Jeremy's Den: Run With The Fox On To The Dawn Of Tomorrow

Did you know the chance of life, any life on this planet, is .00000001 that anything exists? Elephants. Plants. Dogs. Amoeba. Tapeworms. Cats. Budgerigars. Those little beetles that only appear at Christmas. The fact that we exist is so totally random.

(Barney Meagher, Rake, 2014)

People tend to play in their comfort zone, so the best things are achieved in a state of surprise.

(Brian Eno)

Ten years ago today, we lost bassist extraordinaire Chris Squire to a rare form of leukaemia. Jon Anderson and Chris Squire were the heart and soul of Yes throughout the band's classic years, also their best, and Chris Squire was the only member present in each and every line-up, and on each and every album, from the creation of the band until his untimely death at 67. Today's soundtrack is Chris Squire's sensational solo album of 1975, Fish Out Of Water, together with an assortment of songs he wrote over the years, mostly for Yes and in almost chronological order. Enjoy and remember a great musician and performer, one of the best England ever begat. But not before some useless trivia. Do you know what was the very last song Chris Squire ever performed live with Yes? "Starship Trooper". Which was also the very last song Jon Anderson and Rick Wakeman ever performed live with Yes. And the very last song the late great Alan White ever performed live with Yes. Some fucking heavy karma in there. Or just a long standing habit of closing the shows with it.

Remember to click on the images for larger and easier to read versions, if you didn't know already.

Sometimes we do need pollsters to offer some comic relief from the run-of-the-mill fastidiousness of surveying serious issues like Israel kicking Iran's arse or whales dying of plastic pollution. YouGov does that usually, with totally asinine polls about totally irrelevant issues, but they have refrained from that recently, so More In Common valiantly stepped forward to fill the void. Twice. But you can see they are not yet fully familiar with the true meaning of diversion polling, as they never explained what these surveys were exactly about, and we were left to guess from the results they published. The first attempt was, as far as I can guess, to map our political affiliations according to the kind of divertissement we like. Entertainment, festive events, celebrations or summat. On this assumption, which may or may not be right, as there was no manual provided with the polls, I sorted these activities according to the share of Reform UK voters who have a taste for them. Identifying thusly which kind of hobby makes you a fascist bigot, down to which one makes you an inclusive progressive.

The baseline here are the voting intentions More In Common found in the real serious poll they juxtaposed with that question about preferred hobbies. So going to the beach is the most far-right leisure choice, though Formula 1, Women's Rugby and Wimbledon are actually more globally right-wing, given the strong number of Conservative voters they also attract. The second half of that poll, where we drift further away from Reform UK's favourite bits of entertainment, also has some interesting quirks. Not least that the Proms and Tour de France are Reform UK's least favourite entertainments, but also the two favourites of Conservative voters. I get it for the Proms, but Tour de France? Who'd have thunk?

Unsurprisingly, Pride festivities are the absolute favourites of the Global Left. But not everyone puts the exact same meaning behind these words. We know the Greens are definitely the Pink-and-Blues here, as exemplified again by their relentless with-hunts against wrongthinkers who know what biology is, and support the now proverbial Supreme Court ruling. But how do you explain that the favourite hobby of Green voters is cold water swimming? That seems so fucking odd, unless you admit that their variant of born-again McCarthyism also includes that fashionable variant of self-flagellation. Too bad that conjures an image you can't unsee, the very posh Carla Denyer swimming across the Serpentine on New Year's Eve, clad in just an itsy bitsy teenie weenie transflag bikini. More In Common thought it would be fun to try another angle, probing the British public's favourite cocktails, some of which are not even cocktails, by political persuasuion.

I must say first that I do not believe at all that a third of Green voters are teetotallers. That's typically the kind of thing sanctimonious neo-puritans would say to make themselves look good. But I definitely believe that only one out of twelve SNP voters don't consume alcohol. Been there, done that, mates, and we have the receipts, haven't we? Then cider, lager and G&T topping the list is certainly not a surprise, as this look like the Holy Trinity of trans-classist British inebriation. And, as I sad earlier, two out of three are not cocktails, and I would argue G&T isn't either as it involves no stirring or shaking. Or the poll should also have included a pint and a dram, not just lager alone. Finally, I am truly offended by the inclusion of rosé wine, which is definitely not a cocktail either, unless you are daft enough to believe it's red wine mixed with white wine. Which would possibly be better than what it actually is, more of a middle-class drain cleaner than actual wine. Not In My Mouth, mates.

Isn’t it scrumptious? It’s there, in amongst the second-hand pianos, gold teeth and cocker spaniels.

(Diana Harmon, A Murder Is Announced, 1985)

Ever read any Balzac? No, don’t worry, neither have I. but I’m thinking maybe tonight’s the night.

(Cleaver Greene, Rake, 2014)

We had another weirdo poll from Freshwater Crocodile... oops, sorry, Freshwater Strategy, as the name implies an Aussie pollster who occasionally dabble in British politics though they are not members of the British Polling Council. They chose to offer us an unprecedented variant of the time-honoured popularity ratings, but with a twist. They submitted an array of 21 personalities and entities to their panel, and there was certainly some ulterior motive, if not a hidden agenda, in it. I guess they deliberately went where no pollster had gone before, like pitting the King and Jeremy Clarkson against each other. We can only imagine that Charlie was delighted to hear he is more popular than Clarkson, but perhaps he bit miffed that he is less popular than the farmers. How these ended up being the Great British Public's most beloved is still a matter of conjecture.

Then the most striking part certainly was that Reform UK and Nigel Farage were found to be Britain's favourite politicos. But less popular than the European Union, which again illustrates the total lack of consistency of British public opinion, which totally border on lack of self-awareness. Then the fun part is how many people have never heard of this or that 'celebrity'. For some it would be a relief, as they know that the more we know them, the more we loathe them. Like Kemi Badenoch, who has fewer fans in Great Britain than the Orange Baboon, and not many more than Elton Muck. But Robert Jenrick must be miffed that all these days spent cosplaying vigilante in the Tube have been in vain, improving neither his name recognition nor his likeability.

These findings probably incited Freshwater Strategy to take a look at our politics from a different angle. One that had been tried already by local pollsters, but probably not publicised enough. Because that's a serious question that brings us back to things that really matter. What does the general population, and their own voters, make of some kind of arrangement between the Rump Conservative Party and the New Model British Union of Fascists to "own the libs", to put it in MAGA parlance. But would be more like "own the labs" in British English, just not this one or those ones. Turns out the various variants are just mildly popular, and especially not overwhelmingly favoured by the respective electorates.

You have to wonder what went through peoples' minds when confronted with that question. Probably some sort of "What the fuck?" from most. It is probably significant that Conservative voters are more favourable to an electoral pact than Reform voters. Because it would obviously imply Reform UK endorsing and supporting all Conservative incumbents, which would spare them the humiliation of near total annihilation that current polls predict. Symmetrically, a merger or a formal coalition have more support on the Reform side. A merger would be the ideal solution for Reform UK as it would allow then to hijack the whole Conservative electoral machine, and that could prove a massive asset in the South of England and in Scotland. A formal coalition, implicitly under a Reform Prime Minister, would also be beneficial. Reform could benefit of what is left of the Conservatives' expertise at governing, which they dramatically lack, and also blame them for everything that goes tits up, just like the Conservatives did with the Liberal Democrats in the olden days. And with this I have the perfect transition to more serious polling about the Reform UK infestation of the political clownshow. Just brace yourselves for some inconvenient reminders.

There is no such thing as morality, only personal choice. Read Sartre and then read Camus.

(Polly Nesbitt, Rake, 2012)

There are still sinister forces at work in our country, determined to disrupt the process of democracy.

(Tom Dawkins, Secret State, 2012)

There is something darkly sinister in the British mediatariat's obsession with promoting Reform UK, equalled only by their earlier fixation on promoting the translobby. Basically, you can't have a poll about what Starmer, his Cabinet or the Labour Party are doing without comparisons to Reform UK. Or references in the seemingly innocuous style of, "Aye, but what about Reform?", usually leading to some fearmongering results about how Farage could game the system and emerge as the next Prime Minister. Of course these bits have the opposite effect, they make Reform UK more visible and more credible, which I think is actually the intended effect. But this is not a boiling frog effect, which we all know is totally unscientific bullshit. This is more like a perverted mithridatism, where gradual exposure to the poison doesn't make you immune to it, but more ready to accept it as harmless. That and the gradual shift of the infamous Overton Window towards the far-right. I have some leftovers for Lord Ashcroft's Maypoll, which I already used partly in my previous article, to shed some light on this. Starting with whom Brits think is the most likely to moonwalk into Number Ten after the next general.

I painted the "someone else" option a whiter shade of blue because it obviously means, in everybody's mind including Mikey's, "whoever succeeds Kemi after the Conservatives dump her on a desert island because she is so shite at the job that even Vigilante Bob looks like a more appealing option". Farage being the most likely next Prime Minister is not a consensual idea, but it has definitely gained a lot of traction in many parts of the electorate. Because this is the outcome that has been made more and more credible by the most recent sequence of polls, that see Reform UK finishing first, and with enough votes to either bag a majority of seats, or get enough for a majority in coalition with the Rump Tories. The poll includes another approach, mixing the peoples' opinion of Reform UK with their assessment of the next election's outcome, and it goes in the same direction.

Only a third of Brits like what they see when they look at Mosley Reincarnate, but a majority agree that they are likely to win the next election, if you add the top and bottom choices in the chart. I guess there is some sort of sad resignation here, the idea that resistance is futile as the other parties have so little to offer. Which is stupid, given that the election is still 50 months away, and no polls fielded 50 months before a general have ever been right, except probably those from 1998. And, before you object, I know this was not 50 months before the 2001 election. But the term was cut short, and 1998 was one year after the previous election, so it's a valid comparison. My point about a phase of resignation, that could pass as easily as it started, is otherwise validated and affirmed when people are asked who their preferred Prime Minister is. And Nigel Fromage loses in whatever combination is proposed, again in that last Ashcroft poll.

The hilarious part is that Boris Johnson is the one who would most easily beat Farage. Now, if we want wildcards, the next poll should add Angela Rayner and Andy Burnham to the broth. After all, she is the most likely successor if Starmer is incapacitated, and he is the most popular alternative choice among the Labour membership. More on that one later, that's just a teaser-cum-spoiler. Ed Davey should be let in too, even if his chances at becoming Prime Minister are lower than Kemi Badenoch's. Just for fun, I would also love to see Carla Denyer selected, just to check if my hunch is right, that she is the only one Farage would defeat in a head-to-head. After all, injecting some fucking harebrained scenarios is probably the only way we can escape being bored to death by the polls long before the next election.

The longer I live, the more convinced I am that this planet is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum.

(Galileo Galilei, possibly)

It’s virtually a crime to be English these days, or speak properly. That’s hideous.

(Joy Raffery, The Beast Must Die, 2021)

But there is another side to this vision, this time seen from the Overton Window. The Ashcroft poll has probed twelve different statements, that pretty much allow you to identify the British public's permeability to some of Reform UK's pet belief. Of course, they craftily mixed these with others that are not in Reform's usual repertoire, but could probably be morphed into elements of a populist rhetoric if Farage could be arsed to actually work. Which is of course really hard when your basic impulse is to spend most of your time on jollies far away from your constituency. There is a bit of both in Lord Mikey's first six items. A closer relationship with the European Union and better funding for public services don't fit with the usual Faragist narrative, though it's easy to recycle the NHS in the populist "money better spent at home" talking points. But the other four fit with the usual Reform UK mythology. Nostalgia for the glory days of the Empire, rejection of the globalist establishment, climate change denial, that's pretty much what you can expect, and the Great British Public sadly agree.

The replies to the other half of the selected items are more ambiguous, but the idea that we need leaders who will do what the people want kind of mitigates it, as it opens the floodgates to a populist drift into the unknown. Ideologically, these are quite a mixed bag. The replies about immigration are clearly to the right of the spectrum, and those about the economy are definitely Labour-friendly, which accounts for the very uneven split. The statements about defence and austerity could be defended by anyone regardless of their electoral preferences, as they match narratives heard both on the right and the left, which makes it quite surprising that the votes are much closer to a tie. Unless you explain it by the coalescence of the far left and populist right who would oppose cuts to fund defence and support summat of a conspiracist vision of austerity, against the 'reasonable centrists' who would go the other way. On the whole, this survey say that the British collective psyche is a strange beast indeed, but that it also offers rather fertile ground to the blooming of the populist right. Don't think it can't happen here.

A shocking part of the media landscape is that now not a week goes by now without The Islington Gazette delivering a new column in reaction to Farage's latest stunt. Which would be fine by me if only they offered a genuine perspective of political action against him, which they never do. Because they are stuck in the same library of clichéd platitudes, and always much too keen on treating it as a Brexit-spawned English peculiarity. They even try and preach the asinine idea that it's all about communication, which exonerates them from searching for the real root cause, and sadly overlooks that Farage's core discourse is a very traditional collection or racist and xenophobic tropes. Now, if you believe that words have no consequences, just look at what happened in Ballymena, County Antrim. Call me cynical if you want, but I couldn't help feeling some kind of relief in The Islington Gazette that it did not happen in England, so they could freely call out those who stoked the fire, without even once having to mention Farage. Just don't tell me this has nothing to do with Reform UK because it happened in Northern Ireland. Protestant "loyalists" have been identified as the instigators and perpetrators. The party closest to the views of the extremist "loyalist" fringe is the Traditional Unionist Voice, whose leader and sole MP Jim Allister represents North Antrim, the constituency where Ballymena is located. And, for the 2024 general, TUV had an electoral pact with.... aye, you guessed it... Reform UK. The rabble never falls far from the prick.

May the Good Lord, in his wisdom, preserve us from the intemperate.

(Tom Dawkins, Secret State, 2012)

Can I speak freely? Your boss is a fucking cock who doesn’t remember who his friends are.

(Anthony Fossett, Secret State, 2012)

Earlier this month, Survation published the results of a poll they had conducted on behalf of Labour List, surveying only members of the Labour Party. It gives you a clear sense of drama in Paradise, as it is definitely not a vibrant endorsement of the Fearless Great Leader. Whom, if I read the results properly, they see neither as fearless nor as great. Survation first probed the popularity of some of the party figures. They tested 40 and that was definitely a mistake, as more than half got a massive proportion of "don't know", which is pretty much the pollster's euphemism for "who the fuck is that?". So I extracted only 16 names, which is already a fucking lot. Of the 'blissfully unknown', I kept only Ian Murray, but just for the comic value of showing his results side by side with those of fellow Scot Anas Sarwar.

So we have this extraordinary juxtaposition of Ian Who? and Anas Is Da Man, which every Scot will appreciate at its true value. Then the truly interesting and relevant part is that the three most popular in that list are Andy Burnham, Ed Miliband and Angela Rayner in that order. And that the three least popular, also the only three with a net negative, are Rachel Reeves, Liz Kendall and Keir Starmer in that order. I guess that you see where this is going. The Labour grassroots are more to the left than the leadership and government, and are not happy bunnies with what the government has achieved, or failed to achieve, so far. And they have a pretty good idea of which heads should roll. And that was enough to make Survation ask the unaskable. If Labour were to dump Keir Starmer before the next general election, possibly on the same desert island the Conservatives picked for Kemi Badenoch, whom would they want to lead them? And that's where the fun begins.

Ed Miliband may be viewed very favourably for what he is now, but putting him back in the leader's seat? Been there, done that, fuck off. So that pretty much leaves us with Angela Rayner and Andy Burnham. Of course the party members know he can't become leader of the party because he is not an MP, that's stipulated in Chapter 1, Clause VII, Paragraph 1.A.i of the Rule Book 2024. But they don't give a fucking shit. We Want Andy And We Want Him Now. The follow up question thusly is, "But does Andy want it?", a speculation he has earlier dismissed as "annoying" but never explicitly ruled out. The first step would be to get back in his old seat of Leigh, now Leigh and Atherton. The current MP is Labour's Jo Platt, who succeeded Burnham as MP for Leigh when he stood down at the 2017 general election, to stand for Mayor of Greater Manchester. Could she be convinced to resign to allow him to return? Probably, but that's another story. Back to today's issues, Survation also asked their selection of Labour members what should be the government's budget priorities. Which departments should they protect the most, and which should they seek savings from. And some of results are on a collision course with the government's actual choices.

Obviously Starmer will not look for savings in defence, though he would be well-advised to look for efficiency and the elimination of waste, the centuries-old plague of defence procurement. One way of doing that, and possibly the most efficient one, would be to speed up production of every new item of military equipment as delays are a major cause of overheads, and also give some leeway to perfectionists who always want to 'improve' any design, thusly inflating development costs and generating more delays. The military establishment must bow to the necessities of the day, and admit that we must now consider the military sector as having transitioned to a war economy. There is a precedent, the United States' Two-Ocean Navy Act of 1940. It effectively put American shipbuilding on a war footing long before they were actually at war. The key factor was that it was decided, right from the start, that they would not seek 'perfect' designs when they already had perfectly good ones. So mass production of new warships stuck to the same designs for almost four years, and it created the largest and most powerful navy ever seen anywhere in the world, in record time. Surely there is a lesson for today in there.

By all means, let’s remember who our friends are. But let’s also remember the people who voted for us.

(Tom Dawkins, Secret State, 2012)

He’s coming at me with facts to confuse me. This is what they do!

(Rylan Clark-Neal)

Ipsos have devoted a poll to their own brand of assessment of the Labour government's performance over the last year. They selected twelve items that were at the heart of Labour's manifesto, twelve pledges to make everybody's life better. You will be surprised at what actually was on that list. Ipsos tried a two-pronged approach through two consecutive questions. One asking if Labour had done a good or bad job on these issues, then if they had made any progress on them. Which is not asking the same question twice to check if you were paying attention, as there is definitely a difference in the meaning, not just the wording of these questions. Which does not mean the people would actually sense the subtlety and answer really differently, and they did not.

There are actually subtle differences already visible here, even if the general pictures are really similar and consistent, for once. There is such a level of correlation between the two sets of answers that it can only lead you to the conclusion that most respondents thought the pollster was trying to trick them with the same question wrapped in different words, and only a minority saw the difference between the two approaches. The only noticeable change is the much lower level of neutral-ish answers to the 'progress' question, which you oddly don't find in the next three items, where it goes in different directions.

Maybe there is a deeper meaning in these results. That we may actually be able to see the difference between being good at the job and making progress on specific issues. More precisely, that some of us are able to do that because they think twice before answering the second question, see the trap and navigate their way around it. Because there is no in-built contradiction between saying Labour have been shit at the job but nevertheless made some progress, or conversely that they have been good, which admittedly doesn't happen often, but have made little progress. Or, in different terms, "A for the effort but F for the result" vs "You surely can do better than that".

Rake around in the manure as much as you like. You won’t find a buried treasure.

(John Despard, Cards On The Table, 2006)

We haven’t turned up any glories yet, but we live in hope. Nil carborundum, and all that.

(Lord Boynton, Appointment With Death, 2009)

For whatever reason, there is a return to the first observed pattern in the next pack of three issues. I guess you can sum that up as a mix of dissatisfaction and impatience. Which definitely makes sense when you have been promised a lot and don't see much coming. The interesting part in this batch is that the British public don't think Labour have done a good job on immigration, but more think they have really tried. You have to wonder why the public would say that. Of course it can be based solely on official statistics, that show that Labour have actually been better than the Conservatives at handling illegal immigration. Or it can be some sort of approval of Labour's shift towards a clearly right-wing, if not far-right rhetoric, which would be more problematic.

Then, the last triad of select items from the Ipsos poll include the two where Labour get their best results. Fully a quarter of Brits thinking they have done a good job with the Forces and the NHS. In the current climate, that's just too good to be true and reasons to be cheerful. Don't sabre the champagne just yet, though. Majorities also think you haven't done enough progress on either yet, not put enough effort into it, mates. And that's nothing like an abusive partner telling you that your best is never good enough, it does look like a rather fair assessment.

It's fair because there are two sorts of reactions to Labour's achievements, or lack thereof, in government. Those who expected a lot in a short time are justifiably disappointed, but that's obviously not the bulk of the British population, even if it might be in Islington. Those like me, who never expected anything transformational or even bold, are nevertheless disappointed that it is even more tepidly inefficient than our worse prognosis. You have to wonder if they were really ready for it a year ago, despite having had four years under Starmer to do just that. Or, just slightly worse, if their heart is really in it. Or, and now really worse, if Labour has attracted the right people over the last fifteen years to really do the job that has to be done, and do it smartly. Including Starmer himself. That the answer to all three tends to be a definite 'No' means that none of this is going to end well.

He just went to the East End once by mistake, and had a road-to-Damascus moment.

(Hermione Lytton-Gore, Three Act Tragedy, 2010)

The fall from grace is a bloody quick elevator ride, mate, I’ll tell you.

(Barney Meagher, Rake, 2012)

Now the dust has settled, more or less, on Rachel Reeves' Spending Review, which was not a Spring Statement even if it quacked like one. No more unwelcome surprises are expected until the Autumn Statement, and we already have a pretty good idea of what they will be. But in the mean while, uninformed pre-Review polling, based on wild guesses and preconceptions, has given way to informed post-Review polling, based on most of the wild guesses and preconceptions having come true. Let's start with Ipsos again, who went all forensic on an array of 19 very specific items that found their way into the Review that was not a statement. I have sorted them from the most popular to the least popular, just for the fun of seeing where that leads us.

We now have walked into one of the many paradoxes of British public opinion and how they express it in polls. Basically, the government are unpopular, lying deceiving bastards and shit at the job, yet more that two thirds of us approve that batch of announcements. And it's just the beginning. Then who wouldn't love more dosh for the NHS, the pensioners' fuel allowance and policing. Though there may be a catch in that one, which I will mention later. Rachel even managed to sneak in a Farage-friendly measure, hoping that everybody would notice. Which we did, and approved. Rachel totally knew what she was doing here, have no doubt, and there is one of the same inspiration in the next sextet.

Decreasing the Foreign Office budget actually boils down to one thing, further cuts to international aid. That's probably the last time Rachel can use this stunt to please Nigel, as there will probably be nothing left to cut next year. Rachel has no issue with that as it will help fund the increase of defence spending, which has been surreptitiously reset at 2.6% of GDP, instead of the 2.5% everybody expected. Just wait until the Autumn Statement now, when it is reset to the 3.5% we will have to reach now that we have got our marching orders from the Orange Baboon. But there is a fucking booby-trapped time-bomb in there too, increased subsidies for local government. Rachel should have done the exact opposite, put all English Councils under surveillance and on a strict diet, after the abyss of mismanagement and misspending so many of them have indulged in. Even cancelling all orders for pink-and-blue lanyards and Drag Queen Hours won't make a fucking difference. The finals batch of Ipsos' select items confirms the flabbergasting levels of support a hugely unpopular Chancellor can bag when she talks to us nicely.

That's it. Out of 19 items probed by Ipsos, 18 have the full support of a majority of Brits. Only the AI Opportunities Action Plan is a fail, probably because nobody has a fucking clue what it actually means. The way Peter Kyle MP, one of the many blissfully unknown in the Cabinet, sells it will probably make nobody the wiser. There is that awkward feeling that even Peter hasn't a fucking clue what he's talking about, and that all his prepared remarks have been regurgitated by ChatGPT or worse, Grok. Using summat like "unapologetically transformative" as your USP makes me instantly smell a rat. But surely Rachel doesn't care. After all, she has a near-perfect scoreboard, and another three months to get us accustomed to the bad news that will unavoidably come in the autumn. You just need to look at the OBR's latest forecast to get the gist. When your fiscal headroom is ridiculously low, less than 1% of projected spending, and increased borrowing will snatch a third of it, there aren't many solutions. And none of them is unapologetic or transformative.

The principled stand. The Man In The White Suit. Talking it up and never really engaging. Do you want to change the world? You have to live in it first.

(John Hodder, Secret State, 2012)

We have to measure our success by the size of our staff and our budget.

(Sir Humphrey Appleby, Yes Minister, 1980)

After some wee bits of speed-polling, designed to tease us. YouGov have now devoted a full all-inclusive poll to Rachel Reeves' Spending Review and dutifully commented on their own findings. A lot of it is stuff that was also covered by Ipsos, so I won't bore you with duplicates. One of their key questions was a rather standard one, also asked by Opinium in the same timeframe. And it does sound like that soul classic later revamped by Bruce Springsteen, "Reeves, huh, yeah, what is she good for? Absolutely nothing". The popular verdict is unequivocally merciless, neither the economic situation of the UK, nor the financial situation of individual households will get better over the next 12 months after Rachel Reeves' announcements, or because of them.

But YouGov also put their finger again on the many contradictions of the Great British Public. They extracted seven items from the Spending Review, but did not use a verbatim as Ipsos had done, but instead refurbished the wording to cover a wider area of public spending. With the added upside that they wouldn't bore their panel with a mile-long laundry list of too specific items, but instead turn their attention to more generic domains, without the translation in billions of pounds. It worked in some cases, again showing strong support for many of Reeves' chosen priorities, despite a generally negative view of the whole thing. But it also backfired sometimes, as the respondents saw through the attempt to dilute some very controversial specifics into broader, more consensual categories.

Unsurprisingly, Brits totally support refurbishing schools, which might be the opportunity to shut down the illegal unisex facilities and restore the proper single-sex facilities everywhere. That should indeed be a non-negotiable condition for allocating the subsidies. Of course, we also want more dosh for affordable housing and healthcare, and more surprisingly also for building more prisons. Which, when you think of it, might even be a good idea if you consider the number of convicted criminals who aren't serving time because there is no room anywhere to rehome them. And there's nothing reactionary in saying this, as ensuring public safety in all communities is definitely a benefit for the working class. But the public also proved smarter than the pollster by rejecting the increased spending for railways. Because they know it is mostly a cover for spaffing more into the bottomless pit of failure called HS2, and they will have none of it. Now, if we want lots of extra spending, the obvious follow-up question is how the fuck we fund it. It's not even a gotcha question and the British public have no illusion about where this is going.

Even cautiously wrapped in almost conditional wording, there is no ambiguity at all in the public's response. Of course it will be more fucking taxes, what the fuck did you imagine it would be? Unless Rachel Reeves chooses the path of least instant resistance and borrows more. Which would be consistent with the decision to revive nuclear power. You can build a whole storyboard about the immediate upsides of both, including Ed Miliband ranting about how good nukes are for Net Zero, and totally sweep the downsides under the rug. Because, in both cases, we actually don't have to worry about the downsides. Dealing with them is the task we preemptively assign to the next generations or, in the case of nuclear waste, to the next dominant species. Dog, maybe. So now we know the true nature of the trou de loup laid across Rachel Reeves' path, one she laid herself, to be honest. Thomas Cromwell had Wolf Hall, Rachel Reeves has her very own Wolf Hole, the Tax Trap. And there is no easy way she can extricate herself from that one.

Prime Ministers are the democratically elected scapegoats. They are there to take the blame on the rare occasions the Civil Service do something badly.

(Sir Humphrey Appleby, Yes Minister, 1980)

I'm from those fucking streets. So, let us talk with the shared honesty of hoi polloi, shall we?

(Edwyn Cooper, The Gold, 2023)

Now that we have boldly walked into the Tax Trap, there are two simple ways to plug the rabbit hole. One is to raise VAT. Which is rejected on the left because a flat tax on consumption disproportionately hits the lowest incomes, and increasing it would have devastating effects for the very lowest, those below the threshold for paying income tax. This is also a debate in the country of my birth, and an interesting counter-argument has been thrown into the broth. That increasing VAT makes progressive sense as it would hit most those who consume the most, the highest incomes. I am not going to offer a conclusion, or even an opinion, on that for now. What is on the table in the pollsters' universe is not increasing VAT, but increasing the income tax, the most obvious of all obvious options, once you have discarded other obvious ones like the capital gains tax. Increasing income tax was thusly polled by More In Common, and the British public are definitely not happy bunnies with that.

There is massive hypocrisy within the British political establishment about this, and also among pollsters for asking about it, as the income tax is already increasing every year since Rishi Sunak's penultimate Budget in 2022. That's the effect of the freeze of income tax thresholds, which Labour have been very quick to not repeal in their own budgets, just promising to not extend it beyond the deadline enforced by the Conservatives. There is massive hypocrisy in arguing against VAT in the name of social justice, while keeping a punitive measure that goes totally against social justice, and actually increasing the income tax rates would only add insult to injury. Not that I would put this past New Model Labour. I also warned you earlier about a possible catch with the obviously well-meaning goal of increasing funding for policing. YouGov have found it and polled it. That would be an increase of Council tax, allocated to the local police forces, and the British public hate the idea as much as they hate an income tax hike.

Of course, we all support better policing, and a first step towards that would be fairer policing. Which would be like, not using the police forces against wrongthinkers selectively picked by out-of-touch ideologues who rewrite the law to fit their political prejudices and illegally harass innocent people. Or not coercing police forces into inaction and complicity, because the same batch of out-of-touch ideologues have decided that action against crime is racist. Or not using taxpayers' money to propagate a fringe exclusionary and coercive ideology within the police forces, that a majority of the public reject. Again, there is nothing bigoted or fascist in saying that, it is indeed genuinely progressive. Because we know that misuse of public funds and using the police as the private militia of ideological lobbies hurts the weakest in society the most, the deprived working class communities who need fair law and order the most. Not that it matters to the privileged metropolitan middle-class at the core of the entitled woke hive mind.

Next time you come here, you come with a plan. You come with more than just “fuck me!”, OK?

(Lena Palmer, The Gold, 2025)

Our greatest economic challenge is an ageing population. As a nation, we quite simply can’t afford to fund Viagra for 115-year-old pensioners. So, we need to die younger.

(Cleaver Greene, Rake, 2016)

More In Common's polling then took a turn for the weird, exploring the issue of systemic ageism in public finances, or summat. Along the lines of what we do for our young, who are not necessarily bright things, as anyone who has watched one in the wild in his parents' basement can testify. Using 'his' here is no way sexist, as there is plenty of peer-reviewed scientific evidence that there is a 'gender divide' here. Teenage boys temporarily regress to the IQ level of a newborn hyaena, and its BO too, while teenage girls keep progressing. And the Teenage Werewolf was a boy too, wasn't he? Versus what we do for our elders, who are seldom our betters, if the fucking mess they left behind while pretending they did it for our own good is any evidence. Which, again, is not ageism, just a statement of fact. Though we can perhaps make an exception for John Major and all the letters behind his name. Or are we doing too much for him already? The More In Common poll says the opposite, with a majority of Brits thinking that the government does not do enough to address the concerns of the older generations.

Those who don't concur with the consensus here, with high proportions thinking the government is doing too much, are an odd alliance: the TikTok Generation, Scotland, London and Labour voters. I get why Labour voters would be less supportive or our elders. After all, they are the government, those who forced pensioners to eat their kitten to pay for wood for the stove, or summat. I get the point from Scotland too, as we are an ageing nation that needs to attract youngsters more than cuddle the old codgers. The 18-24s' replies is probably just selfishness, and the Londoners' just the need to look fashionably progressive. Then, as usual, what semblance of certain conclusions you think you can draw form that question is instantly blown out of the water by the mirror question. Aye, we feel that the government does not do enough for our young, albeit less massively.

I guess you can see where all this is leading us. If we don't do enough for both the young and the old, where does that leave those in between? Those who pay the bulk of the taxes, pretty much. But More In Common never asked that question, sadly. Instead they went for what they probably thought was a proper summary and conclusion of the whole line of questioning. So they pitted the two tribes against each other, with unexpected results. That we do care about the elders more than about the youngsters, but actually don't care much about either. A few demographics appear split, but the most spectacular comparison is across the generational divide, between the 18-24s and the over-65s. Both tend to stand up for their own interests, but only one does in a really extreme way.

This again proves that polls can't hit at the heart of the truth with bland generic questions, and that you get there only if you make it up close and personal. You can easily interpret this as evidence that the oldest among us are more caring and far less selfish than their sprogs' sprogs. Which I think is probably true, despite all the virtuous gesticulation in the kindergarten about kindness and inclusion and whatnot. It's pretty much what you can expect from navel-gazing TikTok-fed basement wankers whose sole purpose in life is to trawl social media for reasons to squeal offence in unison with the hive mind of basement wankers. Just imagine the plague of locusts that will flood us, twenty years out, when some of that lot become Councillors, MPs and the government. We will miss Starmer, mark my words.

There’s a bottle of Pinot Noir there. It’s well posh. Whatever happened to strong cider and spewing? Kids today, they can’t even get hammered properly.

(Helen Baxter, Death Valley, 2025)

I think our reverence for the truth might have become a bit of a distraction that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting important things done.

(Katherine Maher)

The establishment media love to give Farage disproportionate coverage as he is good value for money, like with his latest stunt, snatching his pound of flesh off the non-doms, which is hardly a novelty item. Labour are doing it already, albeit at their usual leisurely pace that is bound to annul the expected benefits. Rishi Sunak would have done it too if given the chance, or so he said, and it's your unalienable prerogative to believe him. But that same media are less prompt to mention that this is just smoke-and-mirrors, as Nigel would instantly restore the non-doms' privileges. Obviously, none of that dosh would be given back to the people, as Farage claims, all of it would go to massive tax cuts for his already over-privileged über-wealthy drinking buddies. But don't say it too loudly, or the metropolitan middle-class won't get the government they need to pose as resistance fighters. They are probably virtuously miffed, and already reframing the narrative of their trauma, that the trendlines of Westminster voting intentions show Reform UK plateauing and then going down over the last few weeks.

Labour are of course doing themselves no favours, with such cretinous attitudes as the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, a remnant of medieval feudalism now used as the Cabinet's handyman, whining about 1,000 people a day applying for PIP. In New Model Labour's Weltanschauung, this is rationale for further welfare cuts, which is clearly handing Reform UK a new line of attack on a silver platter. That was a fucking awkward moment, something you wouldn't buy if you saw it in a reboot of The Thick Of It. They had a hundred-ish dissenters, so the whips squealed, "it's a vote of confidence in the Prime Minister", and the number of dissenters increased. So the whips went, "OK, mates, it's not a vote of confidence in the Prime Minister", and the number of dissenters increased again. For once, it proved to be Much Ado For Something, as Starmer calling the Backbenchers' revolt "noises off" only emboldened his opponents. So Starmer's final move before the weekend has been to give the rebels pretty much all they wanted, just like Trump does with Putin, so he can argue that he won that vote. Piling up preventable mistakes never makes political sense, and the current snapshot of voting intentions and projected seats bears testimony to this, even if it has improved a wee smitch for Labour in the last two weeks.

I have chosen a different approach this time. Instead of extracting just a small sample of the most recent polls, I have used the aggregate of all polls fielded in June. That's 19 polls with a super-sample of 41,073 GB-wide, and 3,215 in Scotland. Good for a wider perspective from a higher vantage point. Seeing these results, I would feel safer facing The Rise Of The Nutters if the metropolitan media bubble took them off their virtual Fourth Plinth, and started to tell the truth. That Farage is a multi-millionaire Putinist con-artist and landowner, who never gave a shit about the fate of the working class. That the true nature of Reform UK is their former MP Rupert Lowe having his sick 17yr-old dog shot in the head by his gamekeeper. Now, to contextualise, as the woke always urge us to do when they are losing an argument, let's look at the sequence of seat projections since the general. I have used only my own projections here, none from extraneous sources, to maintain continuity.

We can clearly see the tipping point, between the late April and the mid May projections. The only significant event in between was of course the English locals, where Reform UK did better than even themselves expected. That's when the metropolitan mediatariat started squealing, "Look, they have won Durham, Derbyshire and Doncaster, so they are the true party of the working class and Dear Nigel is the next PM". Reform's projected headcount peaked in late May, then started receding in every new projection. This strengthens my two pet theories about Reform UK. First, that this is just a transient phase, as was the Brexit Party's surge in Westminster polls after the unnecessary and useless 2019 European Parliament election. Second, that the bubble would burst faster if the media echo chamber had not frankensteined it into a self-fulfilling prophecy of their wettest dream. That the Birthing Parent Of All Battles, the British Armageddon, will be fought between wokeism and fascism, because that is the only clickbait material they have. May Dog protect us from those sanctimonious wankers.

You have no fucking idea of the raw, viscous sewage you are dog paddling in, do you? Why? Because you’re a moron.

(Selwyn Cresswell, Rake, 2014)

We believe what Anas Sarwar said was a form of sectarian politics and we don't like it one bit.

(Nigel Farage, 2 June 2025)

Nigel Farage obviously couldn't miss Scotland's main festive event of the year, the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse by-election campaign, and took the opportunity for a random cheap shot at the leader of Scottish Labour. Condemning sectarianism with a straight face was a bit rich coming from Oswald Mosley Reincarnate, and also targeted the wrong man. Anas Sarwar may not be totally irreproachable as far as communitarianism goes, but he is still several orders of magnitude less guilty of it than Humza Yousaf. But Farage knew that it wasn't worth wasting such a good zinger on Yousaf, who is a totally demonetised has-been on his way out, when Sarwar still entertains the ambition of being First Minister some day. And they all look alike anyway, don't they? The most striking part of Fromage's foray on Celtic ground was that the local candidate was nowhere to be seen or heard. Which looks like a clear admission that, just like in Lincolnshire, Reform UK have no grassrooted base here, and are left with second-hand loonies who would be the first to be embarrassed if they were elected. Sadly, it doesn't deter Scottish voters from turning to them in droves, as the trends of Westminster voting intentions show.

The Scottish Government's standing will not be improved by the new episode of the neverending Saga Of The Ferries. It is already fucking outrageous that the lone new ferry took longer to build than a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier six times her size. Then the locals were informed that the miracle ferry is in fact a fucking nightmare, as she is too big to fit in the harbour she was supposed to service. It is really incredible that absolutely nobody ever thought to check that, as if they expected the harbour to get bigger overnight. And now the replacement ferry that fits in the harbour is laid up despite having gone through extensive repairs. You just can't make that shit up, can you? This is exactly the kind of situation that fuels discontent and extreme reactions to it, and you see evidence of that in the month-by-month sequence of Scottish polls and seat projections for 2029, an all-inclusive aggregate of Full Scottish and Scottish subsamples of GB-wide polls. Interestingly, two of the four Westminster constituencies covering Ayrshire are among the six now predicted to switch to Reform UK. North Ayrshire and Arran, the setting for the current Ferry Drama, could be their seventh as it would need just a further 1% swing, on current polling, to switch from yellow to turquoise.

The plausibility of Reform UK gains now extends beyond their most obvious target in Brexit-leaning North Aberdeenshire. But can it last until the next general, when Farage is doing his best to discredit himself in the eyes of the Great Scottish Public with statements like, "We can con ourselves as much as we like, there’ll be more coal burnt this year than has ever been burnt in the history of mankind", taken verbatim from his guided tour of Hamilton? In China, India or Poland, maybe. But surely not in Scotland, where our prime asset is renewables, a bigger national treasure than Val McDermid. If Nigel had been briefed before his Tour of Lanarkshire, he would have known that no coal has been extracted anywhere in Scotland for a quarter of a century, and that the biggest colliery in Lanarkshire even closed a generation before that. But facts would probably not have changed Nigel's discourse, as Reform UK have embarked on a crusade to eliminate renewables from the Councils they now rule because, ye ken, climate change is a woke hoax. Thank Dog, then, for making performative fascists even stupider and more delusional than the cretinous Scottish variant of the woke mob.

One of the reasons that we’ve been doing well in Scotland is we’ve been attracting some very, very good, fresh talent.

(Nigel Farage, 2 June 2025)

You get to the top, and you realise it’s only really the middle.

(Tom Dawkins, Secret State, 2012)

We haven't had a new Holyrood poll since my last article, so it's as good a time as any to look back at what has been happening with these polls since the last election. Which we could dub The Resistible Rise Of Anas Sarwar or The Rise And Fall Of Scottish Labour. There have been 109 polls fielded and published over the last four years, so that gives us a pretty good representation of how the Great Scottish Public has evolved, ebbing and flowing between the SNP and Labour. Until an unexpected third player barged in on the stage, that is. Spoiler: it wasn't the Alba Party. The current trendlines of Holyrood voting intentions are consistent with the Westminster voting intentions, for the part after the 2024 general election, and they paint quite a different picture to the proverbially open, diverse and inclusive Scotland of the last generation.

The turquoise brain rot, just as bad as the woke mind virus, has definitely crawled its way to the North of Gretna Green. But is that such a shocker, in a nation where the Orange Order marches have been aided and abetted by successive administrations of the Glasgow City Council of different hues? They have made it even worse this year, blocking half the city to regular people, just to appease 900 fascist bigots. That's exactly the kind of cretinous decision that convinces people they can get away with being real fascist bigots openly displaying sectarian hate, while the lobotomised woke establishment turn a blind eye, too busy calling left-wing wrongthinkers fascist bigots. Anyway, what really matters and determines strategies is how that long sequence of polls translates into seats in the Scottish Parliament. There have been 109 polls since the last election, so I obviously did not project from each and every one. Instead, I focused on a sample of polls form the end months of each trimester. Summat like seasonal snapshots at each equinox and solstice, if you like.

It is quite fascinating to see how Scottish Labour were surfing an unstoppable wave of success in early 2024, that was definitely taking Anas Sarwar to Bute House, and then hit a brick wall in the fall. The pattern is quite familiar and we know what was behind it. In the run-up to the general election, lots of Scots, most of them SNP voters, made the tactical choice to vote for Labour at the general election because it was the surest way to kick out the Tories, and that was the priority of the day. And it trickled down into Holyrood voting intentions, as is often the case when a very strong trend appears in Westminster polling. That's how we got the plausible outcome of a Labour-led Lab-SNP coalition governing Scotland, in the last mile before the general. Then SNP switchers started returning to the fold quite early, before discontent hit in the fallout of Rachel Reeves' Autumn Budget speech that signalled the perpetuation of austerity under the guise of fiscal responsibility. Right now Labour's descent into the abyss has been stopped, possibly because Scottish voters are reframing their trauma after seeing Reform UK become as much of a force here as in England, which was not a given just a few months ago. Will it stand the test of time for one more year? Dog only knows.

I think the time for violins and camomile tea may be over.

(Ros Yelland, Secret State, 2012)

Once a blast furnace has been closed down, to actually reopen that particularly blast furnace is very very difficult. Nothing is impossible, but... it might be easier to build a new one.

(Nigel Farage at Port Talbot, 9 June 2025)

Nigel Fromage's visit to Wales again exposed him for the ignorant and incompetent charlatan he is. It started with is insistence on reopening coal mines, totally oblivious of Welsh reality, where parents' ambition for generations has been to get their boys working anywhere but in the pits. Then there was his weird fixation on reopening Port Talbot Steelworks, until somebody pointed that there are summat like 300 tons of molten iron at the bottom of each blast furnace. Well, not molten anymore, actually, but solidified, which makes putting them back in service a complete physical impossibility. Nothing that investing £4bn in a new one can't cure, retorted The Nige. Again totally ignoring that absolutely nobody would invest that kind of money on a project that wouldn't see the light of day for, like, another generation, when importing foreign steel is a lot cheaper and more profitable. Farage may be just a cunning honey-tongued quibbler, but the trends of Welsh polling say that the Great Welsh Public don't really see through the gaslighting.

Labour in Wales are obviously on a downward spiral, which was already visible at the 2024 general, and only hidden by the Conservatives' massive downfall. Labour's problem here is that, just like Scotland, it's a threesome. Just with any threesomes, he who wins is he who's on top, and Labour aren't on top any more. They are even dangerously close to being bottom, if YouGov's last Full Welsh is to be believed, which would be a fucking kick in the arse. The all-inclusive month-by-month trackers of aggregate voting intentions and seat projections shows how bad it is for Labour. Welsh electoral geography is such, and the tectonic plates are moving in such directions, that Labour would get fewer seats than Plaid Cymru, even on a larger share of the popular vote. That's clearly not what Eluned Morgan signed up for when she agreed to become the sacrificial Prif Weinidog Cymru. But her work here will be done a lot earlier than the next general election, if polling for next year's Senedd election is to be believed. Labour will then have no choice but to become Lewis to Plaid Cymru's Morse, if they really want to avoid giving Reform UK the PIN to the credit card and the keys to the cellar.

I think the best part of Farage's solicited column in WalesOnline was the reference to a Welsh DOGE. When the real one, Elton Muck's Frankenstein Monster, had already been totally discredited by Elmo himself. It has surfaced that DOGE has actually cost more to the American taxpayers than it saved, even after Elmo repeatedly lowered the amount of expected savings to a fraction of the extravagant amount initially announced. DOGE's record is also one of massive breaches of privacy, illegal actions and state intrusion into activities and organisations they have absolutely no no right to interfere with. Coupled with an obsessive fixation on eradicating Elmo's pet hate, the "woke mind virus", even where there is no trace of it. Make no mistake, I still have no patience for the toxic exclusionary woke ideology appropriating public services, but performative gesticulation like this can only strengthen the woketariat's narrative that they are the good uns. They aren't, contrary to what the metropolitan establishment want us to believe, but neither are born-again fascists like Reform UK, whom the same metropolitan establishment actually promotes instead of providing efficient tools to fight them off.

The establishment of Welsh DOGE will help us uncover where there is woke and wasteful spending and we will make sure those funds are redirected to frontline services.

(Nigel Farage, WalesOnline, 8 June 2025)

Your Press Officer looks like she’s growing an ulcer very fast.

(Ellis Kane, Secret State, 2012)

Nothing illustrates Welsh Labour's downfall better than voting intentions for the next Senedd election, due to be held on 7 May 2026. There had already been a massive warning in a poll fielded by YouGov in late April, that found Labour down to third place and gasping for air in the tiny space left by Plaid Cymru and Reform UK. A new poll from Find Out Now makes it even worse. Labour still finish third, but now Reform UK have overtaken Plaid Cymru and finish first. This is quite a harsh judgment on the party that is Devolution Incarnate and has ruled the nation for close to thirty years. The point is not even if they deserve it or not anymore. The point is that everybody at Labour HQ is in total panic and wondering if a massive drubbing in Wales could foreshadow another one at next general, and pretty much for the same reasons. The inability to properly respond to the people's concerns with inventive policies, and an inability to face their mistakes that is almost Trumpian in its disregard for reality. That's the message sent loud and clear by the evolution of Welsh voting intentions.

Of course, the situation could be worse than a Reform-Plaid one-on-one. There is still a strong party of the left left, even if they have been as misguided as all others over the last decade, with a constant confusion between 'woke' and 'progressive'. The seat projection shows again how the choice of small six-member constituencies, instead of a single national list, offers bonuses to the larger parties. It also makes it easier to find a majority. A Plaid-Lab coalition is predicted to get a majority, 48-47 after the Presiding Officer has been picked from the opposition benches, which they wouldn't get on a nationwide allocation of seats. The only pending issue is what Labour would demand in return for propelling Rhun ap Iorwerth to the corner office at Tŷ Hywel, an opportunity Plaid Cymru have been waiting for for a generation. Though, to be honest, they wouldn't be in a position to demand much, being outnumbered almost two-to-one by their prospective coalition partner. Sic transit...

Labour are also possibly paying the price for a pattern of instability, with as many First Ministers within one term as Scotland. Or as many as the country of my birth had Prime Ministers in the last year, or Germany had Emperors in 1888, or the Catholic Church had Popes in 1978. I could ramble on about that for a fortnight, but that would bore you, wouldn't it? The point is that it has shown a party in disarray with two leadership elections and a government crisis in five months, when what it needed most was credibility and stability, and it lost both. There was massive irony in the last stage of the crisis being triggered by the Conservatives, who had gone through worse turbulence themselves at Westminster barely two years earlier. But the opportunity was too good to be missed, as they had surely sensed some drama in Paradise, both between Labour and Plaid Cymru and within Labour itself. There is some obvious poetic justice in the fact that they are in no position of reaping the fruits at the next election, as their own deliquescence has granted Reform UK supremacy over the right. In Wales too, the dildo of consequences rarely arrives lubed.

I don’t know where this ends, but I know that it’s begun.

(Brian Boyce, The Gold, 2025)

That is how England works, love. Them lot have it and us lot nick it. That's what makes it fun.

(Kenneth Noye, The Gold, 2023)

I'm taking you now on a tour of the regions of England, starting with the North West. So, you know what you would be fun? Well, not Ricky Gervais-hilarious, but fun-ish. Reform UK fielding a candidate in Chorley against Lindsay Hoyle. After all, there is no law against standing against the Speaker. I'm not even sure you can properly call it a convention, it's more like a tradition, and not even a consensual one. Nigel Farage himself stood once against John Bercow, so why wouldn't Reform UK stand against Hoyle next time aboot? We know he is at best an ectoplasmic non-entity, which makes him fully deserving of his future ermine, unlike Bercow who was too much of a loose cannon. Of course, Hoyle is also summat of the perfect Speaker for the reign of Starmer, as they both come from the same factory where they genetically engineer crosses between drones and bores. With the current mood in the North, any serious Reform candidate waging a full-blown campaign could very plausibly unseat him. And that would be fun. Just look at the current projected vote shares across the regions of England, and how they hint that this may not be as far fetched as it sounds.

We still see the confluence of two dominant narratives here. One is Nigel Farage's, still posing as the working man's champion, even with his credentials and recent activity going in the totally opposite direction. The other is the media's, constantly undermining Keir Starmer, whatever he does. Well, that's where you'd probably retort that Starmer does a pretty good job undermining himself anyway. You might think that. I couldn't possibly comment. It is quite funny that the same media who are having a go at Starmer now and promoting the Greens, because Starmer is too much to the right, were queuing to sling shit at Jeremy Corbyn six years ago and hugging the LibDems, because Jezza was too much to the left. Of course, Starmer is kind of the lesser evil when you consider the atrocious pig's breakfast PM Corbyn would have made of Ukraine, Gaza, defence spending, the relationship with the EU and Iran, but Keir has definitely been handing the New Model British Union of Fascists the keys to the highway robbery of Westminster seats here, there and everywhere.

Then we must again salute the LibDems' performance, without the slightest hue of irony. They are predicted to hold their hard-won seats in Scotland, Wales, the North West, London and East Anglia. Their only loss to the Reform UK tsunami would be Newton Abbot in the South West. But they would more than make up for that with one gain in Yorkshire (Sheffield Hallam, snatched back from Labour), one in the West Midlands (South Shropshire, from the Conservatives), and a big four in the South East (East Hampshire, Farnham and Bordon, Godalming and Ash, Romsey and Southampton North, all from the Rump Tories). The best part here being of course unseating Jeremy Hunt at last, after a very near miss in 2024. You don't have to be a fan of Mister Ed's, which I'm clearly not, to grant them an A* for resilience and tenacity. And remember, if you are in the South West, just don't mess with the seagulls. But watch out for the bears.

I’m not good with cows. They always chase me, and I can tell when they’re going to do it by the way they look at me. A bit sideways. It’s the way they look at you, like they know something.

(Kelby Hartford, Beyond Paradise, 2025)

I’m scared of fish. I don’t like no fish. I don’t like the way they look at me. When I was little, a fish slapped me in the face in Brixton market and it freaked me out.

(Big Narstie)

What the evolution of polls reveals about the situation in London isn't good news for Keir Starmer either. Even on his home turf, Labour are around 10% down on the general election. The trendlines of Full Londoner polls don't show it vividly, only because of the in-built inertia of six-point moving averages when the data change rapidly, but the most recent Full Londoner even had Labour down 13% on 2024. But what the few Full Londoners fielded since the general election say is unmistakeable. Even in Red London, the Labour vote went into freefall after the Autumn Statement, and as many switched to Reform UK as to the Greens.

The damage, in term of projected seats, is limited because Labour started from much higher in London than in the rest of England. They clearly benefit from the combination of massive majorities in some sinkhole constituencies and a three-way split between the main oppositions. But even this still results in the loss of ten seats. It even allows the Rump Tories to sneak through the cracks and score gains, the only region of England where they do, adding insult to injury in Starmer's back garden. Labour's weakened position is also milk and roses for Jeremy Corbyn's Independent Alliance. If they survive until the next general, which they will, and manage to be granted real party status by the Electoral Commission, which they undoubtedly will too, they can inflict some serious damage on the Labour brand. Including, but not limited to, defeating Wes Streeting in Ilford. They nearly did it at the general, and now they have an even better opportunity.

What still makes the Imperial Capital an exception, for now, is that it still houses its fair share of the entitled metropolitan middle-class, who were fully behind Labour so long as it kowtowed to their fashionable bourgeois luxury beliefs. It's probably all over now, since Labour has set foot in reality again, more or less. They are really a big reservoir, tempted to go the same way as those who have already followed Owen Jones to the Dark Side Of The Green. You really never can underestimate the weight of stupidity when it is rooted in a fantasy of ideological purity, or how current events might influence the most radicalised of this lot. I will just let you reflect for now on the not really reassuring thought that recent events have proved that Khamenei and the rest of his mass-murdering theocratic clique have more supporters in Islington than in Tehran.

The thing about the British media is that it’s disproportionately populated with people who have this toxic combination of being very privileged, well connected, having no moral compass, being shameless careerists, having minimal intellectual curiosity but also being really thick.

(Owen Jones)

Nothing is of greater importance in time of war than making use of a fair opportunity when it is offered.

(Nicollo Machiavelli)

Just when you think the outside world is letting you focus on just Very British Matters, for once, summat happens that shatters your certainty. This time, it is the war between Iran and Israel, of course. Let me get one thing straight first. The Iranian theocracy is a complete abomination. Mass-murderers of their own people in the name of religious purity. Rabid anti-Semites seeking the destruction of Israel. Allies of the Russian Reich. Backers of all sorts of Islamo-Nazi terrorist militias. To put it bluntly, the world would be a better place if this regime was wiped out. This being said, this absolutely does not justify Israel's massive attack on Iran. Benjamin Netanyahu is again adopting the same attitude as Vladimir Putin in Ukraine, He has admitted it, the war goal is not the destruction of Iran's nuclear capability, it is a change of regime by the brute force of a foreign aggression. And, just like Putin asked Iran to order Hamas to commit the 7 October pogrom as a distraction from Ukraine, Netanyahu is using his aggression of Iran as a distraction from the atrocities committed in Gaza. In the early hours of this new conflict, YouGov speed-polled their panel about which side the UK should be on, and the answer is fortunately 'neither'.

This is exactly what we should do, stay the fuck away from that fucking can of worms. That's why Keir Starmer's knee-jerk reaction, to send a batch of planes to the Middle East and not deny they might not have orders to not help Israel "deflect" strikes from Iran, or summat, was both ill-advised and ill-timed. Of course, we have been inundated with bad-faith references to Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, which are valid only up to a point. First, the Iranian population is far more educated and certainly more able to "take back control" of their future than in the three aforementioned countries. Second, Iran has vast resources that can be mobilised for reconstruction once it is rid of the systemic corruption controlled by the Pâsdârân. Third, we no longer have a leader with summat of an obsessive messianic calling to go out and smash things up. Then, of course, there is the trivial matter of Iran getting nuclear weapons, which they have constantly been two months away from for the last thirty years. If you believe Benjamin Netanyahu, that is. But even the blind squirrel occasionally finds a nut. And that would be an excellent and morally defensible reason to intervene, if we hadn't turned a blind eye to Israel getting some, to the point where they may well have more than us. There is definitely a ratty smell of two-tier policies here. More In Common also polled our instant reactions to the opening stages of the confrontation, focusing on Iran's nukes and how important we feel it is to deny them possession.

Of course we do think that it is really important to prevent Iran from getting nukes that would actually work. Then I'm going to do what the woke far-left always urge us to do when they feel they are defending the indefensible. Contextualise. And if you do that, you quickly uncover the inconvenient truth. It's all Trump's fault. We did have a very efficient deal to keep Iran out of the nuke-owners' club, guaranteed by ourselves and a couple of others, including the USA. But it had a major flaw, it had been negotiated by Barack Obama. So the Orange Baboon obviously had to sabotage it and nullify it, not for any rational reason, but just out of jealousy and spite. And that granted the mullahcracy seven years of unchecked and uncontrolled preparations to come back to two months away from nuking Tel Aviv. Now this has put Trump II in total panic mode when he realised he was going nowhere with his threats to Iran, and he went begging Vladimir Putin for help, giving him in return more than he ever asked for, another brick in the wall of his betrayal of Ukraine. See how the pieces all fit together in a vicious circle? Having established that we do feel it is important to quash the mullahs' nuke frenzy, More In Common's follow up question was about what Britain should do next.

A strong plurality of Brits think we should apply the brute force of our military here. That same military we consider unfit for overseas operations, if you remember my previous instalment. But who cares about logic anymore anyway? Bear in mind that the only "military efforts", on the day the poll was conducted, were Israel's, and had taken the very Netanyahesque shape of indiscriminate strikes on residential areas, knowingly killing hundreds of civilians who have nothing to do with the nuclear programme. But Israel clearly considers it acceptable collateral damage if it helps getting rid of two dozen elderly nuclear scientists and military leaders. There is no happy ending to this for anyone, and it will also cause the death of hundreds of Israeli civilians who have nothing to do with their government's deranged policy of all-round aggression. It would be totally foolish, and that's a fucking euphemism, for us to get involved in that mess. Because that would invite Iranian retaliation, and we know which shape that could take. Iran haven't funded, armed and trained Hamas and Hezbollah for nothing. Even if very few of them remain after two and a half years of war with Israel, just a handful are enough to kill hundreds. We know it, they know it, we know they know it. And we also know they would do it, like cornered hyaenas, if it's the last order they give before Israel blows them up. So, just this once, it would be a fucking good idea if Starmer did what he does best. Sit on the fence.

For what can war but endless war still breed, till truth and right from violence be freed?

(John Milton)

That was an escalating sequence of misunderstandings.

(Douglas Baxter, The Gold, 2025)

A lot of bullshit has been spewed in the media in the course of the confrontation between Iran and the Israel-Trumpistan alliance, most of it unsurprisingly coming from the far-left. Most prominent was the narrative that the Iranian nuclear programme predates the Islamo-Nazi theocracy, which is bollocks because the Shah never contemplated the acquisition of nuclear weapons. All he wanted was nuclear power plants, to save on domestic consumption of oil and reroute it to the profitable international markets. The nuclear weapons programme proper did not start until probably 1989, as it is difficult to assign a sure starting date because of its secrecy, though hints had been sown as early as 1985. But that stayed under the radars, as it happened during the early days of the escalation, when the Orange Baboon was gesticulating and shaking his wee fist at Iran, threatening them with all sorts of abominations. A lesser option was helping Israel fight off Iranian strikes, which we had never contemplated for Ukraine against much more murderous Russian strikes, but a YouGov speed poll showed that the Great British Public were not really enthused at the thought.

If Keir Starmer ever needed a nudge to do nothing, that was it. With only a quarter of Brits willing to help Israel "defend itself" , and most of that coming from the right and far-right, that was an open and shut case. This was polled in the same period when Trump and Khamenei were having an increasingly aggressive mano-a-mano. Which, contrary to what 97% of Americans believe, does not mean 'man to man'. The Gotham City branch of YouGov jumped on the opportunity to poll the American public while it was happening, and what they found may not have been what they expected. Americans do think that Iran's nuclear programme is a threat to them, but they also think the USA should continue negotiating with Iran, and not get embroiled in their conflict with Israel. Even registered Republicans agreed with the majority, though they were more inclined to support a direct intervention. That should definitely have been food for thought for the Orange Baboon, before he was tempted to do something stupidly extreme or extremely stupid, in that war that would never have happened if he hadn't been President seven years ago.

Of course, the loony far left were not the only one talking out of their arse. The loony right, mostly undistinguishable from the deranged far-right, contributed too. Like Priti Patel zooming back full circle on the asinine concept of "illegal but legitimate" war, which I thought had been put to sleep forever by Iraq. This sounded weird when The Islington Gazette had reminded us, just the day before, that Starmer held the keys as he can deny the United States the use of the Diego Garcia base to launch strikes against Iran. Which, incidentally and ironically, is the direct result of the agreement with Mauritius, that the Conservatives initiated and then maligned as soon as Labour had sealed the deal. In the mean while, YouGov polled their American panel again and found out why they are so cautious and circumspect about the fucking thing. They are not convinced that beating the crap out of the mullahs will make the world, or even just Israel, a safer place. Even Trump voters, those who should be the first to yell "Go get 'em, Tiger" at the telly, are far from convincingly convinced.

Looks like the messianic evangelicals, those who think we must protect Israel at all costs because the Battle of Armageddon will be fought on a parking lot in Tel Aviv, or summat, have lost a lot of their influence on the MAGA nebula. Which does make the world safer. But we still can enjoy Owen Jones' screeching handbrake U-turn, siding with Iran when he had described the regime as tyrants a year ago, and then accused them of war crimes six months ago, admittedly a wee smitch under duress. But that was Shitweasel's true face because, ye ken, he hates Israel with such vigour that he has no issue with siding with a mass-murdering totalitarian regime that executes more people than the United States every year, lots of them freedom fighters, especially women and gays. Shitweasel was of course outraged by this caricature and denounced it in no uncertain terms, whining that he was again the victim there in his unsufferable faux posh nasal voice. But why should we not mock and ridicule a loony woke faux leftist who quotes Tulsi Gabbard, a known Russian agent planted in the Trump administration, and summons Tucker Carlson, Putin's best mercenary propagandist, as character witnesses for the mullahs?

There is nothing to be learned from history anymore. We're in science fiction now.

(Allen Ginsberg)

Forgiveness is a very powerful item when paired with sone Tomahawk cruise missiles.

(Ros Yelland, Secret State, 2012)

Of course, all of the above was polled before the Orange Baboon decided to go all rogue and bomb the crap out of the mullahs, and Keir Starmer assumed the nodding dog position on the rear shelf of the Tesla. Mind you, I totally agree that Iran's nuclear programme is, or was, "a grave threat to international security", because they pretty much said so themselves. But there were better ways to deal with it than opening the floodgates for all Iran-apologists squealing about illegal war, which it clearly and undoubtedly was, but should be the least of our concerns right now. The real world worry about Iran's reaction to Trump's act of war, and we just don't give a shit about the legality of it, or lack thereof. Not when the threat of Iranian retaliation is hanging over everybody's head in the Satanic West. Why is the Woke Internationale so eager to focus on Trump's faults exclusively, and totally ignore the mullahs' two generations of corruption and crime? Don't answer that, it is a rhetorical question. As you might expect, YouGov's New York Branch Office instantly speed-polled their panel, first about their level of support for the bombings. The Orange Baboon probably expected some patriotic urge to rally around the flag, and he didn't get it.

Only a third of Americans support the bombings, and a third of those just mildly, you could almost say reluctantly. The generational and regional divides are quite traditional, though Trump probably expected more support in the Midwest. But the most significant remains the political divide. Failing to convince registered Independents is a major weakness, as both main parties need this part of the electorate to win elections. The test will only come 16 moths from now, with the 2026 midterms. What the usual MAGA narrative totally overlooks is that they are actually very weak, with only a five-seat majority in the House of Representatives. Trump sowing the seeds of doubt in the public's mid may be just what the Democrats need to take back control. And YouGov's next two speed-polls show that the American public doubt that any of Trump's war goals, as far as we can discern them, has been achieved.

Only a quarter of Americans believe that the aggression of Iran has made them safer. Even worse, only half of registered Republicans think so. They are also far from convinced that the strikes have inflicted a lot of damage to Iran's nuclear capability, which was at the heart of the Orange Baboon's narrative in the immediate aftermath. Inflicting just a little damage is what Israel had already done before, so what the fuck? What was the point of sending massive 150-ton bombers 18 hours away from their base in Missouri, if they couldn't even finish what the Israelis had started? Iran are totally playing on that doubt, claiming that only minimal damage has been inflicted to the now world-famous facility at Fordow. Well, they would, wouldn't they? There is even a new plotline emerging now, that Fordow may have been a decoy, and the actual activities moved months ago to still unidentified facilities elsewhere. But the main focus has shifted to what may happen next, rather than what may have happened last week, and YouGov also polled the American public's assessment of some scenarios.

The American public clearly are realists, if not optimists. Yes, this is only the beginning of a wider war with Iran. Yes, they have the means to strike us at home and they will, but the most likely targets are our bases overseas. Iran actually started retaliation, with a strike on the Al Udeid base in Qatar, which is one of advanced headquarters of the United States Central Command. But, to the everlasting shame of all involved, it was revealed the day after that it had been a jointly-scripted fake, agreed between Iran and Qatar. What was briefly thought to be a hors-d'œuvre of terror to come turned out to be just a stunt in a game of smoke-of-mirrors. But the YouGov speed-polls, being Americano-centered, forgot the option that should be a genuine concern for us. The plausibility of terrorist attacks elsewhere in the West, remote-controlled from Tehran. This is certainly possible because, ye ken, to Iranians we all look the same, part of their own version of the Axis Of Evil. A lot will certainly depend on our government's attitude, and we can only hope Starmer does nothing that may trigger the excessively touchy Iranians, even if it makes Trump unhappy. Because we certainly have more to fear from them right now than from him.

The duty of a true patriot is to protect his country from its government.

(Thomas Paine)

It is very difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

(Voltaire)

After the dust had settled on the holes in the rock at Fordow, and Donald Trump couldn't stop bragging about obliterating something that possibly wasn't even there, YouGov went back to their British panel with some follow-up questions. First of all was about the way we feel our government handled the whole fucking mess. Twice as many felt that they handled it badly as thought they handed it well. Colour me surprised. This might, just might, have something to do with David Lammy deflecting and obfuscating while accusing Iran of deception and obfuscation. We don't even know what Lammy actually thinks, because he refused to say. Can you imagine what its's like to hear the Foreign Secretary speaking on national radio of his own free volition, and then going 'no comment' at every question? Nobody would opine that he handled that well, not any shade of 'well'.

At least we had been reassured by the Prime Minister himself that the United States did not use our base at Diego Garcia. Not because we denied them permission, but because they didn't ask, though B-2 bombers are frequent visitors there. Which was all for the best, as we would have been forced to tell them, "Soz, mates, can't help you with that because it's illegal by your own rules, so fuck off". Then we also had The Islington Gazette telling us that Starmer had backed the US strike on Iran. The only problem, when you watch their own video embedded in the article, and I have watched it twice to be sure, is that he never says that. He mentions the attack very briefly and indeed quite neutrally, and never attaches a qualifier to it. Weird that they would deliberately lie and mislead about that, innit? But, no matter what Starmer said or didn't say, the Great British Public do not support the strikes. Again, twice as many of us think it was wrong as think it was right. And we don't even need to debate which shade of wrong. Morally? Legally? Tactically? Don't give a shit, mates, just plain fucking wrong.

Sadly, during the worst of these hard times, we were denied the benefit of words of wisdom from the Moral Authority above all Moral Authorities, Owen Jones. He stopped transmitting on BlueShite at 14:46 on Solstice Day and did not surface again until 16:11 on the 23rd, and not even posting ideas of his own. Should we ask The Met to investigate his whereabouts during this two-day blackout? Maybe it was just his handler at the Iranian Embassy putting him on hold, as the mullahs hadn't agreed yet on which exact wording their British agents should use to paint them as the innocent victim here. Say what you will about Philby and Maclean, but at least the Soviet agents of yore had some aura of old-fashioned cloak-and-dagger panache about them, that the tedious current variant of The Enemy Within totally lack. The Third Man vs Emilia Pérez, sort of. But Thank Dog we do not need Shitweasel to mansplain us what we should think about the United States, and what we told YouGov about that is pretty clear.

It's one-to-four this time, in favour of those who think we must keep the Orange Baboon's clique of sycophants at arm's length and instead seek our autonomy of thought and decision. Even Reform UK voters have got the memo, if Nigel Farage hasn't. Contrary to Frank Zappa's famous opinion on jazz, the Special Relationship is dead, and it smells funny too, like the corpse of a diplodocus in the primeval savannah. The United States' influence has metastasised in the English body politic the same way Russian influence metastasised in German politics and economy at the turn of the millennium. But, if they were able to shake it off, so can we. A good way to show that kind of determination would be to repatriate Peter Mandelson from his gilded sinecure in Washington, and appoint somebody who dares speak the only language Trump's Court understands, that of strength, even brute force if necessary. Someone who wouldn't be afraid to remind them that the most 'special' part of the relationship was Suez, not Iraq. Does Sly Keir have the baws for that, or will he need to borrow some?

I met Murder on the way, he had a mask like Castlereagh, very smooth he looked, yet grim

Seven blood-hounds followed him, all were fat, and well they might be in admirable plight

For one by one, and two by two, he tossed them human hearts to chew, which from his wide cloak he drew

(Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Masque Of Anarchy, 1819)

Christopher Russell Edward Squire

Kingsbury, London Borough of Brent, 4 March 1948 - Phoenix, Arizona, 27 June 2015

Jeremy's Den

27/06/2025

Run With The Fox On To The Dawn Of Tomorrow

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The Bullshit Never Stops