Jeremy's Den: New Dreams Of Freedom

It’s chilling to see the most powerful man in the world bragging that he passed a test that they give people to find out whether they should be allowed to take the bus by themselves.

(Stephen Colbert)

This is a madhouse! I mean, how long can we hold the dam? This guy is a total crazy.

(Toby Esterhase, Smiley’s People, 1982)

250 years ago this week, the Colony of Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations was the first to officially and unliterally declare independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain, two months to the day before that thing in Philadelphia that Donald J. Trump will commemorate in due course with a giant military parade in front of 1600 Donald J. Trump Avenue in Trump DT, for which he will owe royalties to North Korea, and an address to Them The People at the foot of the Trump Monument on the Donald J. Trump Mall, for which he will owe royalties to the estate of Josef Goebbels. But Rhode Island came first, and deserve to be celebrated with a soundtrack dedicated to America in all its shapes and colours. This semiquincentennial, or bisesquicentennial depending on which Borough of New Trump City you live in, will also be marked by midterms that could prove the most important ever in the history of the Thirteen Colonies. The Republican Party currently hold a teeny weeny majority of five seats in the House of Representatives, which the trends of generic voting intentions polls predict will be overturned by the Democratic Party six months from now.

One of the few good things about Trumpistan is that they are just as addicted to opinion polls as us, which may be why some British pollsters have set up a branch over there. Never forget that that these guys actually invented the opinion poll, back in 1824, when Great Britain was still living under the medieval regime of the rotten boroughs. They even have a bigger punditariat business than us, with some of the current big names involved in it since the days of Clinton. But most of them do not multitask, so are either aggregators or prognosticators, rarely both under the same hat. It's like Law & Order, psephology is represented by two separate yet equally important groups, and these are their stories. Starting with the assessments of the vote shares both parties are likely to receive on Election Day, all of which point to a victory for the Democrats.

This is the easiest part of the psephologifying, as it's pretty basic maths involving just two operations, An ancient Greek with an abacus could have done it, but of course we now have laptops with Excel. It is surely a sign of the quick progress of Western Civilisation when we have more processing power and more sophisticated software on one laptop than NASA had to send men to the Moon, just to calculate weighted averages that people of 1969 would have done by hand on an A4. But it is also a sign of the unavoidable downfall of Western Civilisation when 99% of us actually do need the laptop and Excel because they are totally unable to do a weighted average by hand. Before you ask, I can but it is so fucking tedious and time-consuming that it is best left to Excel. Never mind, what matters is that the best brains in America now concur to tell us that the Democrats are 5% ahead of the Republicans, and that it has been that way for months, which is the first brick in our wall of expertise about these midterms. See you later, aggregators, now is the time for the prognosticators.

The only way for us to serve you is to give you the means to serve yourselves.

(Frank Underwood, House Of Cards, 2015)

Nothing ever really dies in the House. It just plays in front of a smaller and smaller audience.

(Frank Underwood, House Of Cards, 2017)

This year, only one firm aggregates and prognosticates at the same time, Race To The WH, who actually deal with all races, not just the Presidential. Before we examine the prognosticators' prognostications, bear in mind that 2025 and 2026 have been ripe with the America's Great National Pastime, gerrymandering. By law, redistricting, which is American for boundary review, must happen every ten years on the year after the census. But the law does not forbid tinkering with the districts, which is American for constituencies, somewhen in between. Trump started it when he literally ordered Texas to recarve its districts to add Republican seats. Democrats retaliated with a counter-gerrymandering of California. It triggered a chain reaction of similar moves all across the country, some of which have failed and one of which, in Virginia, is still in limbo pending a court ruling. In its present state, this off-cycle gerrymandering switches a net ten seats from Democrats to Republicans, which I am not sure the punditariat have factored in in their predictions.

The pundits love to summat cover their arse by rating some seats as tossups, which is American for marginals, and not assigning them to either party. Of course, nothing is easier than resolving the tossups, simply by allocating them to the party with the best odds in each district. Broadly, two thirds of the tossups go to the Democrats and one third to the Republicans. I have added Focaldata to the tossup-free side of the graph as they have conducted a full MRP simulation, which of course allocates all 435 seats. Despite the gerrymandering, all agree that the Democrats will take back control of the House of Representatives, which is also what my model predicts. It is just a coincidence that it delivers the same result as the average of the pundits' prognostications, and there is still a wildcard in there. We all actually only guess what the impact of the gerrymandering cycle will be, and we will not know until it has been tested at a real election. But it surely looks like the Republicans would have to rig the elections in many more states to hold their majority in the House.

There is a long tradition of the President's party losing the midterms, which is just not common wisdom, but also supported by facts. Only two Presidents ever won midterms with gains in both Houses of Congress, Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934 and George W. Bush in 2002. Surely the Orange Baboon cannot expect the kind of popular support that the First Hundred Days of the New Deal or 9/11 produced. The last two midterms, 2018 under Trump and 2020 under Biden, were odd ones out. In both, the President's party lost its majority in the House of Representatives to the other party, but slightly increased a majority they already had in the Senate. It is not predicted to go that way this year, which is why the Trump Administration are in full panic mode. They are terrified that losing Congress would result in the lot of them being impeached on the basis of the massive abuses of power committed since the Orange Baboon's Re-Inauguration, most of which also qualify as criminal offences under federal laws. We have therefore not seen the last of their efforts to rig the elections, or having them bought for them, just like Elon Muck and Russian blood money bought Trump the Presidency.

The United States has changed, and we must respond. No hedging. No “our American friends”. Just a clean acknowledgement that the country on the other side of the border is not the country we thought we knew.

(Mark Carney, 19 April 2026)

Power is a lot like real estate. It’s all about location, location, location. The closer you are to the source, the higher your property value.

(Frank Underwood, House Of Cards, 2013)

One of the most iconic elections at these midterms, and probably the most watched too, is the Senate race in Ohio. It is a special election, which is American for by-election, to fill J.D. Vance's old seat for the remainder of the original term ending in 2028. In 2022, Vance defeated Democrat Tim Ryan by 6% for a seat that has been in Republican hands since the 1998 midterms. Now gubernatorial appointee John Husted is defending the seat against a revenant and dinosaur of Ohio politics, 73yr-old Democrat Sherrod Brown. Brown held Ohio's other Senate seat for 18 years, from the 2006 midterms to his unexpected defeat in 2024. Brown has been anointed by the Democratic primary two days ago for a replay, as the whole punditariat and pollstertariat assumed he would. Which did look like a good idea a month ago, but may not be right now if you believe the statewide polls.

Brown's voting intentions took a nosedive after the start of the Iran War, which should have been anticipated in a state where the MAGA base is still a meaningful presence. But even them may be feeling some Iran Fatigue now, as Brown is slowly gaining back some votes. Not enough yet to gain the seat, as was predicted one or two months ago, but enough to revive the Democrats' hopes that they could still do it once the campaign allows them to expose all the failures of the Trump administration. Ohio is obviously not the Democrats' lone target seat, and polls show they have better prospects in other states that may be the key to these elections, like Alaska and Maine.

Democrats are defending 13 seats at these midterms, against 22 Republican seats, which theoretically puts them in a better starting position. But some of their seats are in battleground states that will obviously be heavily targeted by the Republicans, namely Georgia, Michigan and Virginia. It looks good for them so far in Georgia and Virginia, but Michigan remains in the danger zone, with a smaller margin than at the last election in 2020. But Democrats are also expecting sone meaningful gains that could be genuine upsets like Alaska and North Carolina, or more predictable ones like Maine, and haven't given up on Iowa despite its strong Republican leanings, which may also be a thing of the past this year.

Polls look quite good for the Democrats so far, but they certainly have to hope that more voters will switch to their side in the run-up to Election Day. Michigan is obviously the weakest link here, but it already was in 2024, when the state's other seat was up. Democrats held it eventually, but with the flimsiest of margins. Team Blue must be painfully aware that they again have a hole to plug there, and must do it quickly. They need to gain four seats to take back control of the Senate, and polls show that it is within their reach if they maximise their votes in the key swing states, but without spreading their resources too thin. There remains just another state, that has quite unexpectedly switched from a solid Republican hold to an opportunity for a Democratic gain, a state of affairs the punditariat have been reluctant to acknowledge for a very long time.

We are sick of this. A weak, reckless, idiotic president just threw us into a war nobody asked for. No threat existed. No objectives were set. No exit plan exists. This is pure fascism.

(Tim Walz, 20 April 2026)

Every kitten grows up to be a cat. They seem so harmless at first. Small, quiet, lapping up their saucer of milk. But once their claws get long enough, they draw blood.

(Frank Underwood, House Of Cards, 2014)

I'm talking about Texas, of course, as you may have inferred from the interval song. Texas was not always the Republican stronghold it is today. It had a Democratic Senator for the last time in 1993, and the seat that is up this year has been held by Republicans since a special election in 1961, but Democrats still dominated the State Legislature when Dallas was filmed. J.R. Ewing would have had to be a Democrat to benefit from political patronage. In 2008, Barack Obama's political strategists estimated that it would take twenty years for the natural effects of demographics to switch Texas from Red to Blue. Here we are, eighteen years later, and Trump's unpopularity has sped up the process. The Republican candidate is not yet known, as the runoff of their primary is still three weeks away, but Democrat James Talarico, who has been selected two months ago and is fiercely campaigning since, is now topping the polls against both Republican contenders, incumbent Senator John Cornyn and MAGA favourite Ken Paxton.

Talarico may look all of 16, but he is actually 36 and has been a State Representative for eight years already. His tender age may actually be a competitive advantage in a state that has grown younger over the last twenty years thanks to an exceptionally high, by US standards, population growth, especially when both Republicans are old enough to be his father. John Cornyn may have defeated Democrat M.J. Hager by almost ten points in 2020, but his position never looked as strong this year, and now the very foundations are shaken by a divisive primary. So, pending further polls delivering different results, Democrats are predicted to gain four seats and lose none. It would give them a tiny two-seat majority, but that's all they need to take back control of the Senate and piss off the Orange Baboon.

Paradoxically, this result may also be the worst case scenario for the Democrats, so long as they haven't solved their Fetterman Problem. Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, elected as a Democrat in 2022, has a pattern of voting with the Republicans, even to confirm some of Trump's most controversial nominations. He is even rumoured to consider defecting. If he did, the newly-elected Senate would switch to 50-50, and J.D. Vance would be called to the rescue to cast the 101st deciding vote. One rogue Senator could thusly achieve what Trump, the Most Powerful Man In The World™, can't. Annulling the result of nationwide elections and making the election losers winners. It remains to be seen which kind of bowl of lentils the Republicans could offer Fetterman. It would have to be a Super Bowl, couldn't resist that one, but also keep him in the Senate to avoid an adventurous by-election. In the meanwhile, the Democrats have to fight tooth and claw for all seats that are within reach, including extending the core battleground to Iowa, so Republicans will be forced to reshuffle their resources to seats they never expected to be competitive.

It’s so refreshing to work with someone who will throw a saddle on a gift horse rather than look it in the mouth.

(Frank Underwood, House Of Cards, 2013)

I took a lot of heat for saying drugs were going down 500%, 600%, 700%. But we also say sometimes 50%, 60%. It's a different kind of calculation and people understand it better.

(Donald Trump, 23 April 2026)

Six months from now, 36 States will also vote to elect their Governors. Currently, 26 Governors are Republicans and 24 are Democrats. 18 seats are up for each party. Eight Democratic and ten Republican incumbents are term-limited, which brings summat of a veneer of uncertainty to these elections. There is a lot to say about term limits, which are actually quite popular and a favourite item for populists and demagogues on the left and right. 37 US States have term limits for their Governors, including nine with a two-terms-for-life limit, like the Presidency. The other 28 allow a return after sitting out one term, like Russia before Putin made himself Tsar for life, and France. Despite the potential for change with so many open seats, the punditariat predicts very little actual movement.

Let's stay on term limits for a little more time. They make sense, sort of, in the United States, where the executive and legislative powers are clearly separated with their own separate elections. Most States even forbid running, which is American for standing, simultaneously for an executive and a legislative position, like Governor and Senator. But it wouldn't work in the Westminster System, where the two powers are inextricably intertwined and Parliament does not have fixed terms, and would even be fucking cretinous. Imagine we had an Electoral Three Strikes Law, like "three terms and you're out", which is pretty common in the US. Harold Wilson, Edward Heath, James Callaghan, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Theresa May would never have been Prime Minister. John Major would have been, but forced to stand down after 18 months. Here ends my lecture on the absurdity of performative well-meaning laws, kids. Now, back to the matter at hand, my gubernatorial projection predicts a net gain of one for Democrats, losing Kansas but gaining Georgia and Iowa.

But a major earthquake may come from, of all places, California, which is indeed the Earthquake State. There, 60% of the vote going to the Democrats could elect a Republican Governor, because of the state's absurdist jungle primary law. The incumbent, Democrat Gavin Newsom, is term-limited, so every Jools and Jim in San Angeles fancied it was their turn for their fifteen minutes in the headlights. What could have been a run-of-the-mill open seat has thusly turned into a fucking free-for-all. There are 60 candidates on the primary ballot, 22 Democrats, 12 Republicans, 3 from minor parties and 23 independents of various shades. This totally illustrates the complete lunacy of the jungle primary system, which encourages every "my voice deserves to be heard" crackpot to stand, quite markedly from within the Democratic Party. The law stipulates that only the top two primary candidates proceed to the general, and California Democrats are now shitting themselves at the thought that it may well be two Republicans. Nobody's fault but yours, wankers, for enforcing this asinine law and never giving a thought to the possible consequences. They were warned, as the same law propelled two candidates from the same party to the general in 5 out of the state's 52 districts at the 2024 House elections, but it was not considered significant enough to require adjustments to the process. Don't come whining when your own petard bites you in the arse, mates.

You can’t expect the office to do anything more than what you bring to it.

(Frank Underwood, House Of Cards, 2017)

For those of us climbing to the top of the food chain, there can be no mercy. There is but one rule: hunt or be hunted.

(Frank Underwood, House Of Cards, 2014)

A wee while ago, Focaldata conducted an American poll, of course dealing with the next Presidential election, though it is still two-and-a-half years in the future. They first polled the primaries, the campaign for which has pretty much already begun for the Democrats, but is bound to be a rushed affair on the Republican side. as even mentioning the end of Trump's reign is as taboo as mentioning the King's death under Henry VIII. Democrats selected Kamala Harris, because nothing says "we're in this to win" like selecting the previous loser. Gavin Newsom, because nothing says "we still believe in wokeism" like selecting the pet hate of the Woke Wing, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, because nothing says "we're done with wokeism" like selecting the rising star of the Woke Wing. The Republican nominees were J.D. Vance. Donald J. Trump Jr and Marco Rubio, in that order. But Focaldata dropped Baboon Junior from the finals, the Presidential simulations, as nobody would be cretinous enough to pick him in real life. Well, they picked the father, so who knows? Anyway, they pitted three Dems against two Reps, and Team Blue won all.

But there is another side to this vision, as always, because you have to factor in the workings of the Electoral College, which heavily favour the Republicans because of the over-representation of the small, mostly Red, States. So a 5% or 6% lead is enough to win the Presidency, but a 2% or 3% lead may not, especially if AOC overperforms in big already Blue States like New York or California. Never forget that Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 by 77 Electoral Votes while winning the popular vote by 2%. Admittedly, the trends of Presidential voting intentions show a massive swing from Republicans to Democrats, but there are about five dozen reasons this could totally go tits up during the 30 months left before the election.

Nineteen of these reasons have names, those of the nineteen candidates already lined up for the Democratic primary. This is in stark contrast with just a handful of contenders on the Republican side. I even have a strong hunch that the Republicans could kill all the suspense even before the primary season begins, by announcing a J.D. Vance-Marco Rubio ticket that would instantly shut down all alternative candidacies. It is also safe to assume Democrats will have a bruising and divisive primary, because this is what Democrats do. It is bound to happen this year if Harris, Newsom and Ocasio-Cortez actually emerge as the top three runners, which could trigger nasty exchanges prioritising ideological purity over pragmatism. Newsom has a head start as he is already campaigning quite bluntly on social media, mercilessly savaging Trump to establish his credentials as the Head Of The Resistance. His mistake could be steering his campaign too close to the centre, leaving the left field to Ocasio-Cortez, who is poised to attract all the younger Democrats in the Zohran Mamdani fan club. Which could allow Kamala Harris to emerge as the consensus candidate in the middle, despite the common wisdom that losers never get a second chance in American politics. Well, Richard Nixon did.

The faithless President depicts himself as Christ while he plunges the nation into wars of choice. While you pay more for everything, the First Family’s wealth is growing by billions. Because they’re crooks, and everybody knows it.

(Jon Ossoff, 20 April 2026)

A storm has been forming, not for weeks, but for decades. The entire nation is in its path and, if we ignore the warning signs, we have no one but ourselves to blame.

(Kate Baldwin, House Of Cards, 2015)

Questions have to be asked and answered about The Curious Incident Of The Shooter At The Correspondents' Dinner on 25 April. Why was security at the venue so lax? Why were residents of the hotel not confined to their rooms for the duration of the event? Why were Trump, Vance and half the Cabinet in the same room at the same time? Why did the Secret Service let the suspect run past them in plain sight? Why did the Secret Service not terminate the suspect on the spot after he shot one of them, when they are trained to shoot to kill without a second thought? Why wasn't security tightened after an alleged Iranian plot was foiled a month before? You can either examine these questions with extreme cynicism, which is usually the best way to assess any Trump-related event, or you can apply Occam's Razor. Both deliver the same conclusion. It was fake, staged and scripted. "Why would he do that?", you may ask. "Why wouldn't he?", I would retort, when his job approval rating is still critically low by US standards.

The worst part, from the Orange Baboon's point of view in his few short moments of complete lucidity, is that his Magnum Opus, the Iran War, is turning into a fucking clown show within a trainwreck. No goal has been met because there was never any goal to meet. All the talk about regime change, nuclear weapons and whatnot was just that, talk. And the narrative kept changing daily because there was no way any of the goals could be met, so Trump had to deny he ever had the goals he had ranted about the day before, and start ranting about the ones he would deny he ever had the day after. The complete farce of the blockade of Hormuz was summat of a zenith of arrogance and incompetence that proved the Orange Baboon had totally lost it. The Great American Public knew it and steadily opposed the war from day one, even from before day one, which must have made Trump livid.

YouGov dug deeper to the heart of the matter, asking their US panelists how they feel about some very precise issues linked to the disastrous failed war. And the verdicts are again unequivocally merciless. It's a fucking failure on all counts, and the sooner we get out of this mess, the better, to sum up the dominant feelings. Such results are especially painful for the Orange Baboon because they can only be achieved if he is losing a significant chunk of Republican voters, after losing the Independents the day he started the fucking war. He has exposed his own weaknesses, begging the Iranians to come back to the negotiations the day after he promised them fire and brimstone. He has conceded victory to the Pasdaran with these very negotiations that will lead nowhere, and his failure to order any significant military action, because he is terrified of the optics of sending The Boys to their death on an election year. So he does what Trump does. Whining, insulting ancestral allies and, aye, staging a fake assassination attempt.

The Orange Baboon started Operation Epstein Files to distract the American public from the Epic Fury... oops, sorry... that's the other way round... can't believe that nobody at the Orange House noticed that some smart arse had chosen a codename with the same initials... let's start again. The Orange Baboon started Operation Epic Fury to distract the American public from the Epstein Files and it fucking failed, so now he has to resort to that tired stunt, a fake assassination attempt, to distract the world from the Epic Failure of Operation Epstein Fury. Whatever. The only question worth asking and investigating is whom he paid this time for the freak show. Can't be Mossad, they wouldn't have made such a fucking clown show of it. So it must be the FSB, again. Or Elon Muck's South African white supremacist buddies. Go for cheap, get a cheap show.

We must especially beware of that small group of selfish men who would clip the wings of the American eagle in order to feather their own nests.

(Franklin Delano Roosevelt)

I have often found that bleeding hearts have an ironic fear of their own blood. One drop and they seize up. But offer them a caring hand and massage them back to life and they soon start beating to the right drum.

(Frank Underwood, House Of Cards, 2013)

The key to the next presidential election might be what Democrats want, and Focaldata probed just that, not from Democratic politicians, but from a panel of their voters. Ye ken, vox populi and all that. The first step was to ask them how negatively of positively they see a number of political concepts. Which does not mean which one they self-identify as, but nevertheless paints a picture of the Democratic grassroots clearly leaning to the left. Of course, we know that sometimes words have two meanings, especially when it comes to defining political concepts in real English and American. Man gave names to all the politics, but not the same on both sides of the Ocean. For example, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani are the rising icons of democratic socialism á l'américaine, with policies that would fit in the SNP's or Plaid Cymru's manifestos. But never mind, it's the intent that counts.

In fact, my problem with this kind of investigation of Americans is that they are notoriously conceptually illiterate when it comes to politics. Democratic voters are no exception when they conflate socialism with wokeism, democratic socialism with Scandinavian politics, and haven't the fuckiest scoobie that Soziale Marktwirtschaft, a concept fabricated by the German Christian Democrats in the 1950s, is the chemically pure definition of a mixed economy. Focaldata then probed a number of craftily chosen statements that explain the success of the new generation of politicians like Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez, or Senate candidates like the aforementioned James Talarico in Texas. There is a clear endorsement in there of key components of left-wing populism, like the belief in sweeping change initiated by the grassroots, and denunciation of corporate influence on politics.

The fun part is that these widely-shared views totally contradict other views that are just as widely held, like belief in the existing political system and trust in established institutions. But who are we to lecture or mock them, when all British polls show that we too are totally defined by our contradictions? Then, endorsing a new world, new people, revolution and voices of thunder, young people with visions and dreams, does not mean you have to keep shtum about the vagaries of your recent past. Focaldata took their Democrats right down that road, asking them if they think the Democratic Party has devoted too much or too little time and energy on a list of topics that sound like elements you have to include in a progressive™ manifesto. It is obviously no coincidence that the three major issues of a populist-progressive agenda, the cost of living, housing and corporate power, emerge as the top three on which the Party has not spent enough of its political capital.

It is revealing that the most rejected issue, that with the highest proportion thinking the party has done too much and the lowest proportion thinking it has done too little, is LGBTQ+ rights. It would undoubtedly be a good thing if Democrats had an epiphany, ad fully admitted that endorsing the most extreme positions of the trans lobby, to the detriment of gays and lesbians, was an avoidable error that alienated way more people than it attracted, and cost them thousands of votes among the blue-collar and Latino electorates. It is also quite surprising that grassroots Democrats are not more motivated by issues of racial justice. It is common knowledge that the Christo-fascist wing of Trumpism is also openly racist, and Democrats have nothing to lose in attacking them from that angle. This has even become a matter of urgency after the United States Supreme Court eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965 on direct orders from the Orange Baboon, in clear submission to his white supremacist agenda. It is obvious that the Trumpists will stop at nothing to rig the midterms, and racist gerrymandering is just their last oven-ready tool to do that. Democrats must clearly do anything they can to fight this, not just as a matter of morals and principle, but also for the most obvious pragmatic reasons.

Conscience has an unmistakable stink to it, sort of like raw onions and morning breath. But a lie stinks even more, when it comes from someone who isn’t used to lying. It’s more like rotten eggs and horseshit.

(Frank Underwood, House Of Cards, 2013)

It’s the nature of things. The universe devolves into entropy. Disorder. Things rot. They fall apart. If the whole universe is doomed to spin out of control, what is the point of anything?

(Linda Bowers, Law & Order, 1996)

We live in interesting times indeed, when a Your Party MP recycles a line from a Republican President of the United States to oppose military spending. Zarah did not go as far as nicking lines from Eisenhower's Farewell Address, because diatribes against the military-industrial complex are definitely too passé, but you get the spirit. There is a clear line of succession with the CND of Jeremy Corbyn's youth, who diatribed against the Western military-industrial complex as the warm-up act at a free Billy Bragg concert paid for by the Soviet Embassy in London. Remember, kids, there is nothing like a free concert. YouGov tested a statement broadly similar in spirit to Sultana's, though milder in wording, thrice generically in relation to public services generally, and once in relation to green energy projects specifically, which may just have been them taking the piss. It does show that public opinion has evolved, but in the opposite direction to Zarah's bold statement. Finally, Lord Ashcroft pitted military spending against welfare and benefits, which is the actual choice Rachel Reeves has to face, without any of the avoidance option YouGov offers, and the people's choice is unequivocal again. Defence First.

Our opinion of the choice between guns and butter had already swung towards the guns last year, and it is even clearer this year. This is quite a significant change, probably because we are aware that without guns, there is no butter. YouGov probed deeper into the root causes of this change of mind, and identified a credible and rather basic one, that we feel the world is dangerous. They asked, very generically, how much danger we think other countries currently pose to the UK's national security and safety. Nobody was named and shamed, or specifically targeted and stigmatised, even if we all know who the obvious suspects are. Not Liechtenstein or Singapore. As you might have guessed, the overwhelmingly dominant feeling is that the rest of the world is a source of danger to us.

Now, if you feel danger around, you must be ready to defend yourself. Even my dog knows that, if Zarah Sultana does not. It is not just about the size of The Forces, though size does matter, like everywhere else. It is also about their readiness to fight. Last year's Strategic Defence Review uncovered some very inconvenient truths, like the British Army having a capacity for only 20,000 fully deployable personnel, or just about a fourth of their total manpower. It is not better in foreign countries with similar nominal military capabilities, but that doesn't mean we should just accept it and do nothing. The Iran War also made the once proud Royal Navy the laughing stock of the world when we could deploy just one destroyer, when France had sent half their navy to the Eastern Mediterranean, it took us three weeks to get her ready and we had to withdraw her after a month for repairs. YouGov found that the Great British Public have no illusion, as a massive majority opine that The Forces are not prepared to face whatever threat may come our way.

I can only concur with the dominant opinion here, but we have a massive problem. There is a lot of denial in government circles about the state of unreadiness of The Forces. They fail to address the seriousness of the situation as if the military were some kind of fragile porcelain who cannot stand the blunt truth. Or they fear that naming and addressing the issues would be bad-for-morale™, when morale is already abysmally low for very concrete reasons. The Army do not need a belly rub, they need accommodation where they don't have to fight with rats for space. The Air Force do not need a scratch behind the ears, they need planes that cannot be unplugged on a whim by a hostile foreign power. The Navy do not need an extra treat, they need ships that do not spend half their time in drydock to fix the plumbing. And, above all, the politicians have to stop playing mind games and politicking, and act.

Never forget the wise words of Josef Stalin, “Them as fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it”.

(Andy Dalziel, Dalziel & Pascoe, 1997)

If your enemy believes in guns, you’d better believe in bullet-proof vests.

(Lee Knight, Dalziel & Pascoe, 2006)

Very surprisingly, the Great British Public do for once show continuity, logic and consistency when jumping from one poll to the next about our level of military spending. Opinium have briefly taken the baton off YouGov on this, and found out something we actually already knew, that we think we spend too little on defence. The results are totally conclusive and even consensual, as even the TikTok Generation and the Green electorate agree. It is obviously a good thing that the faux pacifist discourse from the loopy Putin-enabling far-left doesn't work any more, when the overall climate is not the most favourable, with the election campaigns switching our attention to wholly different matters, and Trump doing his best to give military strength a bad name. But will popular resolve be enough to convince Rachel Reeves to keep going in the right direction in her next Budget?

YouGov quite appropriately covered this too in the latest round of their Political Trackers. Oddly, the political crosstabs of these trackers are definitely dated, ad they do not include Reform UK and the Greens. But the significant demographics are there to assess which part of public opinion is leaning in this or that direction. YouGov regularly ask their panel on which domains the government should spend more, and on which they should spend less. We clearly do not support cutting defence spending, no matter which of the proverbial tough choices this would entail. Only the TikTok Generation are not on board with this, but who honestly gives a fuck? Just wait until they no longer live rent-free in their parents' basement, and they will dance to a different tune. Fortunately, a majority of us are aware that we can no longer trust the USA with anything, especially not protecting us against aggression, when their President contradicts himself from one day to the next, and clearly has no strategy beyond his next ingestion of meds. We must fend four ourselves, and that means putting dosh on the table, a shitload of it.

The current state of the debate around defence is appalling. I won't even mention again Your Party's putrid demagoguery or the Greens' cretinous irresponsibility. Part of the appalling state of the debate is that Labour are being relentlessly bashed, with the feisty complicity of the mediatariat, and don't even fight back. They have retreated deep inside their shell, while they have actually taken emergency measures to derail the decline of The Forces, and all the Conservatives have is the most repugnant display of bad faith. Kemi Badenough is so naturally dishonest, and so terrified of being eaten alive by Reform's hellhounds, that she has totally lost touch with reality. Specifically, that part of reality where the Conservatives were in charge for fourteen years and have shown only crass incompetence in the management of military matters. The MoD's own official statistics make that case. All you have to do is track defence spending as a percentage of GDP through the years, and highlight which party was in charge when the most significant changes occurred. Official statistics go back only to 1960, but this is already enough to prove that the Conservatives, despite all their proclamations of patriotism, have been in complete dereliction of duty over national security and the defence of the Realm.

The labels show the level of defence spending, as a percentage of GDP, at the end of each party's tenure over the last 66 years, with significant intermediate points in 1984 and 1990. Interestingly, Thatcher first increased defence spending, as she realised the projected defence cuts of 1981 would have left us impotent against the Argies, who would have easily kept control of Las Malvinas. The effort ceased after the Reagan Missile Crisis, the last big showdown with the terminally ill Soviet Union, and Mikhail Gorbachev's ascent to power, and it totally went downhill after that. Thatcher and Major enforced the biggest cuts to defence spending since the Suez debacle, starting years before the whole West succumbed to the catastrophic delusion of "peace dividends". New Labour stabilised defence spending at the level reached when they took power, and then the austerity-driven Tories of the 21st century again savagely slashed it below the level of programmed impotence. So much for the fabricated image of the Conservatives as the best defenders of our national security. They weakened it, lied about it, and now New New Labour are struggling to reconstruct it after years of neglect. Facts, mates, just facts.

Naked force has resolved more issues throughout history than any other factor. The contrary opinion, that violence never solves anything, is wishful thinking at its worst. People who forget that always pay.

(Jean Rasczak, Starship Troopers, 1997)

You clearly told us the truth, but you only told us part of the truth. It’s a little bit like, you know, saying, “I had to run to work today”, but not saying that you were chased by a bear.

(Emily Thornberry to Olly Robbins, Foreign Affairs Select Committee, 21 April 2026)

Will incuriosity kill the cat? It may, if you believe YouGov, who saw the Reform vote go up 3% and the Labour vote go down 1% in their first poll after the Mandy Vetting Fiasco, after weeks and weeks of steady narrowing of the gap. That same week, More In Common found Reform up 1% and Labour down 1%, while Find Out Now had Reform unchanged and Labour down 1%. Of course, polls come and go like the ebb and flow in the Strait of Hormuz, and always find a way to contradict each other and themselves. But they also tell us that there is indeed a Starmer Curse on the Labour Party. Every time it looks like he is finally leading them down the road to recovery, he trips on a self-laid trap. The Mandy Fiasco is just another episode of the same series, with Starmer squandering what little political capital he had gained back thanks to his resistance to Trump trying to drag us into an absurd unwinnable war. This makes the current trends of voting intentions still challenging for Labour, and just as disastrous as they were last month.

What is most obvious amidst all the fracas about Mandelson is the stratospheric level of hypocrisy and opportunism displayed by the oppositions, the Rump Tories and the Faragists. As one unnamed "senior Labour figure" told The Guardian, "They all thought it was a very smart political move back then. Now they are all full of this righteous indignation". And we have the receipts, videoed statements from Kemi Badenoch, Nigel Farage and an unlikely Michael Gove. To sum it up, everybody knew that Mandy had dark ties to Jeffrey Epstein, but nobody gave a frying duck because everybody thought he was the perfect choice to cajole and outfox the Orange Baboon. How fucking wrong they all were. But all escape the trainwreck unscathed so far, as the unfair and biased Metropolitan mediatariat, including the Reform-propelling BBC, focus our anger on Starmer. And they get exactly what they are agitating for, more and more of us joining the howling-at-the-moon herd demanding Starmer's resignation. Which will probably happen for all the wrong reasons, as the trophy hunters will not be appeased by just one head on a pike, and will instantly start hounding down the next Chosen One.

But, if a headless-chicken Labour ditch Starmer on VE-Day, where the fuck do they go from here? Who's next? Angela Rayner? Wes Streeting? Ed Miliband? Fuck off! Andy Burnham may gesticulate all he wants, and piss inside the tent from the outside, he knows that he will become an MP again only over Starmer's dead body, and any talk of anything else is pure delusional bullshit. I still believe that the right way is the Third Way, just not the 1990s variant of that. The New Model Third Way between Blairite centro-liberalism and Corbynite wokeism. Repudiate the imported faux progressive bourgeois luxury beliefs from Californian universities, and reclaim the values and traditions of European social-democracy, to bring the working class and the salaried middle-class together in a unifying project. Take your cues from Clement Attlee, also a lawyer from the "soft left" of the party, who rose to the occasion by ditching cautious gradualist reformism and implementing the most revolutionary changes the Realm had known since Henry VIII created his own state superstition. Blair and Corbyn deconstructed, Attlee reconstructed, just as a true Labour government for the Third Millennium should. That's how we disentangle ourselves from the impossible choice between faux socialists appeasing Islamo-Nazis and Putin, and very real fash cuddling Christo-fascists, Trump and Putin.

Fucking ITV. They’re worse than the Beeb. What the hell was that “moral code” bullshit all about?

(Imogen Conrad, Secret Service, 2026)

It has a tragic element. Keir is a decent man but lacking substance. He travels so light because there is nothing there.

(Anonymous Labour source, The Guardian, 20 April 2026)

But is there even a fleeting chance to escape a final between Woke and Fash? Probably not if Labour does not take the fight to them, as two arses of the same cheek. Both rely on toxic un-British ideologies imported from the United States, wokeism and Christo-fascism. Both are sectarian, intolerant, exclusionary and divisive. Both are prone to scapegoating and DARVOing. Fash wants to enforce a British ICE, while Woke wants to enforce a British Stasi, that they already have within their own party to witch-hunt wrongthinkers. Fash are active Putinists, Woke are passive Putinists, and both are delusional revisionists. Do we really want either in charge of the Realm? Sadly, against the background of obsessive Starmerphobia manufactured and maintained by the Metropolitan mediatariat, what we see this time is Reform UK, (Slight Return). To 26%, which does not look like much, but switches back quite a number of seats their way, from both Labour and the Rump Tories.

Today's snapshot includes the last five polls fielded by BMG Research, Opinium, More In Common, YouGov and Find Out Now between 29 April and 6 May, with a super-sample of 9,986, or 19 times Wes Streeting's margin at the 2024 election in Ilford North. We now have a third pollster, Techne, including Restore Britain in their prompts, but they have not included Your Party, unlike YouGov and Find Out Now. We can nevertheless estimate the influence of the two "rebel parties" quite reliably. It's close to fuck all for the Corbynites, who never stood a chance as soon as the Greens transmogrified into a Labour-hounding Tarkus anchored in "eco-populism". Restore Britain's impact is more visible, as they contribute to keeping Reform UK under 30% of predicted votes, snatching like 3-5% off their support. Labour should definitely find a way to help Rupert Lowe, as his fight against Farage can help save a lot of their own MPs.

Not all polls include Your Party and Restore Britain, so I have had to extrapolate their potential vote shares in polls that do not name them, from the vote shares they get in those that do. It is certainly not perfect, but I consider it relatively accurate for so long as not all pollsters cover the whole spectrum of options, and provide their own numbers. And I'll leave it at this for now, as psephology is like Vegas and sausage-making. What happens in the algorithm stays in the algorithm because, if you knew how it's made, you wouldn't eat it. Anyway, whatever the tweak, this does not distort the seat projections, as both Your Party and Restore Britain remain at the fringes of the political spectrum, and neither has the potential to become a kingmaker. So we still have a massive Reform Presence in the North and Midlands, the SNP enjoying full undeserved serendipity, and the Liberal Democrats holding the frontlines in the South.

The most disturbing part of recent events is the obvious and massive Schadenfreude in the Metropolitan mediatariat at every twist and turn of the pre-scripted saga of Starmer's Downfall. You'd think they all have office sweepstakes about when he will be gone, heavily loaded in favour of next week. But, contrary to what both The Guardian and The Mirror headlined, Starmer did not suffer a massive backbench rebellion over the very hypocritical Rump Tory motion to send him to the headmaster's office. He survived it with a majority of 112, and only 15 Labour MPs voted for it. I totally anticipate VE-Day being a fucking wankfest for the punditariat, even if the results of the elections are less challenging for Labour then we expect them to be. But we already know the script, don't we? Shitweasel, Kemi Badenough and Benito Farage squealing in unison that Starmer must resign, as they always do whatever the question is. It is their Carthago Delenda Est and, without it, they lose all justification for any invitation on BBC One. Pathetic wankers.

I’ll be honest with you, people don’t like Keir on the door but it’s not over this Mandelson thing. They don’t like him personally.

(Sarah Champion MP, BBC Radio 4's Today, 22 April 2026)

Ah! my poor dear child, the truth is, that in London it is always a sickly season. Nobody is healthy in London, nobody can be.

(Jane Austen, Emma, 1816)

What could be Keir Starmer's worst nightmare right now? Jimmy Kimmel revealing that Charmilla have been held hostage at the Orange House in Trump DT, and forced to re-enact whole episodes of Downton Abbey? The Daily Mail discovering that Peter Mandelson has an identical twin? Or just a poll of the incoming Borough Council elections in the Imperial Capital? YouGov did just that, and J.L. Partners too, using the infamous MRP algorithms to predict votes to 1/10,000th of a percent. Actually, MRP is much cruder than that and vastly overhyped, but the pollstertariat still think that using it makes them look smart. The weighted average of the two polls paints a really bleak picture of what London Labour can expect, with their London-wide predicted vote share down 16% on the previous elections in 2022. But the average vote share is irrelevant, as what matters is how well of badly they do in each Borough, which is pretty much globally badly.

But we must not underestimate the incumbency factor and the extra resilience it grants Labour in the face of adversity. Some of their Councillors have been around longer than The Ravens At The Tower, or at least since the days of Ken Livingstone, I presume. Labour are defending 1,046 seats, or 58% of all London seats, 20 majority administrations and one coalition administration in Havering. Bear in mind too that this is not a city-wide election, but 679 separate elections in muti-member wards. So you can do what Owen Jones always urges you to do when he wants to make an indefensible point, relativise and contextualise. This will tell you that you can get a Council majority on 35% of the vote, and a minority administration on 30%. This means that Labour could hold control of Camden, Hackney, Haringey, Islington, Lambeth and Southwark. And have enough seats for a minority administration in Barking and Dagenham, Greenwich, Hammersmith and Fulham, Lewisham, Newham, Waltham Forest, Wandsworth and Westminster.

This is far from ideal, but holding more than half of the Councils is clearly not the absolute Apocalypse that has been predicted by many in the Metropolitan mediatariat. Some of these Councils are likely to be hard-fought with the Greens, but I remain convinced that Labour have a competitive advantage. The Greens may be helped by Your Party "concentrating their efforts" on just a few Councils, which is of course just waffle for "we don't have anybody willing to stand for us, so let's get the fuck out of here". Honestly, I can't even see how the Corbynites could hold all their incumbents, all defectors from Labour, unless their is some backroom deal with the Greens for concerted tactical voting. Then what about Reform UK? Methinks the strength of the Turquoise infection in London has been grossly exaggerated by pundits with an agenda. They are credited with more than 35% in only one Council, Havering, where they would have a shootout with the local Residents' Association, who have a long history of cooperation with Labour.

On pure serendipity, due to the fragmentation of the vote, Reform could also bag a plurality of seats in Bexley, and that would be all. The polls credit them with 15% or less in 23 out of 32 Boroughs, just enough to be the naughty brats at the back of the Chamber, but not more. It says that Labour would make, would have made, a better strategic choice focusing on the Greens, who appear to be a credible challenge in Hackney, Haringey, Lambeth and Lewisham. Only Hackney has gentrified over the last ten years, into summat like the Eastern March of Inner Hipstershire, so the Greens' appeal has surely more to do with their "socialist eco-populist", or whatever, stance than with the classic woke rants. But what will remain of this after Che Polanski showed more concern for an anti-Semitic terrorist than compassion for his victims? That should definitely be a vote-killer, especially after the Green Party pretty much admitted that Che didn't know what he was talking about. Voters should also check if everything the Greens promise is actually within the powers of the Borough Councils, or there will be disappointment in the air very soon after the elections. That's the Zohran Mamdani Syndrome, who was forced to admit that he could not keep some of his most popular promises without prior scrutiny and approval by the New York State Legislature, who may not be totally open to pouring millions into New York City at the detriment of rural communities. Fool me once, fool me twice, more fool me...

There are times, perhaps once every thirty years, when there is a sea-change in politics. It then does not matter what you say or do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of.

(James Callaghan)

You are Welsh, they said. Speak to us so, keep your fields free of the smell of petrol, the loud roar of hot tractors. We must have peace and quietness.

(R. S. Thomas, A Welsh Testament, 1961)

Last month, in the penultimate mile before the Senedd election, we got three very useful additions to our array of polls. Three polls, from More In Common, J.L. Partners and YouGov crosstabbing their vote predictions along the lines of the sixteen new constituencies. The real surprise is that nobody had thought of that before, and that we were left with crosstabs with the Council areas or the obsolete electoral regions of 1999, when the existence of the new constituencies had been known for twenty-two months, and their exact delimitations for thirteen months. But let's stop chuntering, let's ride the gift hose now and fully enjoy what these new polls offer and allow. The trendlines confirm that it will be a crash landing for Welsh Labour, going down again after going up again for a wee while. They are predicted to lose two thirds of their votes from the 2021 election, probably split close to equally between Reform UK and Plaid Cymru, the two anticipated winners of today's vote.

It kind of makes sense if you factor in the middle-aged English Nationalist wing switching to Reform, the bright young things in the New Model Progressive™ wing to Plaid Cymru, and only those old enough to have been at Keir Hardie's hustings in Merthyr Tydfil staying with the Old Party. There are nevertheless some surprises in the seat projection we can deduct from the weighted average of the Last Week's polls. This round again says that Eluned Morgan will lose her seat, but Jane Dodds is predicted to hold hers by a hare, as the sole Liberal Democrat in the new Senedd. Rhun ap Iorwerth is predicted to cruise to re-election with votes to spare, with Plaid Cymru bagging the first, second, fourth and sixth spots in Bangor Conwy Môn, while Darren Millar could have a far less stellar election, emerging only fourth of six in Clwyd. Electoral Calculus and YouGov have also issued their own predictions on Election Eve, with Electoral Calculus obviously relying on a different set of polls, going back to when the result was much closer. But, of course, it doesn't end here.

The election of the new First Minister could be a fun moment. A coalition of Plaid Cymru and the Greens is predicted just three seats shy of a majority, so Rhun ap Iorwerth will be elected, as a coalition of Reform UK and the Conservatives have absolutely no chance whatsoever of winning. But what will Labour do? If they abstain, ap Iorwerth wins with the Green votes. But would they go as far as voting for him, in the hope of being offered positions in a coalition government? Boost the Nats to a really convincing majority, or just sit on your hands and watch while power slips away from you, now that is a fucking tough choice for the Reds. And we all know that, at the end of the day, that decision would be taken in London, not in Cardiff. We can only hope that there is enough common sense left in the corridors of Whitehall to avoid any scorched Earth response out of spite, but who really knows? I think we have all realised by now that long-held certainties no longer apply, and we have to brace ourselves for the hitherto unthinkable. Caerdydd may be the place where it happens.

God was to have a peculiar care for the Welsh people. History showed us he was too big to be nailed to the wall of a stone chapel, yet still we crammed him between the boards of a black book.

(R. S. Thomas, A Welsh Testament, 1961)

For real dangers the people of Scotland form perhaps the bravest people in the world. There is no people in the world to whom they are prepared to surrender or to whom one would ask them to surrender the palm of bravery.

(William Ewart Gladstone, The Times, 29 June 1886)

There has been quite a frenzy of Holyrood polling recently, as the pollstertariat has gone into Maximum Overdrive, and graced us with eleven Full Scottish in April, and five more in May. Which is of course not much, compared to when the floodgates open just before a general election, but it is still akin to the seasonal torrential rains. The equivalent of four months of polls in five weeks. Of course, I have given up on giving you a detailed account of all the gory details of each and every poll, or else we would still be here on VE-Day when the real results are in. So you're gonna have to trust me on this as the trends of voting intentions are pretty clear, give or take, but the seat projections are all over the place. If you wanted to massage the results, you wouldn't know which way to go, as each poll spawns its own set of conclusions. So it's smarter, and easier, to just tell you what I genuinely see in those polls, starting with the pretty unequivocal trends of voting intentions.

I will not show you all the details of the last sixteen polls, conducted over the last five weeks on an immense population of 44,725 innocent unsuspecting Scots. But I can show you, and will show you, the sequence of seat projections I got from the continuous line of polls unleashed on our Nation since the last election. This perfectly illustrates the volatility of the electorate, or alternatively the unreliability of polls and the inanity of peremptory conclusions drawn from them. The real truth is that nobody has a fucking clue what is happening right now as our dogs walk their humans to the polling places. Then I totally believe that, whatever the result is, somebody will find a poll that predicted just that, and gloat that they told us so. Because that's the way it is with our dim, mediocre and predictable mediatariat. By the way, if you actually take your doggo to the polling place, make sure there is always a human on watch over the assembled canines on the doorstep, so they do not end in the "stolen pets" column of the local newspaper.

The fun side of Scottish politics is that you can always expect the unexpected from attention-seeking politicos. The last, and fucking hilarious, example is this ferrets-in-a-bag brawl about who should get credit for the Orange Baboon lifting a 10% tariff on whisky, that he would have lifted anyway because the usually docile United States Supreme Court ruled he did not have the power to impose it. I just can't believe this has turned into summat of a pissing contest between Charmilla's flying monkeys and Honest John, which doesn't make it less of a welcome comic relief at the tail end of a boringly bland campaign. Now, what is the best way to attempt a prediction of an unpredictable result? I went for the weighted average of voting intentions from the last four polls conducted up to Election Eve, and what my model says would come out of this. That's an aggregate sample of 14,704, which is as good as you can get without going too far back in time. I have added Last Day projections from other prognosticators for full disclosure, so here's what it says, and that's my final answer.

Thank Dog for Ipsos, Survation, YouGov and Find Out Now, who kept polling until the last second and published all their results instantly. More In Common also interrogated us until Monday. but seem to have missed the memo saying that poll results are best let out in the wild before voting starts, so they are not featured in this Last Day aggregate. If the election delivers these results, that would be a tremendous success for the SNP. Losing only two seats after nineteen years in power and a totally chaotic fourth term is quite definitely the stuff shamelessly sycophantic columns in The Scottish Pravda are made on. But the best will surely be Shitweasel drooling over the Greenies doubling their number of seats, just like the Alien on Ripley's cat, which will give them a mandate to go stage a Tartan Trans Pride in Ramallah, or summat. On the other side of the constitutional divide, The Liberal Democrats will do well in Fife, The Dark Side Of the Forth, and the Highlands, and that's about it, as I will not even joke about the English Nationalist Party securing a beachhead North of the Tweed, which may erode quite quickly if experience with their English Councils set any precedent. Not that any of this really helps us guess what to actually expect on VE-Day, as the polls show about a third of us still undecided, expect possibly some hard-fought recounts in constituencies the SNP never expected to lose. But this is all part of the fun, and possibly having to wait until Monday for the final counts, innit?

I’m simply saying to people, vote SNP and let’s get on with it.

(John Swinney, 27 April 2026)

Of course, Scotsmen are not foreigners. They are fellow subjects of ours, and they are in the same position as any other fellow subjects.

(L.J. Higby, Mac Iver v. Burns, 1895)

The last batch of Full Scottish have also updated the voting intentions for Independence, which of course matter only in the alternative reality where a second referendum would happen before Edinburgh is flooded by the melting polar ice-cap rising the North Sea's level by six metres. But I wouldn't want to piss on your parade, so I have to say these polls are good news, showing Yes in the lead. The trendlines thusly confirm a swing from No to Yes over the last few months. Let's not forget, though, that Yes dominated our political landscape in late 2020 and early 2021, and that it went tits up because of Nicola Sturgeon's atrocious policies in the twilight months of her reign, and never recovered under Humza Yousaf's crassly incompetent leadership. The tide started slowly turning only in late 2024, and I guess we can thank Labour's repellent powers for this more than John Swinney's charisma.

No matter how much we love seeing these trends, let's not forget that such polling works only against the background of the fairy tale where the referendum actually happens. If we look at the smaller picture, as painted by the weighted average of the six most recent polls, we do have a Yes lead with undecideds erased, as they would be in real life. Survation chose to add some spice to the haggis with two follow-up options about the possible fallout of today's Scottish Parliament election. And I mean "possible" here in the same sense that it is actually possible that Perkin Warbeck was Richard of York. But half of us seem to enjoy living past the back of the wardrobe, where constitutional arrangements cease to exist like general relativity in an episode of Star Trek. Perhaps we don't even remember how these constitutional arrangements work, and the SNP's first post-election order of business should be to produce a six-parter for BBC Scotland about what the Scotland Act actually says, instead of holding a futile virtue-signalling vote that will take us nowhere we haven't been before,

There is an amusing part in this. Green voters opine that an SNP majority does not constitute a mandate, but a pro-Indy majority does. It is valid if they are in it, not if they aren't. Must be the well-known Green sense of inclusivity. Anyway, no matter how you look at it, this line of questioning is just another fuckload of delusional bollocks. It is politically irresponsible for the SNP to entertain the mirage within public opinion that the constitutional arrangements can be reshaped by the power of the mind of voters at an election that has fuck all to do with the constitutional process. It is inviting the people to see the world as they want it to be, and not as what it is, the kind of stunt also used by Trump and Putin. The Edinburgh Agreement of 2012 was the result of a unique alignment of the planets, mostly the result of Alex Salmond being a master at bluffing and David Cameron too daft to call his bluff. It's gone and will never come back again. We had our shot and missed, just live with it.

Perhaps it's time we asked the English. They pay for the Union, after all. The UK, in or out?

(Ryan Walker, Secret Service, 2026)

The true democratic principle, that every man‘s free will shall be as unfettered as possible, is taken to mean that the free will of the collective people shall be fettered in nothing.

(John Dalberg-Acton, The Quarterly Review, January 1878)

Survation added a nice unexpected touch to their last Full Scottish, with a question about the electoral law and a switch to "more proportional representation". They used convoluted wordings to describe the two options they offered, which I have used verbatim in the chart below for full, fair and balanced disclosure. If you dejargonise the wordings and go directly to the bare bones of the matter, it is about whether we want to go on with the hugely imperfect Additional Members System that has been used since the resurrection of the Scottish Parliament, or switch to a similar system to the one tested in Wales on Thursday. And we are split about that in almost equal parts, with more than a quarter in the middle who probably don't have a fucking scoobie what the fuck this is about.

There is no sense of a popular demand for a regime change here, as the Welsh Option does not have a massive majority in any of the classic demographics, generational and geographical. This is totally fine by me, as you already know all the reasons I totally oppose proportional representation, even in the bastardised form that will be used by Wales three days from now. One of the main arguments of proportionalists is that it favours coalitions in a culture of consensus, which would be more accurately called a culture of compromise. The problem is that the country usually mentioned as the prefect incarnation of this culture, Germany, has offered convincing counter-examples. The Scholz government fell 18 months ago because there was no consensus, and nobody in the governing coalition was willing to compromise any more. Right now, history is repeating itself with the Merz government torn apart by major disagreements about pretty much everything. So much for the alleged efficiency of proportionality. The Survation poll also shows that the Welsh Option has little traction across the political spectrum.

Ironically, SNP voters oppose it and it finds significant support only among Labour and Green voters. We already know that the leadership of the Scottish Greens have an obsessive fixation on making proportional representation the law of the land, which is a valid reason to oppose it. Labour are notoriously lukewarm about it, and reform of electoral law was not mentioned at all in their general election manifesto, even in the section headlined "Constitutional reform". The Scottish manifesto for Thursday, which will be roadkill by Friday anyway, does not mention it either, which is actually not evidence that they do not want PR, but that they are split about it, so the best option is to not mention it at all. PR is indeed a very unimaginative solution to the flaws of British democracy, when other options exist and should be explored. One such is two-round majority voting, but with one or two weeks between the two rounds, so that election pacts and coalition deals are discussed openly and publicly before We The People make our final choice. It wouldn't necessarily guarantee a strong and stable majority, we have the French precedent of 2024 to prove it, but it would be more democratic than coalitions negotiated in backroom deals after the election, away from the public's eyes, which always happens with PR.

They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.

(Douglas Adams, So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish, 1984)

Jeremy's Den

07/05/2026

New Dreams Of Freedom

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New Dreams Of Freedom