping of manifest dishonesty in the case of compensation for the WASPI women. The Enemy Without is now advancing unmasked as the three-headed Hydra of Nigel Farage, Elon Musk and Vladimir Putin. The plan is quite simple. Elmo finances Nige, which could even be done legally under certain conditions as our current legislation is flawed, propels him to Number 10 the same way he propelled Trump to the White House, and we have another of Vlad The Butcher's bribed agents in charge of a European democracy. Simples. And this is not even a conspiracy theory, as they are doing it openly under our noses, with Elmo also campaigning for the post-Nazi Putin-enablers of AfD in the run-up to the German general election. Sadly, New Model Labour are too cowardly, and too feart of fabricated bad PR, to take on Elmo and Nige head on, as they should, We should surely take this threat to our democracy seriously, as the snapshot of the last six polls already shows Reform UK gaining ground in all corners of The Realm.

I don't know what's worse for Labour here. Is it seeing Reform UK becoming the most significant opposition force in England and Wales even where they don't outvote the Conservatives? Having their back to the wall in Scotland facing an unexpected resurgence of the SNP? Being relegated to third place in the West Midlands and all across the South outwith London? From Keir Starmer's perspective, it may even be none of the above, but being forced to accept a lurch back to the left if he wants to bait the Liberal Democrats into a coalition government. And I'm not even being sarcastic here. Well, just a wee smitch. It is quite telling that the Conservatives don't benefit much from Labour's collapse, gaining back far fewer seats than Labour is predicted to lose. Labour's weaknesses are clearly shown here, with a double-pronged assault from Reform UK and the SNP. That's what you could call "revenge vote", in retaliation to broken promises and abandoned hopes. And it fucking works,

This month, we have also had some youngish New Model Labour MPs campaigning for electoral reform, by which they mean proportional representation, without specifying how exactly it would be enforced. Which is quite daft, as the wet-behind-the-ears newcomers from the Class of '24 would obviously be pushed to the bottom of the lists of candidates if that ever happened, and lose their seats. They even passed it in Commons but, Thank Dog, a '10-minute bill' is just what the name implies. It has a 10-minute lifespan and then disappears into the void, never to be seen ever again. If you want to see what a fucking bad idea proportional representation would be, look at what just happened in France. In the country of my birth, a supposedly foolproof and failsafe two-round majority system totally backfired and delivered a National Assembly pretty similar to what proportional representation would have spawned. Then, because of a political culture of conflict and confrontation very similar to the UK's, very predictable chaos followed. Until the minority government nuked itself, baited by the oppositions into the death trap of a vote of no-confidence it could never win. Have no doubt, the exact same would happen here, as a proportional vote would deliver only a very fragmented Parliament with no path to a sustainable majority, and only the probability of political blackmail by minority parties who failed at the ballot box.

Fancy having to lead a government where some of your MPs want to introduce blasphemy laws and others believe blokes become women if they put on a skirt. I’d throw in the towel in week one.

(Henning Wehn)

There’s something very restful about pigs. The philosophers of the animal kingdom.

(Colonel Melchett, The Body In The Library, 1984)

Survation recently conducted a poll of rural England, on behalf of the Country Land and Business Association, who are probably just as fair and balanced about rural politics as the BBC are about Scotland and drag queens. But never mind, what the poll found, regardless of its interpretation by the sponsor, is still quite interesting. The poll was conducted in the 100 most rural constituencies in England, all across the eight non-London regions. Unfortunately the published data lack one piece of information, the full list of these 100 constituencies, All we know, as the poll does mention how their sample voted on the 4th of July, is that they were more Conservative and Liberal Democrat than the English average, but had roughly the same proportion of Reform UK voters. Which makes the current voting intentions even more revealing, as Reform UK are the main beneficiaries of a collapse of the Labour vote, in these constituencies like pretty much everywhere in England.

The seat projections labelled "Rural England" do not reflect which way Survation's 100 select constituencies went or would go, as we don't know which ones they are. But where the whole 468 seats of non-London England would have gone in July, compared to the full actual results, and would go now, if all had voted the same way as the poll's selection. For better representation I have used my 2024 model, based on the prevailing voting patterns before the election, for the 4 July seat projection, and my 2029 model, based on the prevailing voting patterns after the election, for the current one. The results quite fit with general trends, with Reform UK trebling their number of seats, Labour losing a quarter of theirs, and the Conservatives increasing theirs by only a meagre 5%. The most surprising part of the poll is how these rural constituencies assess the various political parties and their attitudes towards rural life.

I certainly would never have waged even a fiver on the Greens coming out as the party who understand and respect rural communities the most. Didn't the rurals listen to Jeremy Clarkson and how much he hates the Greens? Jeremy being such an expert on rural life, he surely knows best, doesn't he? All irony set aside, this surprisingly positive vision, sharply contrasting with the Greens' more common image as metropolitan middle-class bike-hugging wokes, surely explains how they managed to gain two rural constituencies in North Herefordshire and Waveney Valley, both snatched off the Conservatives. In North Herefordshire, the Greens capitalised on massive concern about pollution of the River Wye, ironically resulting from intensive poultry farming, quite a staple of rural life in that corner of England. In Waveney Valley, they rode the wave of their massive success at the 2023 District Council elections in Mid Suffolk, after a campaign based on opposition to large-scale housing development in rural areas. Which is also quite ironic when you consider the poll's findings about some flagship Labour policies.

Survation's rural panel are strongly in favour of the construction of more homes in rural areas, and you can easily link that to their equally high level of support for a reform of planning laws to stimulate economic growth. I sense a major contradiction here, as the New Model Labour government have made it abundantly clear that more affordable homes means setting aside regulations and restrictions to construction in Green Belt areas. We should probably expect some revival of nimbyism when the construction plans become a reality, unless hopes of an economic boost trump the concerns about preservation of the rural environment. Then there is no surprise in the massive support for cutting taxes, which is widely shared by all Brits so long as you don't mention the unavoidable consequences. Quite predictably too, a substantial majority oppose Labour's reform of the inheritance tax, and actually even the very existence of such a tax. That's a clear reward for Jeremy Clarkson leading the recent tractor protests safely from the back, as he sounds far less convincing and credible when he fronts them and is grilled by the BBC. Despite his shortcomings and hints of bad faith and self-interest, Jeremy was surely seen as the perfect flag-bearer by the anti-tax rurals because, ye ken, who doesn't want to be a millionaire?

In an English village, you turn over a stone, you have no idea what will crawl out.

(Jane Marple, A Murder Is Announced, 1985)

As an older disabled woman with underlying health conditions, I was more likely to die from COVID, but I was just as scared of dying from inequality.

(Liz Carr, Better Off Dead?, 2024)

Another issue has been at the centre of the public's attention recently, assisted dying. Remember that it started in the most bizarre way, with Keir Starmer opining that he wanted to make it legal because some celebrity past her glory days had made him promise. Which gave us the rare and unexpected sight of Starmer genuinely hellbent on keeping his promise, not something that was on anyone's 2024 Bingo Card. The same Starmer who is in a sudden hurry to fast-track something that was not a Manifesto pledge, that wasn't even mentioned in Labour's Manifesto for the 2024 election, not even in passing, not even as something that should be debated, while reneging on all sorts of pledges that Labour campaigned on. He was helped do that by a very opportunistic Private Member's Bill pushed by the ultra-woke MP Kim Leadbeater, taking full advantage of the PMB's status, that means they receive far less scrutiny than regular bills. And that's how Labour came to offer pensioners an easy path to their personal final solution, after sentencing them to freeze by depriving them of their Winter Fuel Allowance. Of course this has been polled, though far less than frivolously futile issues like who should succeed Gary Lineker at Match Of The Day. Opinium did that already in February, on behalf of Dignity In Dying, but oddly waited until late November to disclose the results. Then don't be shocked by what they found, as it was surveyed ten months ago on behalf of an organisation with an obvious vested interest in the debate, and clearly released just before the vote in Commons to influence MPs, first with the level of support for assisted dying.

Honestly, these results look too good to be true. Rarely do you see such a consensus about any issue, cutting across all political affiliations, generations and nations. We always knew there would be differences in opinion based on religious beliefs, but it's hard to believe this is the only truly discriminant variable in an array of fifteen chosen by Opinium, that I have deliberately reduced to only the four that looked like the most significant. It's also difficult to believe that only one religion would be in solid opposition, which prompted one Labour peer to attack the Justice Secretary quite disgracefully, in way that can sadly only validate Elon Musk's claim that the British Establishment Left can't tolerate dissent and free speech. Then, just a few days before the vote in Commons, More In Common polled assisted dying again, on behalf of The Times, with a rather long list of questions that shows that, for once, it is a genuinely complex issue that you can't really encapsulate in just one Yes-or-No question. Though, in the end, you do have to do pretty much just that and test the public's level of support.

More In Common's finding point in the same direction as Opinium's from nine months earlier, though with some changes that can plausibly be linked to the issue being thrown into the spotlight quite soon after the election. Interestingly, support has dropped by 11%, but we shouldn't probably read too much into that as it has not increased the level of opposition. There are just more people sitting on the fence. But More In Common's findings nevertheless look more credible to me that Opinium's, because there are more visible differences in the crosstabs, rather than a feeing of uniformity of thought. More In Common didn't do crosstabs by religion, so we will never know if there were any changes there too. But this is quite a moot point now that the bill has passed its second reading and got sent back into the Commons' procedural vortex, from which it will not emerge until probably April or May next year. But there was a worrying side to the whole process, that More In Common probably sensed too, as they asked their panel if they trusted their MP to make the right decision about assisted dying. The answer was unambiguous. They did not. And I have a hunch it had as much to do with the growing general distrust in politicians as with the specific issue.

And that pretty much sums up my own problem with Kim Leadbeater's bill. It was rushed through Commons to score some Brownie Points with the 'progressive' metropolitan middle-class woketariat, not to 'do the right thing'. It's in marked contrast with what happened in the country of my birth. The last time France legislated about assisted dying, it took them three years of consultation, public debate and scrutiny by parliamentary committees. And now Keir Starmer has made our Parliament reach a decision in three months, with probably no more than three weeks actually spent examining the bill, and a fraction of three days devoted to it in the Chamber proper. In the end, France decided against what Kim Leadbeater would call 'assisted dying', which is more properly called 'assisted suicide' or 'active euthanasia', and legalised only 'passive euthanasia'. Which everybody knew had been practised by GPs and hospitals for decades already, outwith any legal framework and with very few cases ever brought to court, and usually ending with only nominal light sentences.

Stop letting people who do so little for you control so much of your mind, feelings and emotions.

(Will Smith)

Do you know what I should like to see done in this country? I’d like to see every feeble-minded person put out. Don’t let them breed. Finish them off, all the simpletons.

(Alec Legge, Dead Man’s Folly, 2013)

Kim Leadbeater and the supporters of her bill are obviously sincere when they say that the draft includes all necessary restrictions and safeguards. But have they been evaluated by a panel of health professionals? Have they been compared to the infamously proverbial 'best international practice' in the few countries that have already fully legalised assisted dying? No, because there wasn't enough time for that between the first and second readings. And, even if there had been and it had validated the bill, that wouldn't necessarily be reassuring, as we have the precedent of the MAiD legislation in Canada. The first version, in 2016, was just as reasonable and safeguarded as the Leadbeater bill. It was the amended version, in 2021, that opened the slippery slope to massive state-sanctioned eugenics. And a further extension to people with just a mental health condition is proving controversial even by Canada's lax standards. And nothing Leadbeater or Starmer have said is a cast-iron guarantee that nothing of the sort could ever happen here. To try and clarify what the British public are ready to accept, More In Common asked their panel which categories should have access to assisted suicide.

There are clearly some of the proverbial red lines in these replies, as the Great British Public do not think that everybody should be 'eligible', for want of a better term. There is also a first hint of the kind of safeguards the public consider necessary, such as the triple approval by two doctors and a judge. But the replies, as always not devoid of contradictions, also open the door to some sort of 'case by case' assessment, which contradicts the premise that such legislation should rest on general principles, to avoid any possibility of interpretation that might lead to abuse. Nevertheless, the second half of More In Common's extensive list of 'eligible' conditions shows that the public is not ready to accept any kind of assisted suicide legislation, and that are still some remarkably strong taboos. These are related to conditions that could deprive you of the ability to express a clear and uninfluenced wish to end it all, or to conditions that can be dealt with by efficient palliative care, which was sadly not on the table during the very short parliamentary debate. More importantly, anything that approaches 'social eugenics', the seeds of which you can already see in the Canadian legislation, is strongly ruled out.

More In Common then surveyed their panel about the kind of safeguards they want to see enshrined in any future assisted suicide legislation. If you read the text of Kim Leadbeater's Private Member's Bill, or of the very similar bill proposed by Labour peer Charlie Falconer in the House of Lords, it is quite obvious that both fall short of the public's expectations, and by quite a wide margin. Only two of the safeguards supported by the public, the fourth and seventh in the chart, are totally fulfilled in both bills. Another three, the first, third and fifth, are only partially met. Of course, you can argue that independent assessments by two doctors count as 'multiple', but that's probably not what the pollster or their panel had in mind. In both bills, the psychiatric evaluation is left to a prior assessment under provisions of Acts of Parliament the public is probably not aware of, while the poll's intention is obviously a separate assessment conducted as part of the evaluation of eligibility process. Finally, the evidence of absence of pressure is left to one GP's assessment, or should we say 'opinion', or self-declaration, and we know how fallible these can be.

Then, no matter how favourably you reed them, both proposed bills fall short of the public's remaining six safeguards, all of which get massive levels of support. This is clearly a reason to think twice about it, and possibly revisit your earlier point of view. The issue of safeguards will obviously be at the centre of future debates around the bill, as several MPs who voted for it have already announced. Remember that the much-publicised vote actually does not mean anything, especially not that assisted suicide has become legal, other than it has been allowed to proceed to Committee and another vote in the future. That's what second reading means, and no final decision is made until the third reading. Private Member's Bills are notoriously not a priority for Commons' Committees, so it will take a lot of time, certainly well into next year. Moreover, several MPs have stated they voted for the bill only to allow it to proceed, and then amend it with additional safeguards, and they will vote against if these safeguards are not included in the final draft. If Kim Leadbeater refuses common sense amendments for additional safeguards, there are strong odds her bill will be voted down, especially as both Secretaries of State who would be in charge of its enforcement, Shabana Mahmood at Justice and Wes Streeting at Health, have publicly opposed it despite Keir Starmer's demand to not do so, and can be expected to try and rally more No votes if the third reading looks closer than the second. All it would take is 30 MPs changing sides, 9% of the second reading's Ayes, so that's definitely not an unattainable goal.

It is not well, Monsieur, that a human being should die before their time it is come.

(Hercule Poirot, Appointment With Death, 2009)

I just love the idea that MPs were told to vote with their conscience. Can you imagine?

(Ian Hislop, Have I Got News For You?, 29 November 2024)

The key to this, once Keir Starmer had decided that Kim Leadbeater's bill was a more urgent priority than improving mental health care or palliative care, was how MPs felt about it. And also how their constituents felt, which might have influenced many MPs much more than Keir Starmer's posturing and his strong hints that passing the bill was what Number Ten wanted. Opinium polled it back in February, and the public's perspective was much less supportive when asked what they would want their MP to do if assisted dying came to a vote in Commons, than it was on the principle of assisted dying. Which was only an unlikely hypothetical when the poll was fielded, and then became a worrying reality much too hastily after the election.

When Opinium conducted this poll, assisted dying was not on the table, so nobody could know what their MP's conscience told them, as they had never been asked. Even in the last week before the vote, this was still a matter for speculation as very few MPs had come out publicly on one side or the other. But part of the many problems surrounding this vote is that you had to factor in, not just only what it was about, but also where it came from. And that was the first level of red flags, as it did come from the very same 'progressive' circles who have been the most prominent supporters of bourgeois luxury beliefs, or you can call it wokeism for an easy-to-remember label, over the last decade. The second row of red flags was obviously the lack of a proper parliamentary process that is built into Private Member's Bills, not subjected to prior consultation, evaluation in committee or genuine scrutiny before they go to a vote. This is clearly not how such a serious matter should be dealt with and also, quite fittingly, the very point made by the brave and stunning Rosie Duffield in her statement announcing she would vote against the Leadbeater bill. Finally, we were faced with the obvious fact that Keir Starmer, for entirely personal reasons, weighed heavily in favour of the bill despite Labour MPs nominally getting a free vote. More In Common's panel was oddly split on that vote, between those who thought MPs should follow their conscience, and those who thought they should follow their constituents.

That's actually a pretty daft way to reframe the question, as MPs have no way of knowing what their constituents actually think. Unless you ask them in a referendum, an option 36% of Brits support, according to the More In Common poll. But if you did that, it would make the whole Parliamentary process unnecessary, wouldn't it? And therefore make polls about it totally irrelevant, but never mind. Such polling may nevertheless have convinced many MPs to consider all sides of the issue including safeguards, which have to be embedded into any such bill and act as red lines. Alas, recent experience, in a wholly different issue that I will discuss later, has taught us that red lines are easy to shift and made meaningless. Foreign experience, that can hardly be called 'best international practice' in this case, also shows that faulty wording can be used to move the goalposts and abuse the original intent of the bill. Canada instantly springs to mind, and has routinely been mentioned by opponents as the perfect evidence that legislation on assisted dying can easily be turned into some sort of injunction to assisted suicide, usually associated with emotional blackmail about being 'a burden to society'. Then MPs voted on the 29th of November, and it passed. Which might be, as I told you earlier, a non-event that may still backfire at a later stage. There is an interesting element in that vote, which should be something of a warning. Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott and Rosie Duffield, all of whom are clearly to the left of New Model Labour, voted against it. Just saying.

Now, to be totally honest with you, my own attitude towards assisted dying has changed unexpectedly fast, since that debate was reopened in the worst possible way. I started as a strong supporter of assisted dying, and I haven't actually turned around to oppose it. I still believe the law has to change to allow it, I just realised in about two weeks that the Leadbeater bill is definitely not the way to go. Partly because of Liz Carr, whom I absolutely loved when she starred in Silent Witness for eight series, and her eye-opening documentary on BBC One. It had actually been broadcast months before the election, which made it even more valuable as it wasn't a reaction to the Leadbeater bill but a well thought-out position, independent of the political context of the moment. Of course, it was not neutral and was never meant to be, but that was the whole point of it when the narrative was heavily unbalanced towards the other side of the debate. My advice? Just watch it, appreciate Liz's humour and bluntness even when it disturbs you, and judge for yourselves. I'm sure it won't make you change your mind, as it did not fundamentally change mine, but it will make you think twice about the consequences of a seemingly good deed. Which might not be that good after all.

The devil himself dances among us, but we do not see him.

(Hercule Poirot, The Victory Ball, 1991)

The ability of demagogues and autocrats to surprise, to create a new scandal every day, is their superpower. It diminishes attention to the previous day's transgressions and normalizes them. It slowly numbs the senses, including outrage. Values are the only defence. Hold them dear.

(Garry Kasparov)

A month ago already, Ukraine again became the centre of the world's attention, on the day Russia fired an experimental Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile from the shores of the Caspian Sea into the Ukrainian city of Dnipro. In retaliation for Ukraine firing American ATACMS missiles into a munition depot in Briansk Oblast, and British Storm Shadow missiles into a North Korean command centre in Kursk Oblast. Both of which triggered the world's woketariat and German Chancellor Olaf Quisling into a vociferously disapproving meltdown. Because, ye ken, it is 'escalation' only when Ukraine is at last allowed to strike back, and still with restrictions in the fine print at the bottom of the form, but not when Russia starts using untested weapons that have nuclear capability, to scare the shit out of anyone dumb enough to think they would ever use the real thing. To nobody's surprise, The Hipstershire Gazette disgraced themselves again, with a defeatist column aping the worst of Putin's propaganda, the equivalent of which would have put them on the same side as William Joyce in 1939. Sadly this kind of bullshit, typical of the metropolitan middle-class woke echo chamber, does influence public opinion, as shown by the sequence of YouGov's polls, that show a serious loss of confidence in Ukraine's position in the war.

YouGov did not field one of these omnibus pan-European Ukraine polls that had become their trademark in the early days of the war, probably feeling some sort of Ukraine fatigue too. But Ipsos did solicit their British panel for a comprehensive survey of our current attitudes towards the war in Ukraine. To set the scene before going to the heart of the matter, they probed their panel about whom they think has done a good or bad job handling the situation, and what our levels of concern are now on some issues. The West generally are not considered to have done a good job, and our leaders totally deserve it, but Zelenskyy is praised again, and he too deserves it. Clearly there is no reason to pat ourselves in the back, as the whole West has let Ukraine down to some degree. Though none as badly as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who has found his way back to the happy hairy days of his 'Marxist pacifist' youth, when he was a frequent guest to East Germany and met their most high-ranking officials up to Egon Krenz, the last leader of the DDR before the fall of the Berlin Wall. So it was quite easy for him to transition from appeaser to traitor, from Chamberlain to Quisling. But it's also quite a shame that Labour's handling of the war, as bumbling as the rest of their policies, now makes Boris Johnson's tenure look like the Golden Age of British support, seen from Kyiv.

The part about what concerns us most today is also quite revealing. It is reassuring to see that the Great British Public are more concerned about the impact of Russia's criminal war on Ukrainian civilians that on the UK's economy. But, in its own weird way, it's also good to know that one out of six of us are fucking heartless bastards who don't give a fucking shit about the civilians, and that the poll's crosstabs show that it includes one out of five Londoners, one out of four of the TikTok Gen Z and one out of three Reform UK voters. But, quite heartwarmingly, only one out of eleven Scots. Ipsos then asked their panel if Donald Trump's comeback made them feel reassured or concerned, and the verdict is clear. The Great British Public are more concerned, except those who voted for the Putin-enablers at Reform UK. I guess we can fully expect Nigel Farage to express support for Trump's strategy of Ukrainian capitulation. He has to prove he can do better than being an embarrassment on the campaign trail, and is worth every penny of the $100m donation that Elon Musk now denies having ever considered, and that would have been illegal anyway.

We must also not forget that Trump's motives are far from innocent, and are not limited to the ideological choice of a new isolationism, or to a shift of focus to the Pacific and China. There is another dimension to it, with Trump pursuing a personal vendetta against Volodymyr Zelenskyy, because he refused to help him frame Hunter Biden in 2020, with a fabricated fake legal case. Hell hath no fury like an Orange Baboon scorned. Then I guess even Donald Trump will have a hard time talking peace, love and understanding with an imperialist dictator who had a full plan of genocide against Ukraine already before the criminal invasion in 2022. By the way, if you think this is far-fetched, remember that Stalin is only remembered in Ukraine as the man responsible for Holodomor. He also had a plan for the genocide of the Polish elite, and started to enforce it with the Katyn massacre. Putin, still a KGB officer at heart, clearly considers Stalin one of his role models, so nothing is far-fetched and nothing is beyond belief. Because nothing is off-limits for Vlad The Butcher.

The murderer rising in the light killeth the poor and needy. And in the night is as a thief.

(Job 24:14)

This is an evil among all things that are done under the sun, that there is one event unto all. Yea, also the heart of the sons of men is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live, and after that they go to the dead.

(Ecclesiastes 9:3)

One thing is certain. If negotiations are to happen some day about the future of Ukraine, they can't be left to Trump and Putin, without Zelenskyy at the table as Anatol Lieven, a known propagandist of the Putinist Weltanschauung, suggested in a column in Foreign Policy. The idea that some issues are too complex to be entrusted to the poor Ukrainians is as offensively patronising as it is stupid, but is sadly the kind of bullshit Donald Trump could agree to. Which only shows that Trump is the one who should never be trusted with negotiations, not Zelenskyy. We also know that Trump's 'peace in 24 hours' also included forcing Zelenskyy into capitulation so that American businesses are free to pillage Ukraine's natural resources, first of all Elon Musk's firms, which is just one more reason to distrust the USA and strengthen our own support to Ukraine. Especially when Ukraine are proving that they still have the capability to up their game, with a hit squad from their Secret Service roaming free in Moscow, targeting high-ranking Russian war criminals. Ipsos probed the British public's attitude to our support for Ukraine, and we still have a sizeable majority approving it, though we have seen even larger ones in the past.

The results are a bit blurred here as Ipsos asked an umbrella question, mixing humanitarian aid, military aid and sanctions against Russia in one global package. They are also a mixed bag, as support is now falling significantly in some demographics. What we see here is surely in part the result of relentless Russian propaganda, like from the Russian bots allowed by Elon Musk to roam free on Twitter, but also linked to some of our very own politicians endorsing the toxic language of appeasement. On that side you have Jeremy Corbyn, tweeting twice a day about Israel but never mentioning Russia, even when told that silence is complicity. And, more conspicuously, Nigel Farage, always eager to repay his debt to his Russian sponsors. So no one will be surprised that Reform UK voters are the least supportive of all for anything we can do to help Ukraine. There are very similar patterns in Ipsos's follow-up question, about the public's assessment of the level of aid we are offering Ukraine.

There is still a majority approving a level of support at least as high as what we are already doing, and again only Reform UK voters really stand out, with the highest proportion of those who think we are doing too much. But one fifth of the British public thinking that we are doing too much clearly reflects the impact of the populist messaging about 'money better spent at home', which is incredibly short-sighted. Because allowing Russia to win would force us to increase military spending, for our own protection, in the same way Poland already has and the Baltic states are considering. This means increasing it from the current 2.3% of GDP to 4%, or from £56.9bn in the current budget to about £105bn. That would be, each and every year, additional spending equal to sixteen times what we are spending now on aid to Ukraine. This clearly shows that the £3bn a year dedicated to it are indeed money well and wisely spent, and that it would be even wiser to spend even more. Another opportunistic YouGov poll says that a majority of Brits would support an increase of military spending to 3% of GDP, or to a yearly £78bn, even in Scotland. So we could be halfway there without too much backlash, other than from the usual Putin-enabling faux pacifists. But we have another powerful weapon readily available, exhausting the Russian regime and its ability to continue its criminal war of aggression with comprehensive sanctions. Two thirds of Brits support them, even when the economic hardships for ourselves are factored in. Even a plurality of Reform UK voters support them, and I'm quite happy to see that Scotland is the most supportive of the Three Nations.

Of course the combined forces of faux-pacifist appeasers on the left, and bribed genocide-enablers on the right want you to believe that our sanctions against Russia are not working. Which is surely why Vlad The Butcher himself had to speak on Russian TV, to reassure his people that everything is going according to plan, and that they must not panic because he has everything under control. Except the value of the ruble, that is now on the same kind of downward spiral as the German Reichsmark in 2023, which has led to a ban on the purchase of foreign currencies by private citizens. Except inflation, the monthly rate of which is now the same as the yearly rate in the UK, with the price of potatoes, a basic part of the classic Russian diet, up 74% over the last year. Except the defence spending, that will be 40% of the state's budget in 2025. Or, more accurately 20%, with another 20% going to corruption all along the military procurement chain. Except interest rates, that have skyrocketed to such a stratospheric level that whole sectors of the Russian economy are crumbling down because they can no longer afford to borrow, starting with construction, real estate and infrastructures. Putin is taking Russia closer every day to a full-blown closed-circuit war economy, with as little foreign trade as possible except for military purposes, pretty similar to Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Remember what I always said, the effect of sanctions is gradual and cumulative, which is exactly what we are witnessing now with inflation at 21% and the basic interest rate at 23%, levels that are crippling the whole economy and hitting the Russian population hard. That's pretty much the perfect moment for us to increase sanctions and deal the final blow,

When negotiation and compromise fail, then your only course is to destroy your enemy. Before they wake in the morning, have the axe in your hand.

(Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall: Wreckage, 2024)

Thing is, I sort of envy people with a cause. You know, God, socialism, saving trees. Doesn’t matter what it is. Gives them something to do on long winter evenings. Of course, it’s all bollocks really, but they don’t know that, do they?

(Andy Dalziel, Dalziel & Pascoe: The Wood Beyond, 1998)

We have recently been gifted two more Full Scottish polls, one from Survation on behalf of Progress Scotland, and one from Norstat on behalf of The Times. Both surveyed voting intentions for the next Independence referendum and the next Scottish Parliament election, and Survation also polled the next Westminster election. We are now accustomed to Full Scottish delivering contradictory results, even when held in the same timeframe, but this new duet definitely takes the biscuit as the most divergent in living memory. Which raises legitimate questions about their reliability, as they were fielded three weeks apart and it's quite difficult to believe that even the most volatile electorate could change that much in so short a time. The most shocking example is the IndyRef voting intentions. Survation found No leading by 3% and Norstat found Yes leading by 8% three weeks later, while they had found a tie at the end of October. It's impossible to find any recent event that would have triggered such a massive swing, then I guess polls will be polls, and we have to believe them, even when the proverbial pinch of salt becomes a whole barrel. But we have a massive backlog of No-victory polls that the overall trend is evolving very slowly.

On the other hand, the snapshot of the most recent batch of polls has changed considerably, even if the rolling average trend shows some inertia. If I extract only the polls fielded after the Autumn Equinox, four are left in the pot. Two have Yes ahead, one has No ahead and one is a tie, and the weighted average of this quartet say we have a statistically insignificant Yes lead. Or, in common English, a tie. Survation chose to add some spice to the haggis, with a question about five more or less likely options for Scotland's future form of government. But they also added a twist to the spice, as they did not ask their panel if they would support or oppose them, but to rank them from their first preference to their fifth preference, in some sort of constitutional single transferable vote. And you thusly get replies that will probably not make anyone happy in the Scottish political spectrum.

Only a third of Scots chose an independent Scotland in the European Union as their first choice. This a clear warning to the SNP that linking the two is definitely a bad idea. Focus on independence, with no strings attached, and other choices will be made democratically later. The SNP do not have a mandate to instantly apply to rejoin the EU once independence is achieved. Leave that to the people in another referendum. Now, if you consider that the aggregate of first and second preferences determine what the people actually want, it is quite intriguing that the "preferred option" is the status quo, and that some variant of Gordon Brown's DevoMax is slightly more popular than independence. This could offer Keir Starmer an easy way out of the Scottish constitutional debate, if he can convince himself and a majority of Scots that fulfilling The Vow is the magic answer to all our problems. I have a hunch this could actually work, as many polls have already shown that just about a third of Scots are genuinely hard-line imdependentists, and many of the 'soft Yes' could easily be swayed towards a less radical solution. But will Starmer have the political flair to try it? Your guess is as good as mine.

Scotland is not at all that remote. It’s that pink bit about two feet above Potters Bar.

(Jim Hacker, Yes Minister: The Official Visit, 1980)

They put me on a fraud case. I’m off to Glasgow. It’s a very fraudulent place, Glasgow.

(Superintendent Spence, Mrs McGinty’s Dead, 2008)

After years of procrastination, the Scottish Parliament has at last taken a decisive step towards better representation of the people, by unanimously voting to ban 'double jobbing', technically known as 'dual mandate'. This is definitely a smart move, as an opportunistic YouGov poll showed that a massive majority of the public support the ban, and in Scotland more than anywhere else. This practice had already been banned in Northern Ireland and Wales in 2014, so Scotland is now aligned on the proverbial 'best international practice', instead of leaving it to the political parties, who have too often had a very opportunistic and biased approach to this very real issue. This was Stage 3 for this bill, the Scottish Parliament equivalent of the third reading in Commons, so it is now only awaiting Royal Assent to become an Act of the Scottish Parliament and be enforced. It will thusly be in place well ahead of the next Scottish Parliament election, even if some budget fiasco forced John Swinney to call an early election next spring. Which may indeed be a good idea for the SNP, as Holyrood polls have now taken quite a dramatic turn against Labour.

Of course, we are still some parsecs away from the SNP's Golden Years, when Alex Salmond led them to a majority against all the contrary mechanisms embedded in the electoral law. John Swinney, just like Humza Yousaf before him, is actually also doing considerably worse than Nicola Sturgeon at her last election as Lider Maximo. But the increasing fragmentation of the Unionist opposition means that Sloppy John could outperform them all even on the quite mediocre vote shares predicted by the Norstat poll. I will not waste time lamenting the obvious inconsistencies between the last two polls, even if I think that a 6% swing from Labour to the SNP in such a short time totally defies even the most gullible suspension of disbelief. I also seriously doubt that the Scottish electorate would open the door to a return of the Yellow-Green Axis, which is a plausibility under Norstat's findings, knowing the number of huge fuckups we had to endure when it was in charge. Now that the rise of Reform UK makes a big-tent Unionist coalition more unlikely than it ever was, I have to stick to my earlier conclusions. The election results will be closer to what the Survation poll found, and the outcome will be an SNP-Labour deal.

Last month the Scottish Government tabled their budget for 2025-2026, the penultimate or last of the term, depending on whether or not it will open the door to the thin edge of the slope towards an early election. Bear in mind that the 2024-2025 budget includes emergency arrangements, as all Scottish budgets have done since the first one in 2000-2001, to avoid the proverbial government shutdown. So, if MSPs fail to pass a budget by 31 March 2025, we may well have a major political crisis on our hands, but every day operations of the public sector will continue with barely a hiccup. The Scottish Government can still argue that the budget has widespread popular support as it is, to secure the few additional votes they need to pass it. Only the free bus passes for asylum seekers are opposed by a majority, which will probably not convince the government to ditch it, unless the Liberal Democrats demand it in return for their four votes. The weak support for ending the two-child benefit cap is surprising, though we can probably blame that on the evolution of Scottish breeding patterns, that make large families quite a rarity. But it will survive as it is too iconic to consider withdrawing it for even a split second. Even Labour could U-turn on their U-turn on their earlier U-turn and support it, if they're not too dizzy from the multiple spins.

The final question in the Norstat poll shows that there is actually very little popular enthusiasm about this budget, despite solid approval for some of its key provisions, but also very little outright rejection. 25% think it will have a positive effect for themselves and 39% that it will have a positive effect for Scotland as a whole, while 21% and 24% respectively think it will have a negative effect. Now the Scottish Parliament has three more months to unroll the full budgetary process before the non-shutdown-inducing deadline. It will be interesting to see what kind of red lines the Liberal Democrats draw in the sand to at least abstain on it, which would be just enough to pass it on a knife-edge. Or will John Swinney choose to cuddle the Greens? I wouldn't if I were him, as it is bound to be a futile waste of time and energy. We already know that the Greenies have an oven-ready set of red line after red line, and can't be trusted to negotiate anything in good faith and without further unacceptable demands. It's just up to Sloppy John to tell them to fuck off, innit?

I went to a whisky bar in Scotland, and they had a bottle of whisky that is so expensive that they only allowed to buy it if they smash the bottle when it’s empty, because they’re so frightened of counterfeits. Which is what happens in a lot of car parks in Scotland anyway.

(Jack Dee)

The most popular verbs in England are eat, sleep, drink and run. Whereas the most popular verbs in Scotland are booze, fry, inject and scavenge.

(Jimmy Carr, 8 Out Of 10 Cats Does Countdown, 2013)

Since my previous post, we have had eight more by-elections for seats on some Scottish Councils. Before the elections, the Liberal Democrats held one seat, Labour six and the SNP one. After them, the Liberal Democrats now have one seat, Labour six and the SNP one. Partick East-Kelvindale switched from the SNP to Labour and Stirling East from Labour to the SNP, and the other six were held by the incumbent party. So no tsunami of change in our Councils. There's even some unintended comic relief in this sequence of by-elections, as two of the wards are vacant again after just a few days, for the most unbelievably odd reasons, and will be replayed in January. Again, I'm not saying that these by-elections are anything like a predictor of future parliamentary elections, but they are nevertheless quite good indications of the public's mood. Apart from the general stability, the dominant trait here is the surprisingly good results for Reform UK. They bagged 7.3% overall, but 13.5% in the wards where they actually stood. Most remarkably, they reached 14.1% in Glasgow, compared to an average 5.6% in the city's constituencies last July.

This is surely something to watch for all Scottish political parties, and certainly didn't go unnoticed at the London HQs of those who have one. Reform UK bagged an average 7% in Scotland in July, with their best result in Aberdeenshire North and Moray East, on 14.6%, which is not necessarily a reliable predictor of their performance at the next general. Of course its predecessor seat, Banff and Buchan, was the only Scottish constituency that voted to leave the European Union in 2016, 54% to 46%. But the high Reform UK vote was probably much more conclusively the consequence of the local Conservative electorate wanting to punish carpetbagger Douglas Ross for the very inelegant way he pushed incumbent David Duguid aside, from a supposedly safe seat he eventually lost to the SNP by 942 votes. Now, the five Full Scottish Westminster polls we have had since the general election confirm that Reform UK is gaining ground, while Labour is falling and the SNP stagnating.

The voting patterns inherited from the last general election limit the changes in the allocation of seats almost only to to-and-fros between Labour and the SNP. But the situation is far from ideal for the SNP, as Labour won most of their seats with really big margins. To reach just a tie in the number of seats, the SNP need to take back all seats won by Labour on less than 14%. In basic maths, a 7% swing from Labour entirely to the SNP does it, but it gets trickier if the SNP vote is stagnating, as it is in recent polls. That's where Reform UK become the SNP's best allies, if they can snatch enough votes off Labour by rallying all the malcontents, who are already many in Scotland just like in England. And we're seeing just that in some recent Scottish polls, quite similarly to what is happening in the North of England. But, as you might expect, the seat projections that can be deduced from these polls show that the SNP still have a really long way to go to overturn Labour's successes at the last general.

As usual, the projections from my model and Electoral Calculus differ, but go broadly in the same direction. This obviously challenging context has prompted a totally unexpected confession from John Swinney, that he feared all SNP MPs would be wiped out last July. This would have taken us back to 1966, when John was two, the very last general election where the SNP did not bag any seat. John's fear was not as exaggerated as it sounds now, as five out of the nine vestigial SNP seats were held with a margin of less than 5%, and only two on a more comfortable margin of more than 10%. The SNP now face a long and winding road to reconstruction, and John's fate will be decided by the 2026 election for the Scottish Parliament. I'm sure that a clever SNP spad could sell it as some sort of Scotland-only midterms for Keir Starmer, and then use a favourable result as the foundation for wiping out Labour at the 2029 general. There's a lot of hypotheticals in such a scenario, but surely nothing blatantly impossible. Being stuck below a third of the popular vote is obviously not a good position to start from, especially when it goes hand-in-hand with a stubborn determination to not revise or reframe the party's main policies of the last ten years. Which is definitely what any really smart leader would have done, even if he had to face some backlash from the previous dominant clique. But we should never say never, or should we?

In England we have Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat. But Scotland’s most popular delivery service is “send the wee man for chips”.

(Jimmy Carr, 8 Out Of 10 Cats, 2020)

Never trust the Welsh. I had a Welsh nanny. One day she took me to Harrogate and left me there. Very unstable.

(Ariadne Oliver, Cards On The Table, 2006)

The year is ending with a bang, not a whimper, for the Welsh Conservatives. Their leader, the one who had to add a droid identifier to his name because there were already too many Andrews Davieses around, has been forced to resign for being a fucking twat. Which will hopefully not set a precedent, as we would be short on Conservatives pretty quickly. His successor Darren Millar inherits a deeply disastrous situation. The trends of polling for the next Senedd election, the one that will seal Millar's fate as party leader, show the Conservatives relegated to fourth place, from the second place they achieved at the previous election in 2021. There is definitely an air of déjà vu in these trends, with the Plaid Cymru vote stagnating and the Labour vote on a crash-landing trajectory. The sole beneficiary is, as usual, Reform UK, who are now predicted to become the second party in Wales and entertain high hopes of becoming the first.

We have had two Senedd polls in November. One from the hitherto-unknown Beaufort Research for Nation Cymru. Then one from the seasoned YouGov for Barn Cymru. True to form, they delivered different, and summat contradictory, results which nevertheless fit the general picture of a very massive surge for Reform UK, leaving the other parties more or less fighting for the leftovers like hungry street dogs. The two polls were conducted on each other's heels on two consecutive weeks at the end of November, so I opted to try and predict the looks of the next Senedd from their weighted average. I will spare you the full detail of voting intentions and seat projections in each of the hypothetically constructed sixteen new Senedd constituencies this time. You've seen it in all its gory details the last time I discussed Wales, so trust me with just the overall results of the sausage-making this time. Sixteen six-member constituencies do not deliver full proportionality with the national vote shares, which was totally Labour's game-plan when they proposed the reform of the electoral law.

A 96-seat Senedd translates into 95 voting members once the Presiding Officer is chosen, so 48 seats for a majority. A coalition of Labour and Plaid Cymru would achieve that even if the Presiding Officer came from their ranks, but that would be an uncomfortably small majority of either one or three seats. Proportional representation eliminates the risk of by-elections, as any defaulting MS will be automatically replaced by first unelected one on the same party's list in the same constituency. In theory proportional representation also reduces the risk of defections, as it effectively transfers the powers of selection from the local membership to the parties' HQs, who would obviously vet all aspiring candidates to select only the ones most likely to toe the party line, even if it means more mediocre slates in the end. But potential for dissent is nevertheless unlikely to be totally weeded out in a hugely factional party like Labour, even after targeted purges. Keir Starmer learned that in the most practical way already in the first few months of the current Westminster term. So, if the election duplicates what current polls say, it would be wise for Welsh Labour to seek some reinforcements, from either the Liberal Democrats or the Greens. Unless Reform UK wins the election, and all doors to chaos are flung wide open.

Welshmen weren’t born to be right. They were born to be bloody tragic.

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

I think Moby Dick should have a feminist remake and it should be called Moby Fanny.

(Aisling Bea, QI: Oceans, 2017)

At the end of November, we have also had the results of the snap general election in Ireland. At the beginning of December actually, as it took sone days to reach the end of all counts in all constituencies. Ironically, we had the results of a multi-count election under single transferable vote in Ireland faster that the straightforward first-past-the-post counts in the United States. Just saying, mates. Quite remarkably too, Irish polls proved to be more accurate and reliable than English and American polls. Polling errors on the vote shares were within the margin thereof for all parties, so maybe our own pollsters should apply for retraining in Ireland. The polls caught all the major trends, starting with the demise of the Greens and significant losses for Sinn Féin, but also the last-mile reversal of fortunes between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.

My final seat projection was nevertheless quite different from the actual result, despite being based on fairly accurate last-week polling. The 2020 election had delivered results quite close to full proportionality, despite obvious efforts from Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael to game the single transferable vote, with lots of tactical voting for each other on the second preferences. It certainly denied Sinn Féin a number of seats despite coming out first in the popular vote, but their own decision to limit their number of candidates probably had as much impact as it deprived them of a second seat in several constituencies. Again this year they had fewer candidates than either Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael, so it was only natural to project the seats on roughly the same main patterns as those seen in 2020. But it didn't work out quite that way. Whatever tactical voting there was worked quite noticeably in favour of Fianna Fáil, and to a lesser extent Labour and Sinn Féin. But this time it failed Fine Gael and worked against the Greens and Independents. Fianna Fáil thusly finished first in seats by a wider margin than pure proportionality, and Fine Gael ended up third though being second in number of votes.

This definitely did not turn the way incumbent Taoiseach Simon Harris imagined it would. He clearly gambled on getting a personal mandate, but failed quite conspicuously. In the end the combined forces of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are one seat short of a majority, 86 to 87, after they successfully manoeuvred to get one of the Independent TDs elected as Ceann Comhairle. But Fine Gael is clearly the junior partner in that coalition, and Fianna Fáil have every reason to claim the Taoiseach should be one of their own for the whole duration of the next term. The story is not over yet, as another coalition partner is needed to form a government, and it can't be the Greens after voters told them to fuck off and exterminated them, almost literally. Labour and the Social Democrats have already ruled out being part of the coalition government, so the only way out is to attract all or some of the Independents. But we will have to wait until next year for the final chapter now, The only certainty is that the next government will stick to the tsunami of extremist woke madness that has engulfed the Irish political establishment, as they are doubling down on it even when it is massively rejected by the people.

I want it to be a surprise if I know what it is and I like it. If I don’t know what it is, then I definitely don’t want it to be a surprise.

(Aisling Bea, QI: Toys, Tinsel And Turkeys, 2022)

Jeremy's Den

23/12/2024

Santa Keir Is Comin' To Town

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Santa Keir Is Comin' To Town