Jeremy's Den: 2025

I do a lot of reading. About England. About the way it was. And the funny thing is, right, this country, it wasn’t always like this. There wasn’t always kings and queens. Because sometimes, for whatever reason, one of our lot got on top for a while and found themselves in charge. But it never lasted long. Because, you see, when they got there, they’d panic. They’d think, “Hold up, this ain’t me, this ain’t natural, I ain’t no king”. And they took off the crown, and they gave it back.

(Kenneth Noye, The Gold, 2023)

In governing, one must use what works in most cases and abandon what works in only a few cases. Therefore, the sage does not work on his virtue, he works on his laws.

(Han Fei, Han Feizi, circa 230 BC)

This time, let's go to the Dominion of British North America, or the 51st State, to enjoy the work of one of their most brilliant, endearing and iconic sons. Neil Young, with an almost-twofer of Rust Never Sleeps and Live Rust, his landmark albums released in 1979. There are four duplicates between the two, so you will not get the whole of Rust Never Sleeps, as I prioritised the versions from Live Rust. The three songs that were not part of the concert immortalised on the Live Rust DVD are at the top, followed by the whole concert in running order. The CD version of Live Rust has two songs missing, which had been released earlier on Rust Never Sleeps, so I just inserted them in their proper slot. Appended at the tail end is the legendary alternative version of "Hey Hey, My My (Into The Black)" by Neil Young and Devo, with Mark Mothersbaugh singing lead. Believe me, it's a fucking great musical moment, so sit back and enjoy.

Don't forget to click on the images for bigger smarter versions of the charts.

You might have missed the news, as it does not impact Scotland, but the NHS is targeted by Wes Streeting, with a Ten Year Plan. Available in England only. Terms and Conditions apply. At first a consultation was held for six months, and its conclusions heard in April. Then there was a rather subdued Kickoff Event on the last day of the first year since the election, which means it may actually be a reality now, or close to. As with most things with New Model Labour, there is definitely suspicion that the highway to hell may be paved with guns and roses, or summat, as the plan's main goals have already been defined as prioritising shifting the burden of care away from hospitals and "into the community", whatever that means in practice. The most recent example of good intentions going mad is the idea that funding could be linked to ratings by patients, which sounds more like a nosedive into the Black Mirror universe than an extension of TripAdvisor. Of course, someone had to poll this stuff, and Ipsos dutifully did, in partnership with National Voices, summat of a lobby group using "lived experience to strategically influence change". Which definitely sounds like woke jargon, and probably is, but it's the findings of the poll that count, not the ulterior motives. And they're actually quite good for the English NHS.

So the public trust the NHS to give them what they need to manage their health, and to get reliable and appropriate information. What more can you ask? Well, obviously a lot, as Ipsos' opening salvo barely scratches the surface of the abyss of discontent that has hit the NHS over the last ten years, and not just in England. Ipsos actually got a far less rosy picture when they asked their panel to assess how they were treated by the NHS when they actually needed it. A quarter did not feel supported when they faced physical health issues, and almost a third when they faced mental health issues.

Interestingly, women, the elderly and working class people are more likely than average to feel the NHS was not as supportive as they expected, more markedly about mental health concerns. This is of course kind of an omnibus umbrella question, but we can contextualise it with some official statistics. These say that the UK spends 10% of its GDP on health, half of it going to the wages or the workforce, including those who contribute jack shit to public health. About 2 million people require "patient interactions with NHS services", to use the official jargon, every day. That means almost once a month for every person living in the UK, give or take. And half a million per day are unhappy bunnies with the way they are treated. Of course, you can't draw any serious operational conclusions from this rather sketchy view, so Ipsos followed up by probing deeper into the people's feelings, with twenty different items being scrutinised.

Intrinsically the National Health Service is a church. It is the nearest thing to the embodiment of the Good Samaritan that we have in any respect of our public policy.

(Barbara Castle, 1976)

The National Health Service is the closest thing the English have to a religion, with those who practice in it regarding themselves as a priesthood. This makes it quite extraordinarily difficult to reform.

(Nigel Lawson, 1992)

The wording used by Ipsos here shows that they felt a bit dazed and confused about the proper way to survey these issues, resulting in some awkward phrasing. "Yes, definitely" and "No, not at all" are self-explanatory enough to be understood even by someone with the IQ of a Reform MP. But what do we make of "Yes, to some extent"? How do you quantify "some"? The use of a traditional five-step scale would have allowed to separate the fish from the chaff here, to some extent. Better still, the oft-used 0-to-10 scale would have removed any doubt about the true meaning of "some" in that swamp of a thousand nuances. With what Ipso gave us, we can only say that pluralities of patients, though rarely majorities, are "definitely" happy brownies, while more or less significant minorities are "not at all" satisfied with the experience.

There is a worrying item right at the very start, when 44% of patients say they were "to some extent" able to access the care they really needed. That should be a fucking 100% "Yes, definitely", for fuck's sake. And what the fuck does it actually mean? They chopped off your tonsils when you showed up to have your appendix removed? Or did they smell you coming from a country mile away and prescribe aspirin when you were trying to extort oxycodone from them? I am quite sure that both happen a fucking lot more than one-in-two-million cases, the former probably more often due to junior doctors working 36-hour shifts between two days on strike, and both will get you a shit evaluation on HospitalAdvisor. At least we have a majority saying they felt safe, but remember that 7% saying they did not means 140k a day. It doesn't get really better with the next septet of items chosen by Ipsos.

Again, the most significant item is at the tail end. One out of five patients acknowledge there was no need to move them from one service to another, but only a quarter agree there was definitely a plan behind it. So what? Do we shuffle patients around just to keep the corridors looking busy? There are very legitimate reasons to move patients around, like when I broke my ankle. It would have been cretinous to dump me directly into a surgeon's in-box without a full assessment at A&E, and it was all done efficiently and professionally. But what about the 13%, or 260k a day, who think there was no plan at all behind moving them from service to service? Or, possibly worse, about the 36% who express "some extent" of reasonable doubt about why it happened to them? No wonder a lot also voice doubts about the quality of communication. Fortunately, the grades improve about the last seven items.

This time, I have grounds to also question the patients, not just the staff. Do we really need to be involved in the decisions about our care, when we are in the hands of seasoned professionals? Did the surgeon tell me, "Look, mate, you have two options. Either we put metal plates in your ankle to fix it, or we chop off your leg below the knee, which is quicker and cheaper. Which one is it? Heads or tails?" Of course, he fucking didn't and I see no reason why he should have asked, when he had a perfectly valid response that had been used on millions of patients before, with zero risk of failure. I have a deep feeling that the bloke who asks to be consulted on medical decisions, when his only knowledge comes from the internet, falls into the same category as the bloke who defends himself in court. A fucking eejit who should shut the fuck up and let the adults in the ward do their thing. Bear in mind that the number of malpractice cases against the NHS is extraordinarily low, 14,428 in 2024/25, 13,698 of which were settled out of court. Put that against the background of nearly 700 million "patient interactions" a year, about 400 million being regular GP appointments, 140 million outpatient appointments, 25 million inpatient meet-and-greets and 30 million admissions to A&E. You see that the whole system is ultra-safe, probably the safest anywhere in the world, even ambulance-chasing litigation lawyers admit it.

The model of health care as a secular church represents the tradition maintained and carefully tended over the decades by the disciples of Aneurin Bevan. Creating the NHS was seen as an act of social communion, celebrating the fact that all citizens were equal in the sight of a doctor.

(Rudolf Klein, 1995)

That the parties are so coy in speaking about health is mainly down to Nye Bevan. He made the NHS sacred and untouchable. He may have freed the patient from fear of medical bills, but he has locked the politician in perennial dread of change.

(Michal Portillo, The Bevan Legacy, 1998)

During the final reading of the National Health Service Act 1946. Aneurin Bevan summed up his vision by saying that, although not "a devotee of bigness for bigness sake", he would rather "be kept alive in the efficient if cold altruism of a large hospital than expire in a gush of warm sympathy in a small one". There is lot to unpack here, including a very old-time-socialist appetite for state-managed centralisation against locally-managed decentralised structures. It's not so much socialised medicine as a quasi-Soviet-like industrialised medicine, which undoubtedly reflected the mood of the times in Labour's ranks. The choice of Councils as local health authorities was a compromise, as Bevan dismissed them as unfit to run hospitals, and agreed to delegate them some responsibilities probably out of shrewd pragmatism and possibly out of political expediency to appease opposition. Times change, as Wes Streeting is now emphasising a community-based approach to healthcare, and another poll from Savanta showed that the public are in agreement.

The poll showed a strong vote of confidence in GPs to deliver all sorts of healthcare services, rather than hospitals, even for the follow-up on hospital appointments. If you add pharmacists to it, it is clearly an endorsement of a "go local" shift in health policy. This is confirmed by the next question, about what the public feel is now lacking in the delivery of healthcare. A&E waiting times and waiting times for operations are major concerns, but all other items mentioned are within the remit of locally-sourced or community-based healthcare, whatever the fashionable term is now.

It is interesting to see that there is also demand for walk-in services, outwith of A&E, being improved. It is kind of a revival of time-honoured solutions, like basic healthcare being delivered by dispensaries. It was actually part of the nascent progressive movement in Georgian times, long before Nye Bevan was born, starting in deprived working-class neighbourhoods of Manchester. It had wide support in Scotland too back then, as the first free-at-the-point-of-delivery hospital in Edinburgh, several generations before the NHS, was technically a dispensary and still operates today under another name. The public's support for walk-in services and pharmacies is surely also a sign of discontent with the health bureaucracy that is pretty much consubstantial with the ancestral modus operandi of a large-structure-based NHS. What the public wanted to see in Streeting's Ten Year Plan, before it was revealed, also validates reliance on smaller local structures.

There is an interesting plausible consequence to such policies. If you remove some responsibilities from hospitals and transfer them to community-embedded services, you potentially liberate a massive amount of working hours at hospitals, which they can use to improve activities that remain within their remit. I guess Streeting would find that appealing, delivering better service and improving patient satisfaction without injecting shitloads of dosh into a bottomless pit. Maybe that would require some sort of cultural revolution within the current staff, in a good way, but it is surely worth trying. Just as focusing extra funding on decentralised structures within walking distance of the patients totally makes sense from Streeting's predominantly social-liberal point of view. But will the partial rebranding of the English NHS as the digital Neighbourhood Health Service be enough to satisfy everybody? And, more to the point, will it deliver on Streeting's obvious ulterior motive, using an improved NHS as his contribution to the Barrage To Farage?

The NHS is like a theological institution. Its adherents, most of the population of the United Kingdom, believe in it passionately. Like theological belief, belief in the NHS rests on assertions, apparently revealed truth, and woe betide those who try to say otherwise.

(Julia Neuberger, 1999)

The NHS has taken on an iconic status in the eyes of both government and the electorate as politics has become less readily defined by ideology. Few may want to believe in the market or the state any more, or in socialism or capitalism, but most people seem able and willing to believe in the NHS.

(Anna Coote, 2004)

If I was English, as Streeting's plan does not apply to Scotland, I would be worried that his Ten Year Health Plan, already in its "executive summary" version, and even more so in the long-form version, is blighted, to use a word Wes seems to like, with jargonising sentences that leave you wondering what the fuck this is really about. The three "fundamental shifts" announced in it may well fit with the public's expectations, but the devil hides in the details of their implementation, which are far from clear. Ipsos tried to feel the pulse of the public again after Streeting had revealed the full scale of his plan, with a post-mortem poll about thirteen select topics. Or you may call that an outpatient appointment if you don't want to be a fucking party-pooper. Ipsos did not ask if their respondents had actually understood everything in the plan, including the fine print, just how they felt about it. And there is a lot of stuff in there the public support.

One of the amazing things in here is that Wes is actually proposing to create a single patient record, and that it doesn't already exist. This is evidence of the strong proprietary instincts within the health bureaucracy, that can only be detrimental to the patients. Imagine being brought to A&E unconscious in a town you've never been before, and nobody has any clue about pre-existing conditions, allergies and whatnot. Looks fucking bad, doesn't it? The move towards it started twenty years ago, and it is still far from a reality. Obviously a lot of the delay comes from political obfuscation and lobby pressure, leading to procrastination and loss of the sense of urgency. For comparison, a single digital patient record has existed in France since 2011, and moved to an updated web version in 2021. The Frogs are leading not just on high-speed trains, mates. But the good first impression gave way to doubt and "some extent" of dissatisfaction in the second batch of items selected by Ipsos.

Prospective patients are not really convinced by the concept of an AI-led NHS, and anyone can really sympathise with that. Can you imagine your resident doctor going, "we can't give you vegan meals because Grok says it's for snowflakes" or, "we cut you open on the wrong side for the heart transplant because Grok said to always choose the right"? Then there is a huge sense of doubt about Patient Power Payments, that are described in streetingese as an innovative new funding flow in which patients are given a say on whether the full payment for the costs of their care should be released to the provider. What the fuck does that mean? Four In A Hospital Bed? Now that would be fucking real innovation. The final items are not NHS-related, but more like generic health policy. I would have expected stronger support here, as all sound totally common-sensical and self-evident. But doesn't everybody love a triple cheeseburger with a pint of stout? The main issue is whether or not Wes' Plan will improve the way the NHS works, and Ipsos found that Wes has probably not been as convincing as he thought he was.

It is quite odd that much fewer people sense improvement coming than approve the measures that are supposed to deliver it. If I was Health Secretary, I would be worried not just by that, but also by the high proportion of people who think The Plan won't make a fucking difference, just like all the fresh air in the world. Is Wes Streeting doomed to re-enact Much Ado About Nothing, when he fancied himself a triumphant Henry V? The problem may be that it is a ten-year plan, thusly covering the Parliamentary term, the next, and then a bit of the next. This only offers a shitload of opportunities to derail it, by malice or incompetence, or just to score political points. Which is exactly what England should expect if a different government emerges from the next general election. Especially if it's Reform UK bringing in American HMOs to feast on the NHS like allosauri dining on an iguanodon. Then will come the day they miss Streeting. Mark my words.

Those in power are afraid the crisis will expose the reality of NHS under-resourcing and creeping privatisation.

(Neil Faulkner, Mutiny, 20 March 2020)

People are scared of going to the shops or to let their kids out, because witnessing and experiencing crime has become normalised.

(Nigel Farage, 21 July 2025)

A lot has been said recently about crime in the city, which is from a different Neil Young album, especially by the most-platformed citizen-journalist in the UK, Nigel Farage. Which means that, in the true tradition of the inventor of citizen-journalism, Elton Muck, we have been submitted to a steady influx of chemically pure bullshit and extravagant fake news. This wouldn't really matter, because we all know that Farage is a fucking pathological liar, if it did not infect public opinion in a textbook case of the Goebbels Principle. I will not rant again about clickbait-seeking media platforming the Poundshop Powell way too often for our collective sanity, but it is certainly more evidence that shock-headline-seeking media are platforming the Bargain Basement Mosley way too often for our collective sanity. If you can't see it, Survation has conducted a poll that will hopefully open your eyes, starting with how We The People feel about the Garage Sale Trump's favourite soundbite, that Britain has become lawless.

There is some irony in this slogan, as one of Reform's talking points is that our justice system is way too harsh and unfair to the defenders of free speech. Which I would be willing to debate, if their herald of free speech wasn't racist convicted felon Lucy Connolly. Or if Nigel's latest moral high horse wasn't to squeal loudly against protecting kids from zoophile BDSM porn online and blocking further infection of our collective psyche by fascist Russian propaganda. Clearly, Nigel has a two-tier definition of lawlessness, and can be as lenient as a Labour Council dealing with grooming gangs, when the crime is committed by one of his buddies. Sadly the Survation poll shows that the British public is buying Nigel's argument, also peddled by the likes of Robert Jenrick and Sue-Ellen Braverman, that the justice system is failing us and encouraging crime with lenient sentencing.

Nigel is playing it safe here, as debunking his claim would mean proving that allegedly lenient sentencing does not boost crime, and even Robert Jenrick knows that you can't prove a negative. So the media must handle Nigel less leniently, and demand that he proves that harsher sentencing deters crime. They should even dig up crime statistics from the USA, and Nigel couldn't object to that as he takes most of his cues from there. He could thusly explain why the homicide rate is seven times higher in the USA, where half the states still have the death penalty, than in the EU, where no nation has it. Or why Alabama, Texas, Oklahoma and Missouri, the four states which executed the most people in 2024, all have homicide rates higher than the national average. Higher than New York and California, those "woke heavens" Nigel and his US donors hate so much, or Wisconsin, the only state that never had the death penalty. But why would our media let evidence get in the way of juicy headlines?

Don’t believe the stats that show violent crime is going down, says Farage. Just turn the graphs the other way up and use your own data.

(John Crace, The Guardian, 21 July 2025)

I understand that it must be very disappointing for Robert Jenrick that he has been exposed as someone who is all talk and no action, and that I get the job done. I can see that that annoys him greatly.

(Shabana Mahmood MP, 31 March 2025)

The relentless fearmongering messaging about unprecedented levels of crime in the UK boosts the common belief that criminal activities of all sorts are on the rise and out of control. More than half of Brits are convinced that crime is rising, and unfortunately they are right, but fortunately not for the reasons Nigel wants us to believe. The official statistics for England and Wales, the ones on which all of Nigel's narrative probably rests, are quite clear about it. The number of "incidents" has indeed increased by 7%, or about 600k in 2024/25, compared to 2023/24. But the two main factors are cases of fraud, that has increased by 31% or about 1 million, and shoplifting, that has increased by 20% or about 100k. Homicides, firearms incidents, robberies and knife crime have all gone down. Aye, mates, even knife crime, Nigel's favourite exhibit to prove the unavoidable descent of Britain into the wilderness of savagery. All the fault of migrants, of course. But surely the media won't want to shake the public out of its belief that danger is awaiting them at every street corner because every possible offence is out of control, when the number of offences is actually half what it was in 1995 and the third lowest since these statistics were started in 1983.

What makes the public believe that some offences are out of control? Aye, mates, what the media report and devious politicians repeat with a grin. However, if we switch back to the official statistics, most of these fears are total bullshit fuelled by fearmongering and falsification from the right side of the political compass. Homicides have gone down by 6% to what is probably an all-time low of 535 a year. Knife crime has gone down by 1%. Burglary has gone down 3%, including robbery of personal property, the kind the public remember traumatically when it hits them, down 10%. Cybercrime is a mixed bag as fraud has gone up by 31%, but other computer-related offences have gone down by 32%, the most important part being unlawful access to personal information, also one of the public's greatest fears. Domestic abuse has gone down by 4%, but there is a dark stain too as rapes have increased by 6%. If we go looking for the root causes, judicial leniency might be one, as many cases of rapists going free have been reported over the last year. But don't tell Nigel Farage it may also be the promotion of absolutist masculinity, and even violent incel culture, which is a specialty of far-right circles. His feelings would be hurt. Interestingly, the Survation poll also allows a comparison between what is in the official statistics and what the public remember, or think they remember, happened.

Numbers first. The statistics are for England and Wales, so that would be a population of some 62 million in the period they cover. The Crime Survey for England and Wales have identified 9,4 million offences, so about 15% of the population having been victims. The Police forces recorded 6,6 million offences, or 11% of the population. That roughly fits with the Survation poll finding 11% of the public being victims individually and another 4% being co-victims with another person in their household. There is just the mysterious 10% remembering that someone else, but not themselves, was a victim, which might accentuate their feeling of insecurity. The upside is that the public do not misremember, or have ghost memories of stuff that did not happen. But that still does not explain why their assessment of the general situation is so widely and wildly distorted. Maybe that's Midsomer Murders showing Berkshire having a higher murder rate than Colombia and Mexico. Or maybe that's the same infernal couple, the media and Nigel, one exaggerating the threat because sensationalist headlines about berserk teenagers and dismembered corpses are so cool, and the other exaggerating the exaggeration because every minute of fabricated fear brings in one thousand more voters. Will we ever know?

We need fairness and justice. Even in France that’s an objective, surely?

(John Deed, Judge John Deed, 2007)

I’ve always said the human race is broadly divided between angels and trolls. And, believe me, the angels don’t always get the best of it.

(Henry Houseman, Jonathan Creek, 2003)

Now that the Great British Public have established their awareness of the realities of crime, what do they have to say about those who are supposed to tackle it, starting with The Polis? Survation first asked if the public are confident that the police forces have the resources they need to tackle crime. Which is not the right question to ask. The real issue is not whether the boys in blue have everything they need to cleanse our streets, the first concern should be whether or not they use what they have appropriately and in compliance with the needs of public safety. We all know that this is not always the case, and multiple occurrences of police malpractice have been brought to the public's attention in recent years. And I'm not talking police brutality here. More like the deliberate use of police resources to enforce a specific ideological doxa on the whole population, which is indeed the first step down the slippery slope to Big Brother. Anyway, a majority of Brits genuinely think the police need more resources, no matter how they use them, including nicking people for misgendering a non-binary dachshund.

There also is an oven-ready way to deflect from the real issues, blaming the government. Never mind that the police forces are operationally independent from the government, but under the authority of elected Police and Crime Commissioners or elected Mayors. The Home Office has shared operational control only of the Metropolitan Police which, contrary to popular belief, is not the first professional police force established in the UK. The now defunct City of Glasgow Police predated it by 29 years. Now, in the day of age of general discontent, fuelled by politicians and media alike, you won't be surprised that a majority of Brits are not confident that the government is "able to address the issue of crime", as Survation put it. Which is quite a wide-ranging umbrella concept, conveniently shifting the blame for operational failures to the government, who is not responsible for them, but only for defining policies and guidelines. And these, that are sometimes questionable, are definitely not flawed enough to deserve such a level of public distrust.

Now, when you are investigating a crime, or the public's misconceptions about crime and policing, the first question to ask is cui bono? It is common knowledge even in Ireland. And it is definitely one of these questions that have a self-evident answer that only the terminally cretinous fail to see. Of course, it's Nigel Fucking Farage. Because he is right on one thing, we are witnessing and experiencing way too much crime. Just not in real life, but in various headlines in The Sun or The Daily Mail, who have become experienced practitioners of "citizen journalism". That new variant where you have disabled the fact-checking feature because, ye ken, who gives a fuck if it's true, when they have a juicy article to read that will affirm and validate all their fabricated fears and very real prejudice? And we have the final question from the Survation poll to prove it.

So now Nigel is summat like a cross between Robert Jenrick and Bruce Wayne, the superpowered vigilante who will make our streets safe by deporting all foreign thugs, especially the brown ones. Because that's what the public hear when Nigel say "foreign". Never mind that half the foreign inmates in British prisons are from the European Union, and that it rises to two thirds if you add the other Europeans, Australians, New Zealanders and Americans. Never mind that, if we did that, everybody would send us back all the British criminals in their care. Never mind that Nigel is actually exceptionally lenient towards some brands of crime, from tax fraud to violations of the Hunting Act 2004, provided they are committed by some of his posh donors. Never mind that Nigel and his motley crew consider a convicted racist who called for murder and arson a political prisoner victimised by the Thought Police. More than a quarter of the Realm's adult population, summat like 12-15 million, give or take, want Nigel to be their white knight in shining armour. Fucking twats, one and all, and especially Nigel himself.

The great thing about arson: equal opportunity crime. Any moron can light a fire.

(Ronnie Brooks, Law And Order UK, 2010)

It’s hard to think of an occasion when the Tory party has been in greater difficulty. Council seats that we had held with huge majorities suddenly flipped to Reform. So it’s very hard to pretend that the position is anything other than bad at the moment.

(Jacob Rees-Mogg, Dispatches, 26 June 2025)

Jeremy Corbyn has detailed his goals, the foundations of the still unnamed new party that could end up being called The Left, in a column for The Islington Gazette. Jezza is not responsible for the headline, as the Guardian staff write them, but conjuring "transformative politics" is a massive red flag, as I couldn't help reading it as "performative". The column itself didn't make it better as it consists mostly of recriminations against New New Labour, a lot of which are actually well deserved, and some very fuzzy principles. Obviously I fully agree with some of them, like public ownership of utilities, the wealth tax or stopping arms sales to Israel. But I instantly get suspicious at the mention of "welfare, not warfare", that totally stinks of very passé slogans from the 1930s and 1980s, when the 2020s require that we fund both welfare and warfare. Or we might just invite the Russian Reich to colonise us right away. Jezza may be an honourable man, though some would surely disagree with that, but what he wrote didn't lift any of my objections to an outfit that is solely designed to "break Labour's back", thusly paving the way for a New Model British Union of Fascists government, if the current trends of voting intentions, with Reform rising again, hold until the next general.

Then came the unavoidable, which you may remember I predicted two articles ago, as soon as pollsters started tentatively polling the Corbyn Party. Owen Jones has joined the herd and is promoting them on his socials. Which was as predictable as a freshly-groomed golden retriever rolling in the hugest pool of mud in the woods, so I take absolutely no pride in being right. The fun part is that the new party is tentatively called The Left, the literal translation of the German Die Linke. Which happens to be the name of the heir and successor to the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands. the ruling party of Soviet-occupied East Germany, where Olaf Scholz, Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn were honoured guests in the early 1980s. No wonder they are sticking to the strategy of the Communist Party of Germany in 1932, bashing the social-democrats rather than fighting the fascists. Because they care more about their own sanctimonious ideological purity that about the fate of the working class in a new political order redrawn by the Putinist plutocrats in Reform UK. The current snapshot of votes and seats is the best result for Reform UK since the 2024 election, and the worst for Labour and the Conservatives. It is a fucking nightmare except for the Liberal Democrats and the SNP, who are still doing pretty well, which is just one of many oddities resulting from the reboot of English fascism.

The seat projections in the nations and regions of the Realm are just as depressing as you expected them to be. Again. Sadly, people have conveniently forgotten that the "independent Left", or the Gaza candidates, have already proven themselves the useful idiots of the right at the 2024 election. The most obvious case is Chingford and Woodford Green, where the atrocious Iain Duncan Smith held his seat thanks to an ex-Labour independent who had had her ego bruised by deselection. Then Leicester East, the sole Conservative gain last year, in a seat that had been Labour since 1945 except for a brief interlude during Thatcher's second term. And also all the seats Labour held or gained on a bat's whisker because of "independent" candidates, where the sitting MPs now have a massive target painted on their arse, ready for the Gallowayian-Corbynista alliance offering the seats to Reform UK. Bethnal Green and Stepney, Birmingham Hodge Hill, Birmingham Yardley, Blaenau Gwent, Bradford West, Bridgend, Burton and Uttoxeter, Ilford North, Newport East, Pendle and Clitheroe, Peterborough, Pontypridd, Redditch, Ribble Valley, Rochdale, Stoke-on-Trent South, to name just those closest to the cliff's edge. The detailed predicted headcount says it is actually worse than that. A fucking lot worse.

This plainly depressing snapshot, after a brief moment when Reform UK was losing ground, is based on the last five polls, conducted between 3 and 11 August with a super-sample of 10,404. Notwithstanding, there is still one joyous perspective in there. The Rump Conservative Party ending up fifth GB-wide, significantly overtaken by even the SNP. The massive irony being that they would hold three times as many seats is the once Rust Red English North than in the once Blue Leafy South. There is also an odd thing happening to pollsters and pundits, like the over-hyped John Curtice again given space in The Scottish Pravda. They always focus on seats Labour could lose, though Curtice cautiously mentions only the two most obvious ones, but never even hint at those the Corbyn Party could lose. Adnan Hussain in Blackburn and Zarah Sultana in Coventry South are definitely closer to the out door than to remaining a presence, Zeppelinian pun fully intended. Iqbal Mohamed in Dewsbury and Batley is also not far from the danger zone, and guess what? The ones breathing down their necks are Reform UK, illustrating how splitting the vote could come back and bite the Corbynista in the arse.

I think we’ve moved to an increasingly presidential system, and that means you need to put forward somebody who can win votes on a large scale. Nigel seems more able to do that than the Conservative Party at the moment.

(Jacob Rees-Mogg, Dispatches, 26 June 2025)

All coalitions are feasible, at the end of the day. I mean, who’d have thought we’d have formed a coalition with the Liberal Party? So, yeah…

(Iain Duncan Smith, Dispatches, 26 June 2025)

Now we've had our dose of depressing stuff, but where do we go from here? Well, bear with me for a wee while before we come to this. First, let me tell you 'bout a story now, a tale of glory and power. Or summat. We all know how many MPs each party bagged at the last election, or at least have a rough idea. Though you would be amazed by how many don't have a fucking scoobie, or just don't give a fucking shit. But you do, or you wouldn't be reading this. Then let's explore another avenue here. Is the "how many" the most important part of the process, or is it the basic "how"? You surely have no idea where this is leading, yet. But if we go back to 2017, it will get much clearer. I sorted all constituencies by the share of the popular vote their chosen MP got, in 5%-wide increments from less than 30%, which first-past-the-post does allow if there are enough ready to lose their deposit in a given constituency, to more than 50%, which is definitely unquestionable legitimacy.

This is limited to the 631 seats of Scotland, Wales and England minus the Speaker. And you can see the obvious conclusion. 469 MPs out of 631 were elected with an outright majority of the popular vote, or 74%. 85% of Labour MPs and 77% of Conservative MPs cleared that hurdle. So, despite all the criticism against first-past-the-post, it worked pretty well, as we were still mostly in a binary choice between two dominant parties. The numbers just say that both of these parties, and the whole House of Commons, had a clear democratic legitimacy despite the flaws in the electoral law. But cracks were already showing where the competition was more open and diverse. Only two Scottish MPs bagged a majority, John Lamont and Ian Murray. If we cross from the Paleozoic to the Mesozoic, the glory days of the dinosaurs, or from 2017 to 2019, significant changes are already visible.

This time, the proportion of MPs bagging an outright majority fell to 66%. The Conservatives maintained the same proportion as in 2017, 77%, but Labour's share fell massively, from 85% to 59%. Their overall number of MPs fell by just about a quarter, but the number of those getting a majority fell by almost half. The Liberal Democrats and the SNP went in the opposite direction, with 55% and 21% respectively bagging a majority, when only one Liberal Democrat and none from the SNP had managed it in 2017. Nevertheless, the millennia-old first-past-the-post still retained some semblance of legitimacy, as nobody could know if that election was just an outlier or a harbinger of the shape of things to come. Then the 2024 election showed where we were going, definitely not in the direction many expected. The widening of the political offer, coupled with the lack of residual appetite for the two major English parties, meant that only an abysmal 15% of all MPs got a majority this time, a totally unprecedented upset in an election of many.

A quick comparison between the 2019 and 2024 charts shows the incredible extent of the tectonic shift, which spared no one. Only one out of 121 Conservative MPs cleared the hurdle, run-of-the-mill backbencher Bob Blackman in Harrow East. It is quite revealing that none of the Rump Tory grandees who survived the election achieved it, another sign of the intense impulse of rejection the electorate felt for them. But Labour aren't in a really better situation, with only 17% of their 2024 intake getting a majority of the popular vote. A lot of their former sinkholes have been demoted to lower performance ratings by the concerted and organised assault from the "true Left", which is bound to repeat itself at the next general, plausibly with even more devastating results. Has the electoral system lost its legitimacy? Possibly. Should we restore it by switching to proportional representation? Fuck no, it would only make things worse with hung Parliaments ad perpetuum, and majorities hanging by a thread on the whims of fringe extremists. Maybe, just maybe, the system would heal itself if politicians stopped being lying bastards. Simples. Any thought, Keir Starmer?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying this is an aspiration for us. It’s not. I know, in the instinct of the Tory party, they will reach for power at every single given occasion.

(Iain Duncan Smith, Dispatches, 26 June 2025)

I’ve always hated proportional representation, partly because its strongest supporters tend to be the kind of muesli-eating sandal-wearers who have never had a correct opinion in their lives.

(Robert Colvile)

So now we have stipulated that first-past-the-post is just a wee smitch flawed and does not really work as designed when more than three parties compete for our votes. Where do we go from here? We still have the whiny squealy voice at the back calling for proportional representation, on the grounds that it delivers Parliaments and governments that reflect what the people really want. Which is of course total bollocks. Just look at what happens in Germany, the poster country of PR and coalitions. During coalition negotiations in dark backrooms, all parties involved either water down or drop parts of their manifestos, so the only thing that always comes out of it is that the people get stuff they did not vote for. Stuff they voted to oppose, actually, because that's how coalitions work. A bit of this, a bit of that, and concessions that make all campaign pledges irrelevant. Backroom democracy is not democracy. Just as government infighting is not sound government either. Just look at Germany, it's happening again right now. PR is the obviously worst way to solve a democratic crisis, though it can be less bad than you thought, as a simulation of our 2024 election on PR shows.

A single UK-wide list would not work for obvious reasons, so I have tested two different options. Separate national lists for England, Scotland and Wales. Or national lists for Scotland and Wales, and nine regional lists for England. The differences between the two are minute, as all main forces got enough votes to bag seats in all English regions, so you see just the effect of the highest averages method on smaller batches of seats. We do have a feasible and credible government coalition too, with Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens. That or a minority Lab-Lib government, which could probably have worked better than one including the Loonies. According to current polls, a PR-generated House of Commons after the 2029 general would look quite different. Don't bother with the math, I did it for you, There is no majority, even if the Conservatives followed the template of the German conservative parties of all nuances in 1933, and propelled the New Model British Union of Fascists to power. The combined forces of the Left, from the Greens to Independents, would outnumber them, being thusly able to block any legislation and bring Parliament to a grinding halt. A totally ungovernable UK, with no option but an instant snap general, that would probably deliver the same results. Still up for PR now, mates?

Of course, there are other options that are neither FPTP nor PR. All have been conveniently ignored by the 'progressive' PR-fixated camp, but new perspectives are starting to emerge. Without anybody soliciting her opinion, The Islington Gazette have again wheeled out resident Starmerista Polly Toynbee to not make the case for proportional representation, as she does every three months without anyone still bothering to listen, but instead share with us her newfound crush on alternative voting. Which is fine by me, as long as we have two genuine rounds, one or two weeks apart, and not the instant runoff previously used in English Mayoral elections. A reasonable gap between the two rounds allows the parties to discuss cross-endorsements and coalition agreements, all in plain sight before voters cast the deciding votes. Include the provision that only the top two candidates at the first round can proceed to the second round, and you have an ironclad certainty that all MPs will be elected with a majority of the popular vote. If the votes are very unevenly split, as was the case in the UK in 2024, it is highly likely that we would avoid the French fuckups of 2022 and 2024, when a majority system failed to deliver a majority, but only because the three main competing forces were of very similar strength. Why shouldn't we try it, as an incremental improvement over FPTP, which even Reform UK are supporting now that they have found out it's the only way they could bag a majority on less that a third of the popular vote?

Our outdated first-past-the-post electoral system is not fit for purpose and we will campaign with anyone and everyone to change this election system.

(Nigel Farage, 5 July 2024)

Starmer is the kind of guy who’d watch someone choke to death because the polls said Reform voters think the Heimlich manoeuvre sounds both German and French.

(Sara Gibbs)

Is Prime Minister the loneliest job in the UK? Surely not if you are owned by a dog, and I guess lighthouse keeper at Muckle Flugga was worse. But Keir Starmer surely feels it is, especially when so many things tend to glide out of his control and polls take a turn for the worse again. The truth is that Starmer never was a really popular man, more of the pub bore than the pub clown. The public saw him favourably for about a year after his accession to Labour Leader, then his unfavourables outnumbered his favourables for pretty much the next two years. It took Boris Johnson's pathetic downfall, Liz Truss, and a few months of Rishi Sunak's dismal leadership on top to bring back a more positive vision of Starmer. Even so, he only managed to get a roughly even split of positives and negatives until his popularity briefly surged after the 2024 general. Then, as we all know, his ratings fell quite soon and quite quickly, and have remained pretty bad ever since. And we have the polls to prove it, as shown by just those fielded from July 2024 to the present day.

If it can be any solace for Starmer, the official Leader of His Majesty's Loyal Opposition, Kenny Whatshisname... naw, just kidding... the Right Honourable Kemi Badenoch MP, doesn't have better positives. Hers are worse, actually. What saves her from Mariana Trench net ratings is that, nine months after her election as leader of what little remains of the Conservative Party, lots of people still haven't made an opinion of her. That's probably the worse situation for a Leader of the Opposition, who is supposed to leave a strong footprint in the Realm's collective psyche. But Kemi hasn't. Probably because the media have accustomed us to treat The Third Man as the real leader of the opposition, the bloke nobody has ever seen holding a surgery in Clacton, because his time is better spent in TV studios in London, where he is in high demand. But having lots of people still unsure about her doesn't make Kami look better in the polls, as shown by the sequence of those conducted since November last year.

The odd situation were are finding ourselves in now, when the LOTTO is not seen as the LOTTO, and the perceived LOTTO is the bloke who came out of the election joint sixth with the DUP and Corbyn's lot, had led pollsters to change their approach of the ancestral Preferred Prime Minister polling. A three-way PPM has replaced the traditional two-way PPM. Of course, the Turquoise Trumplet ended up third in votes, but that's the first time in recorded history the media have used that as a benchmark. Even when he bagged almost as many votes as UKIP in 2015, nobody ever pushed him centre stage the way he has been last year. Ab immemorabili, the number of seats had always determined the pecking order, so Ed Davey should be The Third Man. But we know why the media moved the goalposts, even if Mister Ed can be as good a circus act as the Bargain Bin Mosley. So we're stuck with a flawed manipulated three-way PPM, just to prove us that a big slice of the British public are dumb enough to fall for a millionaire FSB agent.

Clearly, we don't want Kemi Badenoch at Number Ten. Farage's ratings are pretty stable, while Starmer's are fluctuating, probably depending on how many million voters he has pissed off the day just before the poll. Interestingly, Starmer is also the only one to get a better PPM rating than his party's voting intentions in almost all polls. But this is quite a quicksand of support, as some of it comes from LibDem and Green voters. Just those who can promptly disown Starmer if he does something in opposition to their values and principles, that are more often than not more to the left than those of the average Labour voter of 2024. A lot of Farage success obviously comes from the totally fake persona he has fabricated for himself, or the media have fabricated for him, The Man Of The People. Of course, everybody with two connected brain cells knows that Farage as The Man Of The People is as credible as Eddie Izzard playing Anna Karenina, and that the British public have fallen into a massive trap. But does the sensible left have enough time to dissolve the myth in reality before the next general, when the loopy left have a vested interest in keeping Reform UK very visible, to support their narrative that they are the only antidote against fascism?

We don’t always go for the best or the brightest. We elect the guy we’d most like to have a beer with. I certainly wouldn’t pick my airline pilot that way, or my accountant, or my doctor.

(Alan Shore, Boston Legal, 2008)

The people don’t see this as a temple of service and love. They see it more as a place of pretty unsightly self-gratification, the carpets sticky with the forgotten fantasies of vainglorious old Members past. This Parliament is our national shrine to wanking.

(Cleaver Greene, Rake, 2018)

Now, we all know that MPs are evil creatures, worse than cats, and shameless grifters living off expenses and extravagant salaries. And we know that how, may I ask? Aye, because Nigel Farage said so, thanks to his internationally recognised expertise on the subject. Surely the bloke who grifted £2m in expenses off the European Parliament, and was fined for accepting £205k in freebies, is a world-class expert on grifting. Of course, our MPs have never done nothing to deserve that, except perhaps getting salary hikes above the level of those granted to private sector workers every year except 2021. Of course, it has improved over time. When MPs first got paid by the state in 1911, their salary was six times the average wage. Today, it's only three times, but not because MPs have ever shown some restraint, but because workers' action has pushed private sector wages significantly up at several key moments since. Anyway, whatever efforts MPs may have made over time have been to no avail, as the public is as likely to see them seeking just personal gain as five years ago, when YouGov started tracking it.

The irony is that the creation of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, in the wake of the expenses scandal of fifteen years ago, has not really improved the public image of MPs. In some way, it have even made it worse, as their first operational advice was to increase MPs' salaries by more than 10% in one go, which was implemented in 2015. Aligning subsequent wage hikes on the public sector may not have been the genius idea it looked to be, as 80% of the UK's workforce are in the private sector jobs, and are routinely treated far less favourably than in the public sector. This is accentuated by what some pundits have dubbed "the representation gap", MPs being a very distorted image of society. In 1945. a quarter of MPs were working class, which was already quite low in comparison to the general population of the day. Today it's 7%, when the working class social grades account for 34% of the population. So, to nobody's surprise, the British public overwhelmingly consider their MPs to be out of touch.

It's not even about not knowing the price of a pint of milk, which is probably no longer a point of reference anyway, as monthly broadband subscription may be the new pint of milk. It's more about MPs not having the fuckiest scoobie what their constituents really think, unless someone has polled it. Which YouGov does, by the way, from really serious issues that are bound to be debated in Parliament to totally frivolous ones that have at least some comic relief value. The core paradox of democracy is that most people probably expect their MP to know more about sausage rolls than about online casinos. About the price of sausage rolls, at least, as a substitute to the pint of milk of the post-rationing years. Or maybe we should ask a Select Committee to give us a working definition of the strawberry sandwich, and tell us if the same rate of VAT as Jaffa Cakes applies. Behind the feeling that MPs are out of touch, you also have another requirement, that should be obvious. The people need and expect their MP to be a good constituency MP, to care about their local area as YouGov phrases it in their tracker. Sadly, MPs fail that test too.

It's not just about being born and bred locally. Theresa May, who was born in Eastbourne and raised in a village near Oxford, had a reputation for being an excellent constituency MP for Maidenhead, a town she had never set foot in before being parachuted there at the 1997 election. Conversely Mhairi Black, who was born and raised in Paisley, that she later represented for nine years, earned a reputation among her SNP colleagues as a dilettante who was appointed Deputy Leader of the Parliamentary Group only to make sure she would bother to show up for her day job. In 2024, after both had stood down, the SNP lost Black's seat to Labour on a bigger swing than the Scottish national average, while the Conservatives lost May's seat to the Liberal Democrats on a smaller swing than the English South East's average. Just saying. Because being an efficient and devoted constituency MP is the least the people are entitled to expect from any person they elect. Being one can even buy you forgiveness for being a lousy Prime Minister. Party loyalty will only get you so far if you are just a media-savvy poseur, as it can shift quite brutally and unexpectedly. Got the message, Nigel?

We have got to motivate the lazy slobs in this country to get off their fat lazy asses and go to work. Let’s get our country back on track.

(Denny Crane, Boston Legal, 2005)

Labour’s loopy Left have bravely broken free of Starmer’s stultification to bring us a political party that is easily the funniest thing since the anti-Brexit centrists Change UK.

(Sebastian Murphy, The Daily Express, 30 July 2025)

Our old fiend Jeremy Corbyn has just found a new moral high horse to ride, the defence of allotments against predatory cigar-smoking capitalists unleashed by Angela Rayner. And he even chose The Torygraph, of all places, to seed the first sows of this unexpected agriculture war. Never mind that the National Allotment Society basically told all parties to hold their fire as no lethal damage has been done, why would Jezza miss another opportunity to dump shit in Starmer's back garden? It is just odd to see him resorting to the same stunts as Nigel Farage, stoking faux outrage and moral panic through disinformation. Its is probably not a coincidence that it follows a new poll that sent Corbyn zealots in the amateur psephosphere squealing because it found that Reform UK voters prefer Corbyn to Starmer. I guess we would have seen unquestioning triumphantly gleeful we-told-you-so headlines instead, if the poll had found that Reform voters love Starmer. In the meanwhile, BMG Research also tried to assess the true strength and nuisance potential of the Corbyn Party, polling two scenarios as part of their most recent voting intentions poll.

The results are far worse, from a loony Left perspective, than those of previous polls including the Corbyn Party. There is an interesting novelty too, that Corbyn would snatch as many prospective votes off Reform as off Labour. Which is surely why the well-groomed 'progressive' media and Shitweasel never mentioned that poll, as this is just the kind of awkward situation they are in complete denial about. And, even so, they reach just 5% of the popular vote, their worst result in any of the alternative-reality polls we have seen so far. BMG Research added some yet unpolled information on top of that, testing the public's true feelings towards the Corbyn Party. Let's just say that what they found does not look good. For Corbyn, that is. Don't just consider the raw numbers, which may look good at first glance, but the whole chain until people have to state a voting intention.

Look at that, mates, and let it sink in. 28% of Brits think we need a Loopy Left Party, 20% say they would consider voting for them, but are probably lying as the actual voting intention is not even 6%, and that is the lowest retention rate of any party in all recent polls. It is far worse than even the British Union Of Fascists Reboot, and that is some fucking message, innit? It's like I don't really hate you, I don't care what you do, so long as it's nowhere near any corridor of power. Even the TikTok Generation tell them just that. Pity points for the effort, but no fucking votes, no fucking way. We don't know yet what the new party will be called, so BMG Research called it "Your Party", as in their website that looks like summat a 15yr-old would have made in 1995. But they can't use that one, as it is already copyrighted by a Japanese party that was anything but radically leftist. "The Left" has also been mentioned, thought they could opt for Socialist Unity Party of Great Britain instead, as a more direct reference to the source of their inspiration. That would look cool at the door of the next free Billy Bragg concert paid for by the Russian Embassy.

We are not fighting for crumbs. We are fighting for real change, and we are never, ever going away.

(Jeremy Corbyn, The Guardian, 29 July 2025)

In politics, you go with your gut, what feels good. You don't blink. You don't think. You don't hesitate. You hesitate, your enemies think you're weak.

(Denny Crane, Boston Legal, 2008)

We have a new Full Scottish too, conducted by YouGov on behalf of Scottish Elections Study for their SCOOP Monitor. The weird part is that YouGov conducted the poll in the third week of June, but released the full results only in the last week of July. So these old news are in fact new news. Of course, it can be worse. YouGov, again, and Opinium have just released the results of two polls they conducted thirteen months ago. Why did they even bother after all this time? Anyway, that poll is the most recent Full Scottish we have, so is still worth our attention. But don't hold your breath, it's pretty much All Quiet On The Holyrood Front. No tsunami of change in voting intentions triggering an earthquake in seat predictions, compared to earlier polls conducted this year. We still have the SNP in damage control, Labour in slow recovery and Reform UK massively gaining from the Conservatives. And, if you want to avoid more juvenile chaos in government, a reasoned adult coalition of the SNP and Labour as the only option.

Now the SNP are unequivocally rejecting the idea that the next Holyrood election will be a de facto independence referendum, which we all remember was SNP policy not song long ago. But when the polls show Unionist parties like 15% ahead, this is certainly the safest road not taken. They nevertheless intend to campaign again on "Both Votes SNP", seeing how well it has worked... in 2011, and has failed every time since. You can't game the system all the time, can you? Instead of trying different and contradictory election strategies, the SNP should focus again on the prize, and on Independence as a separate fight from any election, Holyrood or Westminster. Because the total vote share for the nominally pro-Independence parties was 34% at the 2024 general, is 41% in YouGov's latest Holyrood poll, but Indyref voting intentions are a statistical tie, as the updated trendlines show even with an unfavourable YouGov poll that shows No 4% ahead. Obviously, relying on political feralism is not the way to secure Independence, and surely even John Swinney knows that even when he is publicly peddling that very strategy.

So now is the time for my unpopular opinion of the day, that the SNP's independence strategy is really shite. First of all, it is totally delusional to expect we could strongarm Keir Starmer to accept a second Independence referendum if the SNP won 65 seats next year. Because it won't happen. And, even if it did, Starmer would still feel entitled to tell us to fuck off. Secondly, if a referendum did happen, there is absolutely no certainty we would win it. The YouGov poll, which The Scottish Pravda conveniently never mentioned, says 40% Yes vs 44% No, or 47.6 to 52.4 in real money. Even if we take the more favourable vision of the last six polls, three of which had Yes ahead, it is still too close to call. the weighted average says 50.7% Yes to 49.3% No, a statistical tie. It is even a wee smitch flawed, as removing the undecideds from the count is the same as assuming they would eventually vote the same way as the rest of the respondents. But how could we possibly know? How can we be sure there isn't a Shy No factor among those who say they haven't made up their mind? Thirdly, even if we assume that the polls are right, how do we account for the massive negative mudslinging campaign that would unavoidably happen in the run-up to the referendum and wreck our chances? To put it bluntly, we fucking don't.

We’re winners. That’s our culture. We declare victory even if we lose. That’s who we are.

(Denny Crane, Boston Legal, 2008)

I think sometimes we need to take a step back, and just remember we have no greater right to be here than any other animal.

(David Attenborough)

Did you know that shale gas has been drilled in the United Kingdom for 150 years already? The technology now known as fracking, the main effects of which are earthquakes in areas that never had one in recorded history, and lethally polluting underground water reserves when capitalist greed has already transitioned rivers into open-air sewers, was first used in the UK in 1965. The last recorded wells were drilled in 2013 in the Bowland Basin in Lancashire, and kept running until February 2022. Literally days before the Russian Reich invaded Ukraine, and the ensuing energy crisis revived interest in domestic production, even the most environmentally-unfriendly and economically-unsafe one. There is now some lobbying afoot to lift the ban on fracking in England, reinstated by Rishi Sunak after Liz Truss had lifted it, from Nigel Farage and some American company that is already drilling for earthquakes on the other side of The Mighty Atlantic. To enlighten their readership about the issue, Politico asked Merlin Strategy, a newcomer to this game as their first published poll is only four months old, to survey the Great British Public's stance on fracking. Beginning with an array of descriptors of fracking, that the respondents had to file as true or false.

Interestingly, there are several cross-checking questions in there, more than you usually see in polls. But they did not uncover major inconsistencies. Aye, we do think fracking is both not safe and dangerous, not cheap and expensive, not green and bad for the environment. The only contradiction is when we consider it both reliable and unproven, but with really tight results that aren't conclusive either way. It is nevertheless a rather negative image, which makes the results of the umbrella question all the more surprising, as a solid plurality support fracking. Even the TikTok Generation conclusively support it, and only Green voters oppose it. Scotland stands out though, as the only nation where opposition dominates, true to the Salmond-era policy that stopped fracking via a moratorium, not an outright ban that would have risked being overturned in court as this happened several years before the UK government banned the practice, and smart use of planning laws.

Will the rebirth of fracking become an issue in the next general election campaign? Probably not if all players act rationally, as the only rationale for it would be continuously high energy prices, which are bound to go down as tensions on the international markets are eased, and renewables cover more and more of our needs. But Politico has seen the tell-tale signs that it will. Surely we should never underestimate Nigel Farage's thirst for divisive culture wars, which this can very easily become if he plays it as summat like "English patriotic common sense" vs "punitive woke environmentalism", or whatever. This is certainly the kind of hill the Mosley Reboot is ready to die on, to repay his wealthy donors in the business establishment for their efforts. But why would any reason-driven business invest in fracking in Lancashire, when it is far easier to just import liquified natural gas from the United States, who uncoincidentally produce it by fracking? Or from Russia, if you really want to reward all of Nigel's election-rigging donors. More importantly, why would any profit-minded business even try and revive a controversial venture, when the only predictable outcome is being buried under very costly and time-consuming group litigation lawsuits even before one drop is extracted? Risk-averse companies would never do that, even if a Reform government came to power, which is definitely not a done deal, and lifted the ban, which they would probably lack the baws to do, as they are more bark then bite.

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorises it and a moral code that glorifies it.

(Frédéric Bastiat)

In an arena where cut-throat is good, where a take-no-prisoners, eat-your-young mentality prevails, it might be nice to include virtues more noble than unilateralism and tough guy bravado. Maybe the bullying days are over.

(Jerry Espenson, Boston Legal, 2008)

One of the most persistent pillars of delusion in British foreign policy is the alleged "special relationship" with the United States of America. We even had Michael Sheen make a fucking bromance flick about it, for fuck's sake. But did it ever really exist beyond VJ-Day? The signs were there as early as Suez. Seventy fucking years ago. That's when the USA told us, "it's a man's man's man's world, mates, and we just chopped off your balls, sorry but not sorry". The only "special" thing about that relationship is that it was, and is, dominance and submission, and we always submitted. Even tiny signs of rebellion against the Orange Baboon's clearly demented shenanigans were followed by us falling back into our place, like in any abusive relationship, and Trump's one-man-show at Turnberry was only the last straw of humiliation. More In Common (MIC) fielded a poll about various aspects of British policy during the Orange Baboon's golf holidays, including the relationship. Ironically, the older generations, who were there for Suez, no longer believe in it, but the TikTok Generation definitely need educating. Just like our government, methinks.

Or was Turnberry a turning point? You might think so when Keir Starmer did the unthinkable, followed in Emmanuel Macron's footsteps, and announced the UK will recognise the State of Palestine hand in hand with France. Literally the minute after he came back from Scotland, but only after he had been assured that the USA would not object. Or because of it, more likely. So it's pretty much being free as a dog on the leash, just a longer leash. But still a limited one, as the US State Department, their equivalent of the Foreign Office, instantly went off message and criticised the decision as "a slap in the face" for the victims of the 7 October pogrom, thusly mirroring Israel's hissy fit at the announcement. Maybe Keir shouldn't have taken Trump at his word, then. YouGov of course speed-polled it, and found that the British public is split about this decision. Unsurprisingly, Jeremy Corbyn criticised it, because he and his clique don't want any condition imposed on Hamas. There is an interesting subplot in another question from the MIC poll. They submitted a select list of twelve countries to their panel, definitely not chosen randomly, to be rated as an ally or an enemy of the UK. And the USA fared quite badly.

It is fucking hilarious that the USA end up with the fewer positives, and also the lowest net rating, of all the countries the British public consider allies. Even the European Union and Ukraine have better results. There could be many reasons for that, all linked to the Orange Baboon, as there still was some semblance of trust under the Biden administration, and it has tanked since January. Could be that we don't want to be told what to do, as we haven't "taken back control" from the legendary "unelected bureaucrats" in Brussels to hand it over to the very real elected plutocrats in Washington. Or it could simply be up close and personal, that the Orange Baboon dementia-aggravated arrogance and bullying are too repugnant to not taint our overall image of the Thirteen Colonies. I guess we can also count on a basic instinct of self-preservation here, prompting us to tell the Orange Baboon to fuck the fuck off when he embarks on a crusade to try and rig our elections in favour of the Putinist far-right.

The one who cuts taxes the most, the one who gives you the lowest energy prices, the one who keeps you out of wars tends to win.

(Donald Trump, 27 July 2025)

One of the great strengths of this nation is our ability to keep a cool head, and that is how I govern.

(Keir Starmer, 3 April 2025)

We know it's a wild world out there, and it's hard to get by just upon a smile. But is there any hope of deliverance from the darkness that surrounds us? Clearly none if our government keep entertaining the delusion that the United States of America are a strong ally and a reliable friend, when the Orange Baboon has made it clear that they are none of the above. It's depressing to see Keir Starmer and David Lammy still hypnotised and anesthetised by a crassly illiterate foaming-at-the-mouth egomaniac with dementia and a worse taste in interior design than Del Boy. The question now is no longer whether or not the United States are a threat of the same magnitude as the Russian Reich, because we know they are beyond reasonable doubt, but in which way the threat can materialise. The MIC poll shows that the British public are aware of the kind of threats we are facing, though we have a distorted view of how serious each of them is.

One blatant misunderstanding, which seems to be shared by our government too, is about terrorism. What matters is not who commits terrorist acts, but who masterminds and funds them. So the categorisation should not be between islamist terrorism and far-right terrorism, but between Russian terrorism and non-Russian terrorism, as we know the Russian Reich is the main manipulator and organ-grinder for all sorts of terrorist flying monkeys, who are mostly not aware that the puppet master sits at the Kremlin. The same applies to cyber terrorism and election-rigging, with the added difficulty that the latter is now a joint venture between the Russian Reich and Trumpistan, both hellbent on dismembering the European Union and weakening every European nation, the UK included. Nigel Farage sits at the confluence of these two streams of corruption. But is the Great British Public ready to respond to existential threats with all the brute force of the vestigial might the Realm still possesses? MIC asked and it's possible but not guaranteed, more like a cautious "it depends".

I think a direct military attack on the UK, the Bonaparte way or the Hitler way, is not the most likely scenario. Remember that the last such endeavour that succeeded was when a Norman bastard subjugated and colonised the decaying remnants of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy, long before even Joe Biden was born. A Russian attack on the Eastern Marches of NATO is far more likely, but would it really happen when Vlad The Butcher still has the option of installing corrupt fascist puppet regimes that would effectively push The Border back to where it was before Gorbachev scuttled Vlad's beloved Soviet Union? The British public are quite willing to help an ally, but suddenly less convinced when NATO is mentioned, probably the effect of the combined negative propaganda from both the far-right and far-left. Interestingly, the levels of support are not much different for an intervention to stop genocide, and an intervention to protect business as usual, obviously not gathered from the same corner of the political spectrum. But the real key question still remains unasked and thusly unanswered. What are we ready to to extirpate the metastases of foreign interference that are already embedded deep into our political body? Our ancestors called them the Fifth Column, but we now prefer to call them pressure groups, which doesn't change their real nature, The Enemy Within. When you gonna wake up and strengthen the things that remain?

Right, you lot! Hands off your cocks and pull on your socks cos the bastards are here!

(Jim Almonds, SAS Rogue Heroes, 2025)

This is the most dangerous time since the Great War. They’re cutting budgets while the barbarians are at the gate. The system’s failing us, it’s broken. Things have to change.

(John Lancaster, London Has Fallen, 2016)

Notwithstanding, Reform UK want you to believe that we shouldn't worry too much about those threatening us from half a planet away with 24,000-ton ballistic missile submarines, some of which may have been incapacitated by the earthquake-cum-tsunami that hit their base at Petropavlovsk, because the small boats that may land on Clacton's seafront are a bigger existential threat. The media totally work for Farage on this, as they love nothing more than faking outrage at him preaching hate and doom, while offering us the same fifteen seconds of soundbite on a loop. It clearly has a poisonous effect on the British public, as shown by their replies to MIC asking what the motivations of the people crossing on small boats may be. Access to welfare end benefits tops the list, quite unbelievably, as benefits to which asylum seekers would be eligible are actually higher and more easily obtainable in France, Germany or the Netherlands. Asylum seekers would be very daft to come to the UK just for benefits, and we know lots of them are really educated people, probably smarter than the average Reform MP. But never let simple facts get in the way of a stigmatising narrative, as it is always easier to hit at the weak than at the powerful, which is why far-right populists love it so much.

There is also little evidence to support the claim that it is easier to be granted asylum in the UK than in the EU. In 2024. there were around 16 asylum applications for every 10,000 people living in the UK, while there were 22 for every 10,000 people in the EU. This clearly doesn't say that the UK is more "attractive". Likewise, 84,200 asylum applications were processed in the UK in 2024, and 47% were granted. That same year, 130,000 were processed in France and 43% granted. Again, that doesn't make a conclusive case that the UK is in any way more "lenient" than our next door neighbours on the Continent. That's just another textbook case of Reform UK's narrative combining Elton Muck's "citizen journalism", the promotion of deliberately fabricated fake news, and the Goebbels Principle, that any lie becomes truth if you repeat it often enough. But let's just assume, for argument's sake, that we accept the premise. That instantly begs a follow up question, "if that is so, what the fuck can we do to deter people from coming to our shores?", which has an oven-ready answer. Gunboat Diplomacy. Send the Royal Navy to repeal the boarders, in case they haven't anything better to do as it is. The MIC poll says that the Great British Public are all for that rather asinine idea. Even Scotland approves, for fuck's sake, though the last threatening boats that came anywhere near our coasts were those of the Spanish Armada.

The Royal Navy currently has 16 patrol boats that could be used for that task, all wee enough to qualify as "small boats" themselves. Most of them are used as URNUs, so that could also offer some "lived experience" to the posh students who volunteer only because it will look good on their résumé when they apply for vastly better paid jobs than the Navy can offer, or when they stand for MP. Or we could use our 8 heavy-weight patrol vessels, which for some reason have been given some bizarre war paint in recent years, that never existed in the real world during either World War. Unless we elicit to give a final lease of life to the obsolete Thatcher-era frigates that are being scrapped one by one anyway. No shit, mates, Farage would surely love that more manly-ballsy option. Or we could pick the smarter option, prevent the crossings and people putting their lives in harm's way, in close cooperation with the baguette-munching blokes on the other side. MIC dutifully polled what we actually think of the way the frog-eaters handle the situation, and that's not really a ringing endorsement.

Now, the real question should be, "is it France's mission to be our surrogate Border Force when we can't even make the one we have work?", and a majority of Brits seem to think it is. Seeing as our anti-migration forces are failing, the easy popular option would be to play hardball and send the small-boaters back, not just some 50 a year, but all the people we manage to arrest on landing. Which would not be many anyway, as we also suck at it, but never mind, Reform UK are all for it. Nigel could even hire Ryanair to do that, as they have plenty of capacity available on their shit planes, after the greedy bastards shut down flights to France because they don't want to pay legitimate taxes on their pollution. Everything to make some noise and avoid the inconvenient questions about Nigel's friends in the East, the Russian Reich and its Belarus Colony, deliberately weaponising illegal immigration because it boosts the xenophobic parties all across Europe. Why would Nigel ever try and solve the real issues around immigration, from abject poverty to oppressive regimes, in a compassionate and collaborative way, when every negative image of it grants him more media coverage and more votes?

Do something to rise above your insipid press releases! All the meaninglessness!

(Sydney Fields, Boston Legal, 2006)

To be free in this world, you must be feared, and to be feared, you must be powerful.

(Emmanuel Macron, 13 July 2025)

Maybe Farage is right after all, and the biggest threat we are facing from the high seas is 5-metre inflatables, since his handlers in the Russian Reich have decided to scrap the only aircraft carrier they ever had, the mouthfully named Admiral Flota Sovetskogo Soyuza Kuznetsov. She was a relic of the Soviet Union, having started construction seven weeks before Roxy Music released Avalon, so definitely fucking antique. Destruction was on the table since her whole crew was sent to die on the Ukrainian front, and now she's gone, under the flimsy pretext that the Russian Reich does not need a blue-water navy when they have drones. Which is of course total fucking bullshit, but bullshit is all Russia has left now. That and the Fifth Column of fascists and faux pacifists, Farage and Corbyn. Clearly, nothing that comes out of Russia must incite use to lower our guard, as most of what comes out of Russia is at best uncertain and unverifiable, at worst deliberate deception. This is why it is reassuring that the British public still support strong defence spending, even if less enthusiastically than when Focaldata probed it in May.

More Brits think we spend too little on defence than think we spend too much, which is a good thing, and should incite the government to be bolder about it. For example, the Labour government inherited a force of 15 destroyers and frigates in July 2024, which was already ridiculously low, and have brought it down to 14. The Type 26 and Type 31 frigates already under construction will only maintain that level. We will see an increase only in the late 2030s, and only if all the 26s and 31s currently planned are actually built and don't fall prey to future cuts. The government has given no sign that any of the spending increases, under the new NATO target of 3.5% of GDP, will be directed to the surface forces of the Royal Navy, which should be the top priority. They seem content with toying with different scenarios for the Army which, in the dominant strategic context, should be a lower priority. But the pollsters don't mind, as it allows them to ask the same tired questions again and again. In that category, bringing back conscription remains a popular gimmick, albeit quite less so than when MIC last asked in early June.

I won't bore you again with the arguments I developed against reinstating conscription in an earlier article, they haven't changed in two months and it remains a costly and inefficient non-solution when we have more serious options on the table to improve what we already have. It totally makes no fucking sense to increase the size of the Army when we have no real mission for it, offer only lousy pay and haven't seriously renovated military housing since Suez. Thank Dog all who want to reinstate conscription would not be eligible, and not all eligible would actually be called to serve. Otherwise, that would be an influx of literally millions. Clearly something the Army could never handle in its present state, when they are already struggling to recruit just 2,000 to fulfil the very first step assigned to them by the Strategic Defence Review. That just shows how loony the conscription option is, and how loopy it is to still ask. But would a third series of SAS Rogue Heroes help recruitment now, with all the exhilarating prospects it has to offer?

We’re gonna drink melted snow and rabbit’s blood. And we’re gonna kill red deer stag with our teeth. It’s gonna be a grand adventure out here, boys.

(Paddy Mayne, SAS Rogue Heroes, 2025)

Don’t kid yourselves, my friends. Putin doesn’t just want 20% of Ukraine, he wants 100%, and he won’t stop there. He wants to restore his empire.

(Giorgia Meloni, G7 Summit, 17 June 2025)

Say what you will about Volodymyr Zelenskyy, but he really is a fucking shrewd bastard, as he has again proved with the amazing pas de deux he performed for our benefit at the end of July. First, he directed the Rada, Ukraine's unicameral Parliament, to pass a law that pretty much neutered the country's anti-corruption agencies. The FSB's trolls over-weaponised it, hoping we had forgotten that the Russian Reich is by far the most corrupt country in Europe. The EU criticised it, except Emmanuel Macron, who is usually so prompt to comment on anything and everything. Probably because, in France too, the anti-corruption bodies are under government authority and receive instructions from the Ministry of Justice, just as in the then-new Ukrainian law. After protests in Kyiv, Zelenskyy first doubled down on it and then backed down. And we Brits are the last who should take the piss out of him, because this is exactly what Starmer has already done, and would surely do again, under similar "friendly pressure". Then Volodia turned the page, requesting the Rada to repeal the bill they had passed the week before, which they dutifully did. The Ukrainian people's commitment to democracy won. MIC have coincidentally devoted part of their foreign policy poll to Ukraine, and it starts with a rather distressing result.

It looks like the British public is again suffering from a bout of Ukraine fatigue. The level of support has not dropped dramatically, even if it's beyond the poll's margin of error, but it is really revolting to see than one out of five Brits is now ready to abandon Ukraine to destruction and enslavement by the fascist Russian Reich. That's significantly more than when MIC last asked in March, with Reform voters unsurprisingly leading the charge against our friend and ally. It is really discouraging that the Putinist agents who walk among us have scored points with their relentless propaganda about "money better spent at home" and "better cut our losses as Ukraine has already lost anyway". Clearly the vile far-right and the loony far-left have Ukrainian blood on their hands, not just the governments who procrastinated about offering Ukraine all the help they needed at the moment they needed it, and then tied their hands about how they were allowed to use what little help we delivered. MIC also surveyed what the British public think our priority should be, and oddly only one in ten now say we should do fuck all.

Unlike other pollsters, MIC did not ask their panel to rank their three top priorities, but to quote just one. So their results reflect what other pollsters would have labelled 'ranked first', and it is safe to assume it underestimates the real level of support we would see in three-ranked-choices polls. We also have a strong backlog of polls that survey each option separately, showing much higher support for military aid and sanctions on Russia than what we see here. It is nevertheless really sad that so many of us still haven't understood or accepted that the price to pay tomorrow for not having helped Ukraine is far higher than the cost of helping Ukraine today. It's not even in the same ballpark, as defemce spending across Europe is bound to increase by hundreds of billions, just to provide the bare minimum we need to fight off limited aggression from Russia. It is also quite depressing to see that the far-right leader of Italy has a clearer understanding of Putin's intentions than the centrist and leftist leaders in the rest of Western Europe, even if she is not ready to follow up on that with strong actions.

As if Macron wanted half the world because it used to be French colonies, or Starmer wanted the Commonwealth. And while we’re at it, why don’t I rebuild the Roman Empire?

(Giorgia Meloni, G7 Summit, 17 June 2025)

You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word. Victory. Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror.

(Winston Churchill)

The British media should now stop asking Nigel Farage about immigration, and Jeremy Corbyn about Gaza, because we already know what they have to say and don't give a fucking shit about hearing them repeating the same pre-scripted soundbites for the thousandth time. Ask them about Russia and Ukraine, so all of the UK can see how deep both of them have crawled down the rabbit hole of complicity and capitulation, based either on the urge to repay powerful donors or on fossilised beliefs in peacenik mantras that were already obsolete even before I was born. It is important to debunk both men's approximations, and sometimes flat-out lies about the real situation, both on the frontline and within Russia. Economic realities there are on a collision course with Putin's shift towards a war economy, which is so expensive it drains all available resources and takes the whole economy close to the breaking point. Russia-inspired propaganda about their alleged strength and resilience must be exposed, especially now that a quarter or more of the British public are accepting the laundry list of concessions that Trump will demand of Ukraine on behalf of his Russian ally.

Opposition to territorial concessions remains strong, but it has weakened at the worst moment, when they remain Russia's core demand, with the United States' tacit approval. Accepting compromise about future security guarantees for Ukraine, which do include NATO membership and military alliances, is likewise unacceptable, and must be denounced for what it is. A deluded attempt at appeasement on the side of the faux pacifist left, and deliberate complicity with future aggression on the side of the Putinist far-right. Both must be now vigourously challenged by the media, and the foreseeable consequences of a Munich-like stab in the back clearly explained, as they would put us in harm's way exactly like Munich did. The only positive point in the MIC poll is that the public's support for being part of a future peacekeeping force has increased, and has majority support across all political tribes, even Reform voters. The United States being reluctant and Russia vociferously opposed to it only shows that this is an option our government must keep at the forefront of their policies, and be ready to implement when the time comes.

Finally, don't have any illusion about what will come out of the Ukraine-less meeting between the Orange Baboon and Vlad The Butcher in Alaska, other then Vlad getting a guided tour of the next territory he will claim as Russian by first ownership precedent, summat Trump has already publicly conceded in one of his many dementia-fuelled outbursts of fuckwittery. What will happen is that Trump will chicken out, as he did about the format of the meeting, and agree to the partition of Ukraine. The enslavement of the illegally annexed territories in the East for the Russian Reich, the plundering of natural resources in the West for Trumpistan's plutocratic oligarchs. A pre-scripted betrayal, just as shameful as the Munich Capitulation of 1938, and just as repugnant as the partition of Poland between Hitler and Stalin in 1939. What is really worrying is that, despite all we know and have been warned about, half the Great British Public still don't see that "deal" for what it is. A massive victory for the Russian Reich. A massive defeat for Ukraine, Europe, democracy, freedom and world safety.

Then we also have one out of five Brits buying the Trumpo-Russian fantasy narrative that it can be some sort of compromise. Which makes no fucking sense, unless you define enslavement and colonisation as a compromise between free democracy and genocide. It especially pains me that Scots don't see what's happening more clearly than Englanders. Maybe we should now stipulate that the Treaty of Union of 1707 was a "compromise" with England. Or does that sound ridiculously deranged enough? Of course, Ukraine and the whole of Europe will reject such a deal, so Trump has his oven-ready excuse to blame Ukraine and dump them, letting Europe deal with his mess all by themselves. The 15th of August 2025 will be remembered forever as our age's Day Of Infamy, to the everlasting shame of all those who procrastinated and obfuscated on granting Ukraine all the help they needed to defeat and repulse the Russian hordes. Churchill would be livid.

We shall not fail or falter. We shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle, nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down. Give us the tools and we will finish the job.

(Winston Churchill)

Слава Україні! Героям слава!

Jeremy's Den

14/08/2025

It's Better To Burn Out Than It Is To Rust

It's Better To Burn Out Than It Is To Rust