Jeremy's Den: March 2026

When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.
(A. A. Milne, Winnie The Pooh, 1926)

Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.

(Henry David Thoreau)

Today we celebrate one of the Icons Of The Seventies, Spinal Tap before Spinal Tap. The late great Keith Emerson, who sadly left us ten years ago today. He was a legend in his own lifetime, with a distinguished career with The Nice, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Emerson, Lake & Powell, 3 and Emerson, Lake & Palmer again. You're going to get bits of all of them on today's soundtrack. And Keith Emerson genuinely deserves writing credits for all the songs and pieces his successive bands covered, because he went far beyond the usual "arranged by" and added lots of his own writing to all of them. How else do you think Fanfare For The Common Man ended up three times as long as Aaron Copland's original composition?

Remember to click on the images for bigger and better versions.

Let's focus now on what really matters and examine, dissect and discuss what has been The Realm's Great Matter for the last two weeks, the infamous Gorton and Denton by-election, the one the punditariat carefully circumnavigated because they didn't know what to make of it, and yet blew up to their faces in the most petulant way, as the Greenies bagged a fucking lot more votes than anyone expected. But that does not make them the best party to beat Reform, as Zack Polanski instantly claimed. Because the Greenies gained G&D on a scam. The new MP, Hannah The Plumber, carefully avoided mentioning their unlimited devotion to the imaginary "trans rights" and their asininely irresponsible Putin-appeasing defence policy during the campaign, but both will inevitably come back centre stage during a general election campaign, and cost them dearly. As I said before the by-election, G&D choosing the lesser evil because the alternative was so much more abhorrent does not mean that the whole of England should follow. With Polanski at Number Ten, British exceptionalism would morph into British isolationism, and that would be as cretinous and damaging as Benito Farage at Number Ten.

But who's to blame for Labour's apocalyptic result? I would say David Cameron because, ye ken, when in doubt, always blame Cameron, but that's a bit passé now. The fascist candidate Matthew Goodwin was refreshingly faithful to his ideological roots and true nature, blaming a conspiracy of the Muslims and the woke for his own defeat, just like his forebears in the 1930s would have blamed the Jews and the Freemasons. But the punditariat blame Starmer, to nobody's surprise, as their columns had written themselves many days ago already. Unsurprisingly, The Reformgraph were the first to go all tallyho on Starmer, with a very dubious seat projection based on the very hypothetical scenario that the G&D voting patterns would be repeated GB-wide. Which is as likely to happen as Andy Burnham defecting to Reform, but never mind. All that matters is to stoke the fire of discontent against Starmer within Labour, hoping it will lead to a coup that would spawn government instability and further weaken them.

There are about 631 reasons this scenario is total fucking bullshit, one for every constituency outwith Northern Ireland that is not Gorton and Denton. There is also a definite feel of improvisation and bad faith in it, as the headcounts do include the Scottish and Welsh seats for the main three English parties, but do not include the SNP and Plaid Cymru. Then a simulation based on the G&D results obviously made no fucking sense in Scotland and Wales and The Reformgraph noticed it, but they couldn't be arsed to restrict their fantasy scenario to the English seats only. But what matters more is the actual intent behind that totally bogus fairy tale. It is quite clear that it is not meant to help Labour. Is this the start of a new self-fulfilling prophecy, no longer about the irresistible rise of Reform, but about Labour being doomed by a pincer movement from the left and right? Time will tell, but some in the fash-enabling metropolitan media bubble surely think it is a valid option to reframe the debate as a fash-on-woke Clash Of Titans, as loopy Che Polanski has already done.

What I take from it is that people want to see the Labour party, the Labour government, shouting more loudly about our values, about our story.

(Lucy Powell, 27 February 2026)

So many of our traditional allies wring their hands and clutch their pearls, humming and hawing about the use of force.

(Pete Hegseth, 2 March 2026)

But the World's Great Matter now lies miles away from the outskirts of Manchester, it's in the plains, mountains and cities of Iran. You may have forgotten it, as the continuous frenzy of the news cycles tends to give us a short attention span and a short memory span, especially when Donald Trump and his constantly changing whims are involved, but the United States and Israel were already embroiled in an illegal war with Iran nine months ago. It was the Twelve-Day War, allegedly fought to destroy Iran's nuclear capabilities, and it was a fucking failure, despite Trump's claims that he had single-handedly destroyed all Iranian nuclear facilities. So Trump and Netanyahu definitely had to start another war, even it it was illegal under United States law and in violation of every bit of international law. Everybody saw it coming, so of course the American branch office of YouGov polled it at regular intervals. The Great American Public were strongly against the intervention before it happened, became more supportive immediately after it happened, and have gone back to pretty much their pre-attack position, which is clearly bad for Trump, though he doesn't give a shit.

The total downfall of the regime would be extremely welcome news, but this is definitely not Trump's main war goal, whatever he may have said in one of his short moments of lucidity. It's not even the defence of Israel against a more or less credible "nuclear threat", it's much more down to Earth. It's mostly about protecting the United States' other allies in the region, mostly Saudi Arabia, because there is still a fucking shitload of lucrative business deals to be made with them. QED. Simples. YouGov nevertheless also probed their American panel about military action specifically aimed at regime change, the overthrow of Khamenei. It is a bit of a moot point now that he is no longer with us, especially when Pete Hegseth made it painfully clear that regime change and the restoration of democracy were not on the table, if they ever were. And that was never a really popular option anyway, even if people appeared more split about it in the last week before the assault.

YouGov's continuous tracking of the American public's stance on Iran has identified Trump's Achilles' Heel. Time is not on his side, while the Iranians are acting as if they had all the time in the world. Which makes sense when you consider that the American military have already sounded the alarm about an incoming shortage of ammunition, which would leave them as defenceless against Iran as they have left Ukraine against Russia. Fucking Karma. We are already past YouGov's first deadline of just one week, and Trump has painted himself into a corner when he mentioned a Hundred-Days War, or that it could even last until September, which would be seven months. The more it lasts, the more Trump loses support, especially among the Independents, if he ever had them. This is an important factor in American politics, as no President can call himself really successful if he does not have significant support among Independents. The Orange Baboon has failed to get it, and it will come back to bite his fat arse at the Midterms.

The most shameful part of the sequence of events is that Trump literally baited the Iranian protesters into action in late January, which led to the mass murder of at least 32,000 and probably many more by the Pasdaran and the Basiji, and did jack shit when it happened. Reza Pahlavi, who was obviously kept out of the loop by the Trump administration, also openly incited a popular rising, despite being fully aware of what the regime's militias were capable off to silence any opposition. Both have barrels of blood on their hands. But what happens next? A Venezuela scenario, where the remnants of the previous leadership are allowed to limp on, is highly unlikely. Negotiating anything with the Iranian authorities will not be easy either if Israel keeps unaliving them while they are trying to select their new Führer. Whatever the option, we should not really trust the current Veep, who is so ignorant of basic historical facts that he doesn't know that both World Wars ended with the unconditional surrender of our enemies, or knows it and was deliberately lying to serve a pre-scripted narrative.

If you go back to World War II, if you go back to World War I, if you go back to every major conflict in human history, they all end with some kind of negotiation.

(J.D. Vance, Huffington Post, 24 August 2025)

We're going to go on offense, not just on defense, maximum lethality, not tepid legality, violent effect, not politically correct.
(Pete Hegseth, The Independent, 5 September 2025)

Have you noticed the weirdest part of the American assault on Iran? The operation is called Epic Fury. Can you see it now? Initials E.F. like in Epstein Files. Someone was definitely taking the piss, and neither the Orange Baboon nor any of his minions noticed. Fucking hilarious. On the very first day of the strikes, in a perfect distraction from the Epstein Mess, Trump got his first major hit, pun fully intended, when Führer Ali Khamenei was unalived under the rubble of his safe secret compound in downtown Tehran. Or, more plausibly, Mossad did score that hit as the Americans would never have known when and where to strike if the Israeli had not shared the information they gathered from the huge number of agents they have planted up to the highest levels of the Islamo-Nazi theocracy. It was profitable for Trump, albeit briefly, as YouGov's instant speed-polling showed that the American public leaned towards approving Khamenei's elimination, though not by the massive margin the Orange Baboon probably expected.

Then, after the news cycles had fully digested the event and spat it out as no longer exciting enough, it was time to revive the time-honoured debate about the legality and justification of Trump's actions. His decision to start the war was clearly illegal as the United States Constitution states that Congress holds the power to declare war. Even Franklin Delano Roosevelt sought Congressional approval after Pearl Harbor, when there was a genuine emergency and an immediate threat. Even George W. Bush sought Congressional approval before starting the Iraq War. But Trump does not care about such formalities, and it is starting to fuel discontent even in the ranks of the Republican Party, which has always been the party of the constitutional fundamentalists. The end results is that only minorities of the American public agree with Trump's claim that his actions were legal, and he does not even have his usual overwhelming support from registered Republicans.

You could even argue that Trump himself opened the can of worms and created the threat when he withdrew form the international agreement to limit the Iranian nuclear program, out of spite and for no other reason that it had Obama's name on it. The threat level had actually been lowered by the agreement and constant surveillance of Iran's nuclear program, and Trump revived it with his massively hostile attitude. The Iranian leadership could also only feel emboldened by Trump's continuous show of weakness in his dealings with Russia. His only escape route was then to exaggerate the threat, totally contradicting his earlier narrative that Iran's nuclear capability had been totally wiped out last year. This only fueled a significant sens of doubt among the American public, who are not even convinced that the attacks on Iran were justified. They could probably have overlooked the legality issues if they had been convinced that a real and immediate threat justified the intervention, but Trump himself has nullified that argument with his multiple inconsistencies and lack of clear strategy.

Now the Orange Baboon will have a lot of mansplaining to do, especially with his own electorate. After all, he was elected on a solid pledge to never get involved in "forever wars" ever again, bragged he was the only President who had never started a war, and that he had even ended seven. Or it may have been eight, including the one between Ruritania and Jarhanpur. And now he has already got seven American servicemen killed, even before any face-to-face confrontation has happened, and is toying with the idea of sending more into harm's way. Because anything that is not a business transaction is a game to him, and next week he will demand the Nobel Peace Prize because killing the Ayatollah Supremo was a giant leap towards world peace. And so was the murder of 165 innocent people at a school, presumably. As I said earlier, we must exercise extreme cynicism in assessing everything Trump does. So the real question is where the root causes of the aggression of Iran lie, in the past or in the future? A distraction from the Epstein Files or a preemptive justification for suppressing the midterms? Your guess is as good as mine.

I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground. Like every president says, "There will be no boots on the ground", I don’t say it. I say "probably don’t need them", or "if they were necessary".

(Donald Trump, New York Post, 2 March 2026)

I find it interesting that Democrats keep going after President Trump, the greatest president in American history.

(Pam Bondi, 11 February 2026)

Like all far-right populists going down the road of uncontrolled authoritarianism, a significant part of Trump's narrative is that he does enjoy popular support because he embodies patriotism and common sense. This is a total fabrication, and his job approval ratings are here to prove it. YouGov surveyed them fortnightly all along his first term, and again since the unfortunate occurrence of a second term, proving beyond reasonable doubt that the American people never approved of the way he was handling his job, except for a brief honeymoon period in the first month of the second term. It did not last, and his job approval quickly sank to lower levels than at any time during the first term. The last time YouGov checked, 59% of Americans disapproved of the way the Orange Baboon is handling his job, and only 38% approved.

Keir Starmer would kill for an approval rating of 38%, but never forget that American popularity ratings are to British popularity ratings what Fahrenheit are to Celsius. In the Thirteen Colonies, 38% is a Mariana Trench grade low, as a President worth his salt should always be over 50% so he can brag his support goes beyond his own party. Trump doesn't even have the support of all Republicans and, quite ironically, the fanatical MAGA zealots are the most likely to desert him as he has broken pretty much all the cast-in-stone campaign pledges he made to secure their votes. Including a brand new foreign war that is built to last and cost American lives, on top of gas, which is American for petrol, and PB&J sandwiches becoming as unaffordable as healthcare. YouGov did not just probe the overall rating, but also surveyed what the American public think of the way Trump is handling a large array of issues that are part of their everyday concerns.

Trump has subpar approval ratings on the key issues that will undoubtedly be at the core of the campaign for the midterms, if the Democrats up their game and put their act together. This is the typical opportunity where a Mamdani-like "progressive populism" is their best strategy, focusing on very concrete issues like the cost of living and jobs, instead of fuzzy ideological principles. The American public are also dissatisfied with the inept way the Trump administration has handled the Epstein Files, so Democrats definitely must keep that under the spotlight. YouGov couldn't resist polling two minor but yet significant issues. The renaming of the Kennedy Center, which has already happened and massively hurt it, and the renaming of Washington's Dulles Airport, which hasn't but is proposed by some MAGA zealot in Congress. The American public definitely hate these displays of hubris, which do not improve Trump's global standing. The full array of issues surveyed by YouGov reveals that he does not have even one positive rating, even on national security, despite his constant embellishment of his achievements.

The American public are even hugely critical of Trump's foreign policy decisions. He even has a net double-digit negative on the two hottest issues of the day, Ukraine and Iran. Foreign policy is rarely at the centre of the American public's concerns, and is unlikely to be a deciding factor at the midterms. But the cumulative effect of discontent over all issues will be, and it would be quite karmic if Iran became the last drop that breaks the camel's back. Right now, I can't wait to see what the American public will make of the Orange Baboon's totally surreal statement, that another ayatollah succeeding Khamenei would be an acceptable outcome, which is obviously not what the Iranian population want. Christo-fascists cuddling Islamo-Nazis, who'd have thunk? But it does make fucking sense if you consider that the United States are not focused on the restoration of freedom and democracy in Iran, but on the best way to extract profits from the country's natural resources. You see it now, don't you?

We expect casualties with something like this, but in the end it's going to be a great deal for the world.

(Donald Trump, 3 March 2026)

I hear a lot of folks say, if it wasn’t for the US, the French would be speaking German. But if it wasn’t for the French, you’d be speaking Cherokee. I'm sorry, did that hurt your brain?

(Michael Borland, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, 2003)

The upside of American politics is that it is still a straightforward two-party system between Republicans and Democrats. So, unlike here, you do not have to worry about voters crisscrossing the political compass in a Brownian movement, it's all just about Red-to-Blue and back. Of course, at the moment you don't see any Blue-to-Red, as the Republicans go from setback to setback at by-elections even in Deep Red states, while the assorted Green and Libertarian loonies watch from the cheap seats at the back. The trends of generic polling confirm that Democrats now dominate voting intentions, though the margin is just about 5%, so it does not look like a massive rejection of the Republican Party. Yet.

Of course, Trump is already thinking about rigging or suppressing the midterms by all means necessary. If he can afford a $1bn-a-day war to distract from the Epstein Files, then his corporate donors can afford a $1bn-a-day campaign to rig the elections and keep the Putinists in charge of the USA. Elon Muck bought him the Presidency two years ago, and there's already a queue around the block to buy him Congress this year. There is also still some gerrymandering going on, that I have factored in for my seat projection. Republican gerrymandering in Texas and Democratic gerrymandering in California cancel each other. But further Republican gerrymandering in Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio grant them an advantage of four seats. Which is relevant only if the elections are very close, which is not the case right now, unless the Trumpian mob succeed with massive voter suppression, which they have already put in motion.

A lot is at stake in the Senate elections too. Pundits are watching those day after day with special attention, as the key issue is whether or not Democrats can take back control of both chambers of Congress. This is extremely likely, for now, for the House of Representatives, but is a lot more uncertain for the Senate. State by state polling, combined with the punditariat's predictions, say that Democrats could flip three Republican seats. Which would result in a perfect 50-50 tie in the Senate, with J.D. Vance called to the rescue to cast tie-breaking votes every now and then.

Sadly, Democrats will have to do better than that as their own John Fetterman of Pennsylvania has made it a habit to vote with Republicans even on controversial nominations, like Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin to the Department of Homeland Security, after the Orange Baboon sacked dog murderer Kristi Noem for being so crassly incompetent that even he noticed. So they would have to secure 52 seats to be totally on the safe side, which is far from a done deal. Unless serendipity is on their side and "progressive populist" James Talarico flips a Texas Senate seat to Team Blue for the first time since 1988. Polls already rate that race as a tossup, which is American for marginal, and it may very well get worse after the Orange Baboon infuriated the local MAGA mob by endorsing incumbent John Cornyn in the Republican primary against MAGA favourite Ken Paxton. If Cornyn survives a savage primary, and is selected thanks to Trump's endorsement, it would take only a fraction of the local MAGA staying at home in protest on Election Day to toggle the seat, and put Trump in fucking deep shit. Ohio is the other possibility, and possibly closer to the edge than Texas. Bonus is that it would add karma to injury, as this was J.D. Vance's seat before he ascended to the Vice Presidency.

Freedom has more often been lost in small steps by progressive incrementalism than it has been by catastrophic upheavals such as violence or war.

(James Madison)

This is an illegal war of aggression. If the cheerleaders of this crime succeed, our world will descend into bloody chaos.

(Owen Jones, 1 March 2026)

We have all witnessed the loopy woke far-left exercising an awkward amount of restraint towards the mass-murdering Islamo-Nazi theocracy of Iran, just as they have a hard time condemning the genocidal fascist Russian Reich. It has an ironic side for me, as my full and honest assessment of the illegal and unlawful US-Israeli attacks would make me sound like Vladimir Putin or Owen Jones, which would be fucking embarrassing. But I will not shed a tear for the Butcher of Tehran, who was after all a legitimate target once the operation had started. Strongly condemning it as a matter of principle doesn't mean you cannot be satisfied with the results, does it? The loopy far-left are still stuck in a cretinous Weltanschauung where anyone opposing the White White West is by definition a hero and a freedom fighter, even if they massacre their own people by the thousands and fund international terrorism. Thank Dog the Great British Public don't fall for that asinine ideology, as J.L. Partners found when they probed us about our levels of concerns over some salient features of the Islamo-Nazi theocracy.

I guess we can equate "concern" with "disgust" here, or at the very least "opposition", given the deeply abhorrent nature of the regime's most publicised actions. By the way, you know what a public hanging in Iran looks like if you have watched the third series of Homeland, and what happens to Nicholas Brody in the last episode. Homeland may have been promoting all sorts of simplistic bullshit, but that part was true, as the Iranian authorities themselves had provided evidence that it is how it is done. The Taliban also hanged dogs the same way after Trump had given them back the keys to Kabul. The second third of the poll's selected topics refer to Iranian tactics to gain influence among us, that are strikingly similar to those used by Russia and, to a lesser extent, China. And, quite ironically, by the United States since the very unfortunate return of Donald Trump. And it is definitely very reassuring that we are hugely concerned by such practices, and hopefully not just when Iran is indulging in them.

It is good to see that we are aware of the dangers of entryism in our institutions by radicalised Islamists, and don't fall for the loopy woke far-left's bogus accusations of islamophobia. If we are ready to fight off infiltration by Mossad, the FSB and Trumpian Christo-fascists, then it is also legitimate to fight off the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the ideological inspiration of Hamas and has been banned as a terrorist organisation in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. The final five items again show a healthy level of concern about Iran's actions on the international scene. This is of course not a competition in evil between Iran and Russia, Israel or the United States. We should also refrain from relativising and contextualising, as the woke far-left always do to seek excuses for their inconvenient pet causes abroad. Evil is absolute and can't be excused, and I don't fucking care if Trump is more evil than Khamenei, or if Nakba justifies Hamas.

Of course, the abominations committed by the Islamo-Nazi theocracy since 1979 do not make Trump's and Netanyahu's initial decision to attack, and all that followed, less illegal. But that also raises deeper questions about all those, progressive or not, who have stood up for the absolute primacy of international law and treaties. What did the sanctimonious preachers of international law do when Israel was razing Gaza to the ground? Fuck all. What did these white knights do to prevent Russia destroying and enslaving Ukraine? Too little, too late, always. They were paralysed by the self-inflicted terror of "escalation" and "provocation", thusly affirming and validating the aggressive strategy of the mass-murdering bully, Vladimir Putin. The pattern repeats itself with Donald Trump. Those who won't submit are threatened. Those who submit too late are insulted and demeaned. For all others, submission becomes the default setting of self-preservation. The defenders of international law, with their mix of procrastination and cowardice, have killed it just as effectively as Trumputin. We had seen that movie before, in 1938, and yet we never learn.

The Americans showed all our so-called multi-step strategists how war should actually be fought.

(Maksim Kalashnikov, 3 March 2026)

We were not involved in the initial strikes on Iran, and we will not join offensive action now, but we will protect our people in the region, and support the collective self-defence of our allies.

(Keir Starmer, 2 March 2026)

Keir Starmer is a very unlucky man indeed. He has now reaped the worst of both worlds about Iran, getting flak from everywhere including from within the Labour Party. Now, you could also say he fucking asked for it, as this time he did not just fuck up, he managed to fuck up the fuckup. He is no Churchill, that's true, as Churchill was fluent in repainting his fuckups as strokes of genius. First Starmer was chastised by the right for denying Trump the use of Diego Garcia and Fairford. Then he was chastised by the left for allowing it, and again by the right for allowing it too late. What a fucking conundrum. It's the kind of own goal that could have been avoided if Starmer had followed his initial instinct, which was the right one, or just listened to the voice of the people, which was readily available though YouGov polls.

A week before the attacks, we opposed allowing Trump to use bases in the UK. Four days after the first strikes, we opposed U-turning and allowing Trump to use bases in the UK. It was clear and consistent, even if some of us fell for the stunt that it was just for "defensive attacks", of course mostly on the Tory and Reform sides. The root cause of this is that we oppose the American and Israeli war against Iran. It was polled five times during the first ten days of the war, by YouGov twice, BMG Research, Opinium and Survation, with really similar results. Opposition is obviously stronger on the left, but even Conservative voters show some reluctance to support Trump, and Reform voters are not unanimously behind Nigel Farage sucking Trump's dick and offering him advice at Mar-a-Lago on how to destabilise the UK government, a move that would have got him hanged, drawn and quartered under Henry VIII, for conspiring with a foreign power against the interests of the Kingdom. And his head displayed on a pike in Clacton, the first time ever most people of the town would have seen him.

The Survation poll, fielded six days after the first strikes, also tested several courses of action and showed again that we are collectively not willing to go to war alongside Trumpistan. There is definitely a strong element of legalism and appropriateness deep within the British psyche. Or it may just be the distant memories of Iraq combined with our intense dislike of the current tenant of the White House. What's left of it, that is. I am only surprised that we oppose arming the British Overseas Territories to the teeth, as the two most at risk of an Iranian attack already are military bases, Akrotiri and Diego Garcia. We were reminded of the hazardous position of the Cyprus bases twice recently, and all we could do at first was send them John Healey, as the destroyer Keir Starmer had decided to dispatch there needed five days to reach her station, on top of three whole days for replenishment at Portsmouth to make her battle-ready. The odd part is that HMS Dragon was still moored in the middle of nowhere off the harbour six days after the announcement, left only on the Seventh Day, and will not sail at her full speed of 33 knots to Cyprus, but at a more leisurely 20 knots, despite the stated urgency of the situation. But, when you think of it, Gibraltar may be more at risk now, as Trump may be tempted to seize it by force after Spain denied him permission to use the naval facility at Rota.

Keir Starmer's precarious situation was highlighted quite cruelly on the evening on 3 March when Emmanuel Macron addressed the French on live television, which I did watch because I keep track of what's happening in the country of my birth. Manny did not drone on as usual about concepts and principles, but went straight to the point in just nine minutes. Most salient announcements were that the French destroyer Languedoc had been deployed to Cyprus and was already on station, twelve days ahead of our HMS Dragon's ETA. And that the Charles de Gaulle strike group was sailing to the Eastern Mediterranean, to fulfill France's commitments to the defence of its allies in the Gulf area. France does not have a base in Cyprus. None of the Gulf states were ever French colonies or protectorates. That's our turf there, and Macron put us to shame by doing more, better and more quickly than us to defend them against Iranian retaliatory strikes. Of course, Macron has two aces up his sleeve that Starmer does not have. Toulon is closer to Cyprus than Portsmouth, and will remain so in the foreseeable future. More importantly, France has a genuinely fully independent defence, including the nuclear component, totally free of interference by the United States.

You have now confirmed that UK bases will be used by the US for their operations in the area. This is a significant concession to President Donald Trump and one which risks drawing the UK into a dangerous conflict.

(Ellie Chowns MP, 3 March 2026)

The Prime Minister’s failure to be a reliable ally to the United States in this moment has placed the US-UK relationship under a lot of strain, and that is a cause for concern.

(Robert Jenrick MP, 3 March 2026)

Now the important part is what we think we should do, what we think our governement should do. I guess we have to tell them, as Keir Starmer sounds like he doesn't really know. That's what happens when you painted yourself into a corner with contradictory decisions in quick succession, and it surely does not help that Trump too doesn't seem to have a firm direction and is dangling various options under our noses in a completely disorderly way. This explains why our pollsters are a bit in limbo over the whole situation, not really knowing what alternative options they should survey. Survation chose to advance very cautiously, limiting their probe to just a ternary choice between very generic options. The lack of detail, and of specific practical courses of actions, explains why almost half of us opined that we should stay clear of the whole mess and avoid taking a stand.

It is quite surprising that only one out of five Brits want to actively oppose Trump's war, which is a very legitimate choice when faced with a brutal, illegal and improvised aggression. Your Party are at the vanguard of opposition and petitioning Keir Starmer, which is where I have a dilemma wrapped in a conundrum. I basically agree with most of their arguments, though not with the hyperbolic overtones, but can't forget that it's the same lot who, in four years, never ever did anything to tell Putin, "Hands Off Ukraine", and also never denounced the mass murder of protesters by the Islamo-Nazi regime's militias. Fucking hypocrites, relishing in double standards just like the fash. Then it is also reassuring that even fewer of us want to get actively involved and join Trump's and Netanyahu's war. YouGov chose another approach, erasing neutrality and opposition, and only probed various modes of actual military action ranging from the allegedly defensive to the openly offensive.

Here again, there is strong opposition to actual co-belligerence, but there is obviously a very fine line between that and retaliatory attacks. You can easily understand Starmer's problem here, as limiting our reaction to purely defensive measures, even with Ukraine helping us with their own very effective technology, will probably not be enough to achieve full protection of our interests and allies, and there will be intense pressure for direct strikes on Iranian missile launching sites. This would lead us straight to treading the thin ice of semantics and casuistry, as you definitely cannot have a working definition of acceptable "defensive attacks", no matter how hard you try. Furthermore, we do not have a fully clear and accurate picture of what our involvement has been so far, other than it is quite confused. Opinium tried to clarify the issues, if possible, by testing different situations in which it would be acceptable for us to strike back at Iran. Multiple answers were accepted, so the total is way over 100%.

So, retaliatory attacks are justified if Iran strikes first on UK territory or military assets, and it's hard to disagree with that. Then it is only marginally acceptable to strike back if we are not the chosen targets, and even if Iran attacks neutral shipping or neighbouring countries. Which also makes sense if you consider that it would be the first step on the slippery slope to full involvement in the war, in situations where we are not directly threatened. Then protecting US forces or Israel is definitely a no-go zone for an overwhelming majority of us. We have a rather clear picture here of where we think Keir Starmer should draw the line. If we are under direct threat, Go Get 'Em, Tigger. If we aren't, stay the fuck out of it. Thank Dog for the Great British Public having conclusively made up their mind, when our government has not. Paradoxically, the Orange Baboon's openly dismissive and patronising attitude may actually help Keir Starmer extirpate himself from the quicksand of indecision and half-choices. If the United States don't need us, that's fine. It's their war, not ours, so let them deal with it without our involvement. Simples.

After failing to win the Peace Prize, Trump turns his focus to Nobel Prize for war. As for Keir Starmer, even when he tries to make a reasonably sound judgment he somehow ends up losing both sides of the argument.

(John Crace, The Guardian, 2 March 2026)

Worrying for the Tories, most of the rest of the country seems to have a better understanding of the geo-political ramifications of a war in the Middle East than Kemi Badenoch does.

(John Crace, The Guardian, 4 March 2026)

Trump's illegal war on Iran is also a golden opportunity for us to reassess the "special relationship" once and for all. Of course I am only using that descriptor for clarity, as I believe more strongly than ever that it has long ceased to exist, if it ever did. On one side, you have Tony Blair still propagandising the delusion that Trumpistan is still "an indispensable cornerstone for our security", which is so fucking laughable when you consider how Obama, Biden and Trump have all betrayed that in different ways. It gets even fucking worse when Blair goes ranting about how "you had better show up when they want you to", which is him again poodling to US interests in total disregard of British interests. On the other side, you have the Orange Baboon insulting and demeaning us because he has only three settings, domination, abuse and business. Trump has destroyed the last shreds of the "special relationship" and we should celebrate it as the end of a toxic delusion. Survation nevertheless polled the impact of the Iran War on it, and found we believe it has been weakened. No shit, Sherlock.

Of course it makes little sense to say that something has been weakened when it had already been destroyed, but never mind. But I can only welcome the slow realisation that Trump's behaviour has changed the nature of the relationship between us and the USA, hopefully forever. Our priority now is obviously a complete redefinition of our links to the USA, which we should consider as a hostile state pending evidence that they are not. That means turning away from them and towards Europe, because our future is obviously with and within Europe, and Keir Starmer should have the baws to acknowledge this and act accordingly. I can only agree with Yvette Cooper when she says that always agreeing with the USA, whatever the circumstances, is not in our best interest, and would be glad to hear Starmer say it loud and clear too. Thank Dog another question from Survation's Iran poll shows that British public opinion is progressing in that direction.

Of course, steering a more independent course does not mean we have to endorse the fanatically obsessive Americanophobia of the loopy far-left, which is just as cretinously asinine as the aggressive cult of Trumpism among our homegrown fash. Then I don't really get the subtle distinction between working with the USA on a case-by-case basis and taking an independent approach, as they sound to me just like two alternative modes of the same attitude. It does sound like what we have been spontaneously doing with France or Germany for years without conceptualising it, sometimes walking side by side and sometimes going separate ways, but always in a general context of cooperation even when Macron is stealing our thunder. Now, you may wonder, how do we assess the way our leading politicians have handled Trumpetanyahu's illegal war so far? Or maybe you don't give a fucking shit, but Opinium and Survation have asked anyway. with really similar results.

Survation offered two shades of cluelessness, instead of just the usual one. It is indeed an interesting innovation to invoke ignorance as a mitigating circumstance for cluelessness, but it does not change the big picture and the conclusions. Keir Starmer's handling of the situation has naturally received more scrutiny and coverage than anyone else's, across a very short timeframe where he was targeted very negatively from all sides. So it is probably closer to the truth to say that we are split about his attitude, rather than genuinely opposing it. What is also never considered in such polling is that none of the others are in charge of anything, and that three out of four have conclusively demonstrated that they relish in spewing bullshit at every opportunity. It makes their day like a golden retriever rolling in mud after eating fox shit and drinking from a drain. So bear with me when I do not pay much attention to their ramblings. Which is just self-protection from people only motivated by scoring cheap political points to feed their self-fulfilling prophecies about the decline of Labour.

We are trapped in a bit of a nightmare, aren't we?

(Owen Jones, 2 March 2026)

Stiffen the Prussian Guard! Crack out the battle plan and the bubbly!

(Tim Settingfield, Midsomer Murders, 2004)

It may have escaped your attention because of the Scottish Parliament election, but there will be local elections in England on the same day. Which will be, as usual, quite a mess because local government is a fucking mess in England. The seats up this time were last up in 2022, according to the standard election cycle, except when they weren't. Six county councils should have had elections in 2025, but they were delayed because of Angela Rayner's local government reform, so these were last up in 2021. Some other seats that were up in 2022 have also been up again in the meanwhile, because the law mandates that all seats are up, no matter where you are in the standard election cycle, when ward boundaries are redrawn. So we end up with two sets of pre-election data, one reflecting who was elected at the "previous election" in 2022 and sometimes 2021, the other reflecting the actual incumbents. So, here's the big picture first, by meta-region with London in a category of its own as it accounts for a quarter of the councils and a third of the seats up this year. Votes are the 2022 results, seats and councils are the incumbents.

And, just because the English turn even the simplest process into a Heath Robinson contraption, we have no fewer than five different types of Councils up, some in full, some by half and some by third. Those of us born before Harold Wilson was Prime Minister may remember that we had summat similar in Scotland in the olden days before Devolution, with three island Councils on a sui generis status, and nine mainland regions divided into fifty-three districts. The whole system was taken down by the Local Government Act of 1994, which became fully effective in 1996 and still rules our local government today. The same reform happened in Wales at the same time. So it took us and the Welsh two years to implement a major simplification, when the same process was started in England twenty years ago and won't be finished for another five years. Which is just more evidence that Celts are smarter than Englanders, as we needed only two years to achieve summat that will take them at least twenty-five. So here's the funnier angle of observation, the map of England by type of authority.

You might feel a bit confused, dizzy even, looking at that. Then you think that Scotland and Wales have been living for thirty years now with a much simpler, leaner and cleaner organisation, with a single simple election cycle instead of four overlapping ones, and you have to wonder what takes the Sassenach so long. You may have summat of an answer with the changes afoot in Surrey, which will be effective after the new Councils have been sworn in, or whatever they do down there to put elected officials in office. In a few weeks, there will be two new unitary authorities covering the county, East Surrey and West Surrey, instead of one Surrey County Council and eleven District Councils. The number of Councillors will go down from 246 to 72 in East Surrey, and from 287 to 90 in West Surrey. Do you see it now? That's 371 seats vanished, 371 local dignitaries, most of them Conservatives, left without a cosy occupation and its aura of prestige. 371 bruised egos in just one county. There are 21 other counties all across England that still live under the two-tier arrangement of County and District Councils. Literally thousands of seats that would be vaporised by a thorough reform. No wonder neither the Conservatives nor Labour are in a real hurry to get the job fully done.

Men reform a thing by removing the reality from it, and then do not know what to do with the unreality that is left.

(G. K. Chesterton)

Those of you who represent renewable clients, you're screwed. The rest of you will be very rich.

(Robert Jenrick, Reform UK Business Evening, 1 March 2026)

There are 57 days left before the English locals but, if your sole source of information was the Politics pages of The Hipstershire Gazette, you wouldn't know. I'm not talking about the frontpage here, which is obviously full of Iran news, but about the fucking Politics pages, which are supposed to keep you abreast of what's happening here. There are 5,014 seats up in 136 Councils, and we have been told the fate of the Prime Minister is at stake, and yet nobody can be arsed even to fake interest. This is in marked contrast with the country of my birth, where municipal elections will be held this Sunday and the next, because they are addicted to their two rounds of voting. Down there, the elections have been all over the news since before Christmas and Le Monde, the French equivalent of The Guardian, has devoted sur mesure reviews to the elections in 104 cities and towns. The fucking Guardian has not even mentioned Islington Borough Council, for fuck's sake. If we start from the top, 35 Councils are up in the North, more than in London but with fewer seats at stake.

There is a marked regional imbalance here as 21 out of 35 Councils where elections will be held are in the North West. That's the combination of the abundance of Metropolitan Boroughs from the sea to the Yorkshire border, and the survival of District Councils in Lancashire, that has so far resisted the modernisation that has been carried out everywhere else in the North. Labour have a fucking lot to lose all across the North. Just imagine the devastation if they lost Manchester and Sunderland, which is not likely, or Rochdale and Newcastle, which is. Plus massive losses in the Lancastrian District Councils, if last year's County Council election is any warning sign. Far fewer Councils are at stake in the Midlands, only 15 of them, but that does not make it less of a danger zone for Labour.

It is safe to assume that a lot of attention will focus laser-like on Birmingham, given the incumbent Council's shenanigans over the last few years. Amusingly, today marks the first anniversary of the infamous Bin Strike, which is still unresolved, and not every Council has grounds to brag that they will send voters to the polling stations with 422 days of rubbish amassed in the inner city streets and no means to clear it because they have been fucking bankrupt for the more than two years. But I would also advise you to shift your binoculars a few miles down the road to the South East, to Solihull. It may be the smallest of the seven Metropolitan Boroughs in the County of the West Midlands, but I also rate it as the most likely to induce an earthquake on VE-Day. A switch from Labour to Reform, that is. Doncaster fell last year, and from a great height, so why wouldn't Solihull this year? Labour do not face the same level of threat in the South, where they have a far smaller footprint. A record 54 Councils will hold elections down there in May, the bulk of them being antique District Councils, 32 out of 54.

There is one specific area of the South I will have my eyes on when the results fall, Suffolk. The Greens gained control of Mid Suffolk District Council in 2023, and Suffolk County Council is up this year. It will be fun to watch how people vote in the Mid Suffolk wards, and which kind of verdict that implies on the performance of the District Council administration. The Greenies have three County Councillors from the Mid Suffolk District, so what will become of them? Not that we could guess from reading The Guardian, could we? Now, when you think of it, scant coverage of these locals is probably in almost everyone's best interest. Labour and the Conservatives have every reason to avoid the topic, as both are extremely likely to suffer a massive drubbing. Reform have every reason to be cautious, just in case the plebs don't vote the way they've been told, and don't grant them as massive gains as they expect. But the Greenies' Great Leader can't help it and is talking too much. Surely the post-mortem on VE-Day will be fucking fun.

I predict a Green wave in the local elections. Anyone who thinks our by-election win was an outlier is mistaken.

(Zack Polanski, The Guardian, 7 March 2026)

If I was hit by a bus tomorrow, Reform has its own brand, Reform has its own identity.

(Nigel Farage, 17 February 2026)

There is another way to examine the Councils that are at stake at this year's English locals. That's through the prism of their second dimension, the type of Council as officially described in the exquisitely diverse English terminology. Setting aside the 32 London Boroughs for now, we have 106 Councils with elections this year. 32 Metropolitan Boroughs, 18 Unitary Authorities, 6 County Council and 48 District Councils up. 31 for all Councillors, 7 for half and 66 for a third. This will clearly dampen the impact of massive vote swings on the composition of the Councils, and probably concentrate media attention on just a small number that appear ready to deliver juicy headlines. So I expect lots of boots on the ground at the counts and declarations for the Metropolitan Boroughs, which also happen to cover the major conurbations in the North and Midlands, where Labour is the traditionally dominant force.

Labour have already suffered some setbacks in their Metropolitan Boroughs recently, mostly because of internal strife and dissent over Israel and Gaza. The Greens have definitely seen an opening here. Stick a Green label on the incumbent Gaza Independent Councillors, strike a non-aggression deal with Your Party and the Workers Party, and Zach's your uncle. An anti-Labour alliance of the whole loopy far-left could wreak havoc in those Councils, without necessarily working for the benefit of the population. You don't stop a 14-month bin strike in Birmingham by showing up at the negotiating table with a £400 designer keffiyeh on, the binmen would tell you to fuck off and get real. I guess there will be some Thick-Of-It-grade moments in some Councils when they digest the fallout of the elections. Then we have the Unitary Authorities, that are kind of the odd bunch out at these elections.

One of the provisions of electoral law in England is that a Council must be reelected in full after boundary changes, no matter where they are in their electoral cycle. We can't have that in Scotland as our Councils are always up in full. But it does happen in England, in Councils that are usually up in halves or thirds, and totally disrupts the cycle. To the point that this year's incumbents may be quite different from those elected four years ago from the same wards. We have this situation in Swindon, Milton Keynes and Thurrock, while only minor changes have happened in other Councils that strictly followed the cycle. But that won't distort the overall picture too much, as these three cases will be diluted in the mass of other seats that have not been impacted by events, dear boy, events. Finally, we have the County and District Councils, which I have bundled together as components of the same antiquated two-tier system of local government.

Most of these Councils, 41 out of 54. are spread like leopard spots across the South. There have been some changes among those too, but not due to disruptions in the continuity of the election cycles. It was all about by-elections, defections, desertions and changes of affiliations that sometimes inadvertently and serendipitously resulted in a change in control of the Council. Most likely to be from this or that majority to no overall control when a slim majority was toppled by changes in allegiances and no oven-ready substitute was available. It will be interesting to spot Reform's impact on this more parochial level of English local government. Most of the District Councils have just a third of their seats up, so you can't achieve any sort of full clean sweep of Great Replacement. But bagging a third of the seats, if that happens, can certainly be a path to a minority administration if the rest of the Council is fragmented enough. Could that be the key to some Reform "successes" in the quiet rural Middle England? Make St Mary Mead Great Again!

The real monsters, they look like us. They’re human. They don’t hide underneath the bed or lurk in the dark. They’re out there. Or in here.

(Sam Casey, Law & Order: UK, 2013)

We have to know where we are before we can go where we’re going. Right?

(Hetty Wainthropp, Hetty Wainthropp Investigates, 1996)

At the fringe of these locals, or possibly at the heart of them eventually, the 32 Borough Councils in London are up in their entirety, totally compliant with the simple classic four-year election cycle. This is definitely The Year Of Living Dangerously for London Labour, with Jimmy Cliff in the background as if Notting Hill Carnival had come early. The harder they come, the harder they fall, one and all. The last elections, back in 2022, were a mixed bag for Labour in London just like in the rest of England. They expected to be the main beneficiaries of the Conservatives' decline and they failed, the LibDems were. In London, Labour gained three Councils and lost three, coupled with a loss of votes and only token gains in seats. In the Imperial Capital too, at the heart of the Labour Machine, the LibDems fared better. Labour's situation has obviously not improved during the four years of the term.

Not many Labour Councillors have defected to Your Party, as you don't jump off a sinking ship to another that is already foundering before even touching the water. Even rats know that. More have switched to the Greens, where competence, reliability and genuine local roots are not prerequisites, and even more have chosen to sit as independents, the perfect default option when you have no fucking clue which way the wind will blow eventually. Labour certainly have a lot to lose in London and know it, even if we don't have any poll to back it. I will come back to that later, with more juicy gory predictions, as we also have six Mayoral elections to deal with. Coincidentally, five of these will be held in London and the sixth within Tube distance on the Metropolitan Line.

All these seats were up in 2022 as part of the regular election cycle, when Instant Runoff still applied. Only Croydon and Tower Hamlets needed the second preferences to be counted. By-elections were held later in Hackney and Lewisham, after the return of first-past-the-post. By law, Mayoral by-elections cover only the remainder of the original term, just like Parliamentary by-elections, so that the cycle will be unbroken. Croydon, Tower Hamlets and Watford are extremely unlikely to change hands this year, and I even expect the three incumbents to all bag an outright majority, even if they no longer need it. Then I would hate to bet anything substantial on Hackney, Lewisham and Newham. I do not expect anyone from the right to be competitive in any, but the well-hyped Green Wave may very well hit. That's totally feasible if half of Labour voters switch to the Greens. But will they?

To know that others do not know is already to know more than they know.

(Hetty Wainthropp, Hetty Wainthropp Investigates, 1996)

Your Party is a reminder that the left often prefers to pick a fight with other groups on the left rather than the right-wing parties.

(John Crace, The Guardian, 26 February 2026)

Rachel Reeves is the happiest bunny in London these days, and even in the whole of the Realm. With all the stuff happening elsewhere, absolutely nobody has paid attention to her Spring Statement, or even noticed there had been a Spring Statement, which wasn't actually much of a statement anyway. All the proverbial tough choices have been craftily delayed until the autumn, when hopefully Trump enforcing martial law all across the USA and canceling the midterms will provide the appropriate distraction. But the polls have been delivering a mix of good and bad news. Good news is that Reform UK is definitely going down, rated below 30% by all pollsters and below 25% by a couple of them. Bad news is that the loopy Greens are on the rise again, and snatching big chunks of votes off Labour. Just like that Gorton-and-Denton thing had metastised all across England, and people genuinely believed Che Polanski when he says that the Greenies are the ultimate Barrage Against Farage. When we all know that the Liberal Democrats are.

Not everyone is a happy bunny though, as the pollstertariat have The Clash on repeat under Keir Starmer's windows. Should He Stay Or Should He Go? The dominant feeling is that he should go, but it has been this way for months and nothing has happened. Well, nothing but Keir blocking Andy Burnham from standing in Gorton and Denton, and getting a full backlash of instant karma. Let's be honest, not even Winston Churchill could have reframed that one as a stroke of genius, though Vladimir Putin probably could. Now there is another challenge down the road for Keir. The Orange Baboon may have erased a regime change in Iran from his laundry list, but he still wants one here, especially if he loses his flying monkey Viktor Orban in 32 days. Trump's Christo-fascist mob and its influencers will never let it go until they have Lord Haw-Haw 2.0 sat at Number Ten. What is scary is that we are now getting accustomed to the idea that there is no alternative but Che Polanski. The two shades of being bought and sold for Russian gold, the active Quisling or the passive Quisling, William Joyce or Derek Savage, the Infection Of Boils or the Swarm Of Locusts.

But, before we get to London Has Fallen: The Sequel, the Orange Baboon may have inadvertently and serendipitously granted Sly Keir a stay of execution. There is no fucking way even the looniest Labour backbencher would ever consider a coup during wartime. Of course there is a precedent, H.H. Asquith was deposed midway through the biggest war the world had seen so far. But the context was different, as the plotters did have an alternative, David Lloyd George, that does not exist in today's Labour Party. Andrew Murray Burnham could have been that alternative, but this has been taken care of for the next two years probably. Ed Miliband? Wes Streeting? Angela Rayner? Fuck me sideways. So many are speculating about the possibility of Al Carns being the solution. Which instantly creates another problem. Nobody has a fucking scoobie who he is. At least Starmer had some name recognition before he became leader, as Jeremy Corbyn's handler of Brexit affairs. If some Labour grandees really think that a complete unknown, who is at risk of losing his own seat in a close three-way with Reform and the Greenies, could be their saviour, it only says a fucking lot about the level of despair within the Parliamentary Labour Party. Nothing that will restore public confidence in them.

A misplaced Marxist dialectic or some other thought crime of false consciousness is seemingly far worse than threatening to deport hundreds of thousands of foreigners.

(John Crace, The Guardian, 26 February 2026)

Certainly Kemi Badenoch is the worst leader of the Tory party in living memory. There again, the gene pool of talent is no more than a puddle.

(John Crace, The Guardian, 4 March 2026)

There has been quite a lot of polling recently, so today's snapshot includes the last seven polls fielded by BMG Research, J,L, Partners, Survation, Find Out Now, Opinium, Focaldata and YouGov between the Fourth and the Tenth of the Third. That's a super-sample of 13,051, or the displacement in long tons of a German Braunschweig-class battleship of yore. There is a wee paradox in today's prediction, as the Reform vote is level with two weeks ago, but they are predicted quite a few more seats. Which is in fact not a paradox, if you take a closer look at the other numbers. The Green vote has increased, so splits the left-wing vote deeper than ever, thusly enabling the fash to sneak through the cracks is some more marginals, without much benefit for the Green goblins themselves. But the entitled woke metropolitan middle-class would still pat themselves on the back, wouldn't they? And blame the working class for the results.

Now the Green loonies have their biggest predicted vote shares all across the North. It's not just Huddersfield any more, it has spread like slugs on a rainy day since the Gorton and Denton by-election and is genuinely a clear and present threat to Labour. The problem is, of course, that as long as they focus obsessively on just weakening Labour and do jack shit to counter the fash, they actually help the fash. They haven't grasped yet that the left vote is not a finite slice that they must get the biggest share of at all costs, but that it is a variable slice they have to fight to expand. They're that fucking daft. Or they're just fucking cowards who go for punching down on a corpse because punching up the fash's mugs is too risky. Mummy's boys. More significantly, the Greenies visibly underperform where there is an adult left-wing alternative to Labour. Scotland and Wales.

The seat projections are quite fascinating too. The SNP again manage a fucking huge harvest of seats, despite bagging fewer votes than in 2024, thanks to first-past-the-post and the fash. The Liberal Democrats still have the biggest contingents of non-turquoise seats of all parties in the South West and South East, both also bigger than any other party in any region of England. Interestingly, all of Your Party, Independent Alliance, Gaza independents and whatnot outwith London are predicted to be wiped out. And the most surprising part, given the overall context, is that all are predicted to lose their seats back to Labour, not to Reform. Your Party would thusly shrink to its London base, but could still claim tremendous success with the unseating of Wes Streeting and Rushanara Ali in the Imperial Capital, both traitors in the eyes of the blissfully ideologically Unsoiled.

Of course, the obsessive fixation of the Corbynites and Polanskites on Labour is the perfect recipe for a lose-lose situation that would only benefit the fash. We have reached an extremely dangerous situation, regardless of the results of the next general. A whole slice of society has been groomed, and that includes the best part of one generation, to blindly follow imported ideology and hate those they should sympathise with the most. And I'm not talking about the Young Fash here, I'm talking about the Butlerjugend. The sheer amount of blind bigotry on the woke side of the tracks is so tremendous it makes your head spin. All based on simplistic generalisations and cretinous stereotypes. No love for the Jews because they are the oppressors. No solidarity with the Ukrainians because they are white. No love for lesbians because they are transphobes. No compassion for Iranian women because they defy someone you have been told is your friend. No freedom for the enemies of freedom, as they said during the Reign of Terror in France. These wankers, deep down, want nothing more than the fash to win, so they can tell us that they told us so. That's what the German Communists told the German Social-Democrats in April 1933, and they had all the time in the world to discuss the fine points after they were all sent to Dachau.

They used to say, “Never on Sunday”, then Pearl Harbor happened. I never say never.

(Gil Grissom, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, 2000)

People should not attempt to change history. It is the task of history to change people.

(Alexandra Ostrakova, Smiley’s People, 1982)

Somebody recently published a cute fairy tale about the SNP nicking 67 constituencies at the next Holyrood election, that was instantly relayed by The Scotsman, The Times and of course The Scottish Pravda. That story was not supported by any published seat-by-seat data, or even just a summary of the national vote shares, as all respectable pollsters do, and is of course total fucking bullshit. No party has ever won a majority on the constituencies only, as you can see if you look up the winner of the constituency vote at every election since 1999. Remember the SNP won the Impossible Majority at the 2011 Miracle Election only because they bagged 16 list seats on top of their 53 constituencies, thanks to the then-still-relevant Both Votes SNP. The best constituency result so far is the SNP in 2021, winning 62 constituencies on 47.7% of the vote. To bag 67, they would have needed to switch an additional 8,847 votes in the five closest opposition constituencies, pushing their national vote share to 48%. How could they even dream of achieving that this year when the trends of Holyrood polling have their predicted vote share stuck on 35%?

We have got another three new Holyrood polls now, from YouGov, Ipsos and Survation, and it looks like they have all decided to take the piss and play mind games with us. Or they may be totally incompetent, the Occam's Razor of polling that we should never dismiss too quickly. How else do you explain that the voting intentions they purport they found are so all over the place, way beyond any margin of error? I wasn't aware that psephology had transitioned into some variant of "pin the tail on the donkey", but it now looks like it is what it has become after the pollstertariat's weak performance at the 2024 general, when last day polling still overestimated Labour by roughly 5%. So there are fucking consequences, especially when you get that horrible feeling that the numbers would be just as good if you just threw dice. Or a dart at the donkey's arse.

Of course, the mediatariat never tire of the fucking game, because that's what they are overpaid to do. Pontificating about polls they know to be bogus, and drawing very definitive conclusions from seat projections they have just made up at the pub. Or extracted from John Curtice, which is actually worse. There are nevertheless lessons to be learned from this senseless influx of polls. First, obviously, that there is fuck all chance in a thousand years that the SNP will bag 67 constituencies. Second, there is a non-zero probability that Labour will not totally crumble and dissolve into a puddle of tears. Genesis reference here, mates, IYKYK. But the seat projections from the last trio of polls still give use wildly divergent pictures of the incoming Parliament.

For lack of totally solid evidence, that would resist a second post-mortem, we can still envision the broader consequences of the election, regardless of the actual numbers. John Swinney will not get a super-mandate of his own for anything, and a whole squad have already sharpened their sgian-dubhs to backstab him on the Ides of May anyway. I mean, you don't let Stephen Flynn in without knowing that your days are numbered, do you? You just fucking asked for it, mate. Not that it will change the global picture much. We will still have a weakened SNP missing a majority and forced into an inconvenient alliance with someone they outvoted by a wide margin. That or endless pointless budget negotiations every spring for the next five years. After all, if you sign up for a coalition deal, all the sausage-making will be confined within the Cabinet, and the rest of us will be spared the sight. Thank Dog for that.

There are some politicians who have that edge of authority and style, clever and charismatic, who know how to seize the moment as it passes.

(Mattie Storin, House Of Cards, 1990)

The election in May will be a choice between two contrasting futures. Tolerance or division. Progress or decay. Defiance or deference. Culture or ignorance. Humanity or indifference. Plaid or Reform.

(Rhun ap Iorwerth. Plaid Cymru Conference, 27 February 2026)

We have the same kind of disturbing stories coming out of Wales too. Last time I mentioned Wales, we had a YouGov poll predicting a massive victory for Plaid Cymru and a very subdued performance for Reform UK. Since then, we have had one more poll from the Wales-based Beaufort Research, and two from the England-based More In Common, that tell totally different stories. So, just like in Scotland, we are left with conjectures based on flimsy evidence. Just like in Scotland, we are not even still sure that Labour will be crushed, as all three new polls credit them with 20% of the vote, twice what YouGov found six weeks ago. Based on the weighted average of the Beaufort pol and the most recent of the two More In Common polls, the situation is far less idyllic for Plaid Cymru than YouGov led us to think. It is even perilously close, instead of a brilliant double-digit lead.

This does not mean we should disbelieve or disregard polls. After all, every pollster has the unalienable right to be an incompetent bozo, or to massage the numbers to please anyone who paid for the poll. What this polling says would potentially create an awkward situation for First Minister-Elect Rhun ap Iorwerth. He would still have first dibs at a government, having got the most votes, but pretty much with his back to the wall. Labour doing much better than earlier polls predicted, and not totally collapsing, would give them a stronger hand in negotiations. Especially as Plaid Cymru would definitely have to go for a threesome to clear the majority hurdle, and Labour on 18 seats would be an absolutely inescapable option. Now the election is still 57 days away, that's eight weeks, and any crazy stuff can happen in eight weeks, that would totally change the game. Labour could just collapse again, couldn't they?

Faceless candidates and feckless council leaders from Northumberland to Kent are the canaries in the mine when it comes to what Farage has in store for our parliament and our people.

(Rhun ap Iorwerth. Plaid Cymru Conference, 27 February 2026)

You know, when a tree falls in a forest, even if no one’s there to hear it, it does in fact make a sound.

(Gil Grissom, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, 2001)

We are just 57 days away from local elections in England, that promise to be the perfect blend of a shitshow and a bloodbath, so it's as good a time as any to take a look back at the Councils that were elected last year and what's become of them since. 2025 was not a good year for election nerds, with just 23 Councils holding elections, an unusually low number due to the multiple hiccups of Angela Rayner's local government reform. Only four Councils were up in the North, so that leaves me a slot to give you the full picture first. 1,641 seats were up for grabs, and an astounding 680 went to Reform UK, almost as many as the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats combined, while Labour were left starkers out in the cold after losing two thirds of their incumbent Councillors and their one incumbent Council in the Holy City of Doncaster. But where are we know, a year on?

No Council has changed hands since the elections, among those that were up last year, so I won't bore you with these figures and focus solely on the number of Councillors. The most visible point is that Reform UK has lost 43 Councillors, 6% of their 2025 intake, in ten months, more than all other parties combined. And the deserters have gone all over the place, most as independents, some as representatives of the other factions of the radicalised far-right like Restore Britain or Advance UK, and some even rebranding themselves as bogus "local parties" like the South East Lincolnshire Concerned Citizens. Which I have totally made up, by the way, but it does have the ring of truth, doesn't it? Interestingly, the only party with more seats now than after the elections are the Liberal Democrats, thanks to a few by-election gains. Four Councils were up in the North last year, two in the North East, one in the North West and one in Yorkshire, and you can already see some setbacks for Reform there.

Reform scored an unexpected hat trick in the North, leaving only Northumberland to a weakened Conservative minority administration. But it hasn't been all milk and honey for them since. Just like in other regions, internecine feuds have fueled defections, including to the loopier-than-thou Advance UK. They didn't even exist when the elections were held, and are a more radical spin-off of Reform. They are actually fucking morons thriving on the most racist conspiracy theories while embracing Truss-style economics. The combination of the two is more than enough to rate them as fringe lunatics, and we should actually welcome their appearance, in a weird way. They are out to split the fash vote, which can only be good news in he long run. We also have a wee emergence of Your Party in Lancashire, though much smaller than you could have expected from the various grunts of discontent against Starmer. Actually, these ones did not even hurt Labour, as their converts were elected as Green or independents.

I suspect that Tony Blair is doing the bidding of Trump in a similar way to Farage. Is anybody going to listen to Tony Blair on the progressive side of politics? The answer is absolutely, categorically, no.

(Karl Turner MP, 8 March 2026)

Sun Tzu once said, “If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by”. But those were brutal times.

(Gil Grissom, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, 2003)

Reform UK were far less spectacularly successful in the West Midlands, where they gained only one majority in Staffordshire. The Liberal Democrats totally lived up to their new status as the Barrage Against Farage in Shropshire, massively overturning a Conservative majority of twenty years. The Reform minority administration looks on solid ground in Worcestershire despite a couple of defections, but are in a really precarious situation in Warwickshire. There the minority turquoise administration rests on only one third of the Council, and is limping on only because there is no oven-ready alternative majority. It will probably not last until the next elections, scheduled for 2029.

The situation is a fucking lot better for the Turquoiseshirts in the East Midlands, That's where you can occasionally find Richard Tice, when he is not in Dubai whining that the place makes him feel more unsafe than London. They took control of five out of six Councils that were up last year there, and gained a significant and so far unshaken minority in the sixth. It was highly significant because all six were controlled by Conservative majorities before the elections, and Labour lost far fewer seats than the Conservatives across the region. So it was more a case of radicalisation within the right, fueled by an extremist xenophobic discourse, than of the white working class turning their backs on the perennial party of their ancestors. Reform have also suffered far fewer losses in the Midlands than in other parts of England, so it could very well turn into some sort of heartlands, the same way the North was for generations the heartlands of Labour.

Reform also won the mayoralty of Greater Lincolnshire last year, thusly called because it covers the whole of the ceremonial county, parts that are administratively within the East Midlands as well as parts that are administratively within Yorkshire and the Humber. But Reform are still a minority within the Greater Lincolnshire Combined County Authority, another bespoke oddity in English local government, where the Conservatives still hold a majority. Control of the authority could switch if Reform bagged massive gain the North East Lincolnshire Council, which is up for a third this year. But they would have to take over all seats that are up, which definitely sounds like an impossible task. So Lincolnshire will not become the first one-party County for Reform. Not this year, and plausibly not ever.

The freaks have looked at her in a secret way and tried to connect their eyes with hers as though to say, we know who you are. We are you.

(Carson McCullers)

The brainpower in this room, it’s like a ZX Spectrum running ChatGPT.

(Lee Mack)

Now that we have reached the leafy shores of the South, do you know how we can tell that Somerset is posher than Essex? Not because they have Jake Rees-Mogg podcasting from his seventeen-room mansion, though it helps. But because beach resorts in Somerset are subtitled "super-Mare", when they are just "on-Sea" in Essex. Though they do have both Pontins and Butlin's in Somerset up to the present day, so some parts of Moggshire are definitely oiker than others, while Essex only had Butlin's in the past, and it's been gone for half a century. It was in Clacton, by the way, you just can't make that shit up. Having a leader who is not against performing his own clowning did not hurt the Liberal Democrats in the South West last year, quite the opposite. They surged from 68 to 123 seats in the region's four Councils that were up, and are now in charge of all four.

Then we have the South East, and that's where we meet Kent, the Reform-dominated County Council that makes Saturday night at the Wetherspoons car park look like a dinner party at Eaton Place. Of all the Councils won by Reform last year, it is the textbook case of the complete chaos spawned by crass incompetence and internecine feuds. The defectors even managed to resurrect the putrefied corpse of UKIP, for fuck's sake, as Restore Britain was probably too woke. There is only one District Council up in Kent this year, Tunbridge Wells, for a third of its seats. The Liberal Democrats are the incumbent administration, with a majority of seats, and Reform was non-existent there at all three previous elections. At face value, it seems unlikely that the LibDems will lose their majority, and this year's election could also be an opportunity to express discontent at the abysmal performance of the County Council. One to watch, obviously.

Finally we have East Anglia, the Counties At The Edge Of Forever, and home, in a relative way, to both Nigel Farage and his evil-twin-turned-arch-enemy Rupert Lowe. Double Start Trek and Pink Floyd reference in here, IYKYK. Rupert has decided to reframe himself as a fucking weirdo since he has broken up with Nigel and launched his own outfit, Restore Britain, which is so far only conspicuous by its absence in all meaningful national debates. Probably because Rupert has channeled his inner Giovanni Drogo and is scrutinising the Eastern horizon to make sure the German battlecruisers are not coming back. Only two Councils were up last year there, and the LibDems ended up in charge of both. East Anglia is not Reform's lucky turf, as they had three MPs elected there in 2024, and only one is left now, Nigel Farage himself. Rupert defected to his own fantasy world and the third one, James McMurdock, left under heavy suspicion of fraud on Covid-era government loans. Just another day at Reform UK.

There is an interesting common feature to all these Southern Councils. Labour's presence was already weak before the elections, and totally non-existent in a number of wards. On top of that, the demographics and sociology of the South are proverbially different from those of the North. The Liberal Democrats thusly did not score big gains just on their own merits, as the best incarnation of the Barrage Against Farage, but also because the main source of Reform votes, the ancestrally Labour-voting white working class, basically does not exist down there. Even Kent was not a popular uprising against the out-of-touch woke Labour establishment, it was a coup against the Conservative ruling class that had become entitled and complacent after half a century in charge, with just a four-year hiatus in the early 1990s. Therefore, the main threat to the Southern LibDems is not the return of Labour, which won't happen, but the surge of the Greens, which will. Doon Sooth, they have the right combination of asininely woke university bubbles and pockets of conservationist nimbyism to make that happen.

Your best? Losers always whine about their best. Winners go home and fuck the Prom Queen!

(Sean Connery)

It’s going to be a total catastrophe for us in London. If we lose swathes of voters on our progressive flank then we’re doomed. We need to start listening to them.

(Anonymous Labour source, The Guardian, 6 March 2026)

There have been no England-wide polls for the locals so far, but a rather sensational prediction for the London Boroughs. It was produced by a company called Bombe, can't make that shit up, which has never been publicly involved in any sort of political polling so far, and does not even mention it on its web site. Which, quite oddly, uses a domain assigned to the British Indian Ocean Territory. Meaning the Chagos Islands, the Diego Garcia naval base, in case you aren't familiar with the name yet. That alone should have triggered massive alarms, which is why I am quite flabbergasted that this simulation was used by The Guardian, after it was reportedly circulated by a number of Labour politicians. The Hipstershire Gazette were is such a hurry to promote that scenario of ultimate doom that they didn't even notice that the seat projections they published did not add up, as the total was higher than the actual number of seats despite not even factoring in all parties. Thank Dog somebody recalculated the whole thing for Wokopedia, and it ends up looking like that, with the numbers now adding up.

I am definitely not saying it does represent the current state of mind of Londoners, or is even remotely credible. The problem is that it does not sound totally far-fetched if you consider actual polling hinting that Labour have lost more than a third of their voters in London since the general, which could have devastating effect at the Borough elections. But no poll so far has the Greens high enough in voting intentions to substantiate the claim that they would bag more Borough Council seats and more Boroughs than Labour and the Liberal Democrats combined. Unless you injected some sort of Gorton-and-Denton-ish tweak into the broth. It is obviously totally extravagant, even if Che Polanski loves to propagate just that scenario. Let one hundred Gortons bloom, as Mao Zedong famously said, or summat. It also looks like the new self-fulfilling prophecy even the right-wing media have converted to, now that they have realised the limitations of the earlier Reform-focused prophecy. I just wonder how many people will have a fucking rude awakening on VE-Day, when the full results fall and none of the doom scenarios have self-fulfilled.

Without a change in course, we risk a repeat of losing large Labour strongholds, like London, just as we did in the 2000s in Scotland. If we don’t unite progressives, we risk opening the door to the darkness and division of Reform.

(Sadiq Khan, The Guardian, 1 March 2026)

Keith Noel Emerson

(Todmorden, 2 November 1944 - Santa Monica, 11 March 2016)

Jeremy's Den

11/03/2026

Some Go North And Some Go South

Some Go North And Some Go South