There’s 1.3% genetic disparity between us and chimpanzees, that has something to do with our ability to programme DVD players, but essentially they are us and we are them.
(Cleaver Greene, Rake, 2010)
© Peter Gabriel, Horst Königstein, 1980
It doesn't really go well with people, on the whole, when you tell them you're going to take over their country. That tends to make people who say, "No, you're not", really popular.
(Ian Hislop, Have I Got News For You?, 2 May 2025)
Back To The Eighties now, and the good stuff from the Thatcher Era, with Ein Deutsches Album, the German version of Peter Gabriel's seminal groundbreaking landmark album 3, his best ever unless it is So. Bonus tracks at the end are "Shosholoza", the B-side to the English single of "Biko", the German version of "Here Comes The Flood", the B-side to the German single of "Biko" and a staple of Peter's concerts in Germany into the 2020s, and Peter's version of "Bully For You", which for some unknown reason has never been officially released though he did record it during the 3 sessions. But maybe it was kept hidden because Tom Robinson's version was better.
As you surely know, the images look better if you click on them for larger versions.
We have just witnessed a really tremendous event, that may well alter the course of Civilisation As We Know It™. The general election in Trinidad and Tobago. Naw, mates, just fucking kidding. Of course it was the fucking Canadian election, Donald Trump's first electoral defeat since his coronation. To get this in context, it's worth going back in time almost fifteen years. The Liberal Party of Canada suffered a massive debacle at the 2011 federal election, being pushed into critically endangered status by the New Democratic Party led by Jack Layton, the best Prime Minister Canada never had. But Layton's untimely death, barely four months after the election, again totally changed the Canadian political landscape. Then, out of nowhere and the family mansion, came Justin Trudeau, bringing his unmistakeable boy-band charisma to a bar brawl. He resurrected the Liberals and then killed them again, as totally awful polls for nearly three years predicted a second near-death experience. Then came Donald Trump, who inadvertently resurrected the Liberals once more and sent them skyrocketing in the polls. After this, the new Prime Minister Mark Carney just had to show some baws and tweet sone juicy stuff, et voilà! The dawning of a new era, or summat.
Carney's long-predicted success was less flamboyant than YouGov's last MRP simulation predicted, as he will lead a minority government. But he still won, and it will hopefully have a calming effect on the Orange Baboon, who doubled down on his cretinous attitude to Canada on Election Day. Or he may just get bored and switch his very short attention span to a more pressing issue, like intimidating universities who, to be bluntly honest, sometimes asked for it. The outcome did not hurt YouGov's feelings anyway, who were quick to pat themselves on the back for missing it without really missing it. Maybe we have now to get ready for a reboot of the War Of 1812, when the USA got their arses skelped by the Canadians who burned down the White House and the Capitol. Admittedly, they were technically British at the time, but you get the gist. Our friends at YouGov did see an opportunity for another juicy speed-poll, about what we would do if the USA and Canada ever went to war. Mark Carney will surely feel pride at the fact that a majority of us would side with Canada. Though it's not a fully consensual matter, with clear political and generational divides that don't always fit with the pre-scripted patterns we all have in mind. But we in the Far North should also feel proud that Scots come out as the most supportive of our Canadian brethren.
The funniest bit of that Canadian election was obviously Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre losing the seat he had held for 20 years in the riding, which is Canadian for constituency, of Carleton in Ontario. Ironically, this riding is literally just one door down from Mark Carney's own riding of Nepean. Then the most outrageous sequel was Poilievre demanding that the MP for Battle River Crowfoot, an ultra-safe Conservative seat in Alberta, hundreds of miles from Ottawa, resign so that Poilievre could come back to Parliament at a by-election, and go on as Leader of the Opposition as if nothing had happened. Something remarkably similar to Canada happened at the Australian federal election five days later. For a long time, polls predicted that Labor, which is Australian for Labour, was doomed to lose that election. But Trump's return turned it around, and granted Prime Minister Anthony Albanese a stay of execution. YouGov predictably had a last day prediction for this one too, though their conclusion of a Labor landslide looked a bit odd, considering they also predicted the TPP vote to be only marginally different from the previous election. But Labor won with a bigger majority than YouGov predicted, and the leader of the Liberal-National Coalition Peter Dutton lost his seat in the division, which is Australian for constituency, of Dickson in Queensland, which he had represented for 24 years.
If YouGov overshot Canada, they have definitely undershot Australia, as Labor have bagged an almost as big landslide as our own Labour last year, with 62% of the seats. YouGov nevertheless found reasons to pat themselves on the back, as the other pollsters had missed the results by an even wider margin. Taken individually, the Liberals, which is Australian for Conservatives, have suffered an almost as massive defeat as our own Conservatives. But they can hide part of the disaster behind their Coalition partners, who have fared summat better. No Australian party occupies the same square on the chessboard as our LibDems, SNP or Plaid Cymru, which kind of favours the right-wing parties, as the Australian Independents have far less traction than the smaller parties in the UK. There is also some massive karmatic irony in these results. Trump, the self-appointed Nemesis of wokeism, got two of the wokest parties in the wokest nations of the Commonwealth re-elected, which was surely not part of his Master Plan. But it will undoubtedly make things easier for Keir Starmer, as he will not have to face hostile leadership in the two main historic Commonwealth nations. And Dog knows he fucking needs it.
We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we must never forget the lessons. We have to look out for ourselves and take care of each other.
(Mark Carney, 29 April 2025)
© Peter Gabriel, Horst Königstein, 1980
We have no way of knowing what the future holds, or if things will change, or when, or how. So let’s just do now. We should enjoy it, not get ourselves in a state about it.
(Humphrey Goodman, Beyond Paradise, 2025)
Then came the First Day Of May, when the Runcorn and Helsby by-election was held. I have summed up the various predictions we had about it, from three pollsters and two prognosticators, with the pollsters concluding it was a shoe-in for Reform UK, and the prognosticators predicting Labour would hold it. That one was clearly the star of the night with partial recounts, the so-called "bundle recounts" first, and then a full recount that delayed the declaration by three hours. Long after I had gone to bed, as this one was definitely not an all-nighter event for me and my dog. At the end of the day, or the start of the day actually, Reform UK gained the seat from Labour by six fucking votes, while the Greens bagged 2,314 votes. It is quite obvious that many more than six would have gone to Labour if the Greens had not stood, so you get a textbook example of where the quest for ideological purity takes you. Vote Green, Get Reform. Exactly what Owen Jones campaigned for all along, the unsufferable twat.
Of course the establishment media couldn't get enough of Runcorn, as it totally fit their pre-scripted narrative, that the British Union of Putinists were the big winners of that night, full of sound and fury signifying something. The core of that Red Doom narrative was that we would see massive swings to Reform UK, and Runcorn and Helsby should already have been a warning sign, as a lead of just 0.02% is anything but massive, especially after a trifecta of polls saying it would be 4% or 5%. Only BBC One's and The Scottish Pravda's favourite faux guru John Curtice could argue that such a narrow gain validated the trend of national polls putting Reform UK ahead by several percentage points. Then we had the results of the six Mayoral contests, that showed how easily voters could derail the narrative, even when you had polls to support it.
Reform UK had their sights firmly set on four Mayoralties (Doncaster, North Tyneside, Greater Lincolnshire, Hull and East Yorkshire) thanks to hugely favourable polling in the last two, the Liberal Democrats on one (Hull and East Yorkshire), the Conservatives on one (Cambridgeshire and Peterborough), and the Greens on one (West of England). Carla Denyer was even seen early on BBC One's Election Night, talking as if it was already in the bag. Thank Dog it didn't happen, and the Greenies even suffered the humiliation of ending up third behind Putinist influencer Arron Banks. The real pollsters got Cambridgeshire about right, but totally missed West of England, so possessed they were by their own fabrication that it was a shoe-in for the Greenies. The other four seats, in the Midlands and North, also went against the other side of the narrative, the one where Reform UK emerged as the party of the working class.
Now, it will be interesting to see how the narrowly elected Labour Mayor of Doncaster will deal with the Council which... SPOLIER ALERT... went to Reform quite conclusively. There are clear issues of overlapping prerogatives here, that are allegedly resolved by the Local Government (Functions and Responsibilities) (England) Regulations 2000. But it is more than obvious nothing is actually settled, as it would requite a peaceful agreement between recipients of concurrent legitimacies, and many pissing contests can be expected as soon as the new Council convenes. But Doncaster and North Tyneside also prove that Labour can consider themselves lucky that Boris Johnson switched the Mayoral elections to the time-honoured FPTP, instead of the earlier instant runoff., in one of his last achievements in power Otherwise the second preferences would unavoidably have delivered two more Reform UK Mayors. thusly affirming and validating the punditariat's pre-scripted narrative. Thank Dog for small mercies, even if they pave the way for Wetherspoons-car-park-grade brawls.
You are the chaos. You’re not the end result of some butterfly effect. You are the butterfly. You are the original fucking polka-dotted butterfly that causes every bit of chaos on this planet.
(Wendy Greene, Rake, 2010)
© Peter Gabriel, Horst Königstein, 1980
Chaos eventually finds its own level and, more often than not, it’s in a better place than it was when it started.
(Cleaver Greene, Rake, 2010)
In the last few days before the English local elections, even The Islington Gazette felt they had a duty to fuel the paranoia about the British Union of Putinists doing really big. While Ed Davey relished in taking the piss out of Kemi Badenoch, who had inadvertently given him one of the best arguments for voting LibDem at the locals, and did not forget to hit at "occasional MP" Nigel Farage too. But did they underestimate the weight of tactical voting against Reform UK? Or the appeal of independent candidates, as a way to avoid tossing a coin between bubonic plague, cholera and amputation of both legs? It turned out the tactical vote actually helped the New Model British Union of Fascists, mostly against Labour, and that million of Brits chose to have both legs amputated because, ye ken, that's how you fight off immigration. Until someone pointed out that Councils have fuck all power on that, but it was too late. The fun part is how everyone who tried their luck at predictions got it totally wrong. The worst being Britain Elects, who sent their last prediction by email at 18:50 on Election Day. Don't quit your day job, mates.
The vote shares here are the actual ones, compiled from the official results published by the Councils themselves, not the "projected" ones fabricated by the BBC, as I have no fucking scoobie what that actually means and how they make it up. So we had three pollsters involved here. Electoral Calculus went for the full trifecta of voting intentions, seat predictions and Council predictions. More In Common just did the voting intentions and a lengthy briefing, and Britain Elects the dual set of predictions on behalf of The New Statesman. And none got even close to the absolute shitshow these elections delivered, especially the part where Labour lost two thirds of their seats. In the end, it looked like promising to crush the cars of fly-tippers on Election Eve wasn't that much of a vote-winner after all. It is also quite interesting, and relevant, to check how the complete vote, for Councils and Mayors, evolved between 2021 and 2025, and how they compare with contemporary voting intentions for the next general election. The voting intentions are for England only, to be consistent with England-only local elections.
The key point here is that these elections were held both times in areas of England that lean more to the right than the nation overall. So there is definitely a paradox in the 2021 voting intentions, that were significantly more Tory-friendly than the actual vote. You may remember that this was the period where the UK went through summat of a vaccine euphoria, that boosted Boris Johnson's popularity and also the Conservative Party. It took months to die down, as the two parties were level in the polls again only at the end of 2021. It then took another ten months and Liz Truss to seal the Conservatives' fate and make a Labour landslide unavoidable. There are fewer discrepancies in the 2025 data, except the obvious better Labour result England-wide that in the Councils that voted. Even the Liberal Democrats have reasons to be cheerful, as their local elections result looks like a better predictor of their general election performance than ever before. What remains to be seen is what Reform UK will make of their new positions of power, and how long it will take them to indulge in fascist virtue-signalling, and fall into total buffoonery. Not much, I guess. There is a fine line between the thin edge of the wedge and the slippery slope, and Reform UK can definitely be trusted to walk it sooner than later.
LibDems are extremists. When their Councillors get in, they promote four-day weeks and veganism.
© Peter Gabriel, Horst Königstein, 1980
The Universal theme park in Bedford will be absolutely transformational for the British tourism industry. if we manage to pull it off.
The whole metropolitan punditariat is still debating how far the Turquoise Plague will spread in the next few years, and one of the vantage points is the English North, the once red post-industrial wastelands. The most potent example of how the British Unio n of Putinists eviscerated both Labour and the Conservatives is County Durham, where they jumped from non-existence and one candidate in 2021, to 43% of the popular vote and 65 seats out of 98 on the Council this year. Doon there, the Conservatives shrunk from 27% to 6%, and from 24 seats to... 1. Labour did even worse, dropping from 34% to 22%, but from 53 seats to 4. Oddly, the Liberal Democrats managed to sneak through the cracks with minimal damage, dropping from 12% to 11%, and from 17 to 14 Council seats. There is surely a lesson to learn when you see the LibDems emerging as the most resilient of the three traditional establishment parties in the English North, where Reform UK wiped out nearly 200 Labour and Tory Councillors in one day.
There is an even better story for the LibDems in the Midlands, where they managed to double their number of seats on the same share of the popular vote as in 2021. This has a lot to do with their massive success in Shropshire where they snatched control of the Council from the Conservatives, who had held it for twenty years, trebled their number of seats and totally blocked Reform UK from the kind of success they would gloat about for a thousand nights at the pub. This is in a very marked contrast to neighbouring Staffordshire, where the LibDems have only a very tiny footprint and the Conservatives had been the dominant force for 16 years. Then they were ruthlessly hanged, drawn and quartered out to dry by Reform UK, losing 83% of their seats and letting Reform UK bag 49 of the 62 Council seats. What are the Midlands trying to tell us? Have the LibDems inadvertently become the best barrage against Farage? Will we witness Mister Ed transmogrifying into the English Emmanuel Macron and save us from the fascist hordes, when poor Keir always though that was his manifest destiny? The next series will be a fucking thrill, mates.
I know that ranting about how Reform UK replaced Labour as the party of the working class will dominate the establishment media's narrative for weeks without end, as it feeds the doom-and-gloom narrative they are so desperate to ram down our throats, but don't forget who were the second winners at these elections. The Liberal Democrats, especially in the Southern Counties. They now have a majority of seats in Cambridgeshire and Oxfordshire, missed it by just one seat in Gloucestershire, and are the first party in Devon, Wiltshire and Hertfordshire too, with very good prospects of leading a coalition administration in all three without needing to include the Tories. Finally, they emerged second in Cornwall, only two seats behind Reform UK, and my tenner is on them forming the administration there too with a Broad Front from Greens to Meryon Kernow. When you look at the overall picture of the English South, we really have summat of a paradox here. There was a far smaller swing to the right than in the North and Midlands, and the magic of First-Past-The-Post made the Liberal Democrats the first party in all three Southern regions by quite a margin, doubling their share of seats in the South West and South East, and increasing it by half in East Anglia where they already had solid bases.
Of course these elections have to be put into perspective and, as the woke wankers say, contextualised. There are currently 18,590 Councillors in Great Britain, 16,132 of them in England. So these elections covered only 10% of the whole English force, and we are supposed to believe this is the dawning of the Zombie Apocalypse or summat. Fuck me sideways! The establishment media, most of it in the hands of opportunistic billionaires, surely need massive fearmongering clickbait headlines, but we don't have to asininely believe any bullshit thew print. Just consider that the Faragists had 805 Councillors after these elections, or 4.3% of the whole force GB-wide. Fewer than the Greenies and the smallest of all English parties, and they have already lost a handful in just three weeks. And fewer will remain a year out, with defections because the party is a fucking shitshow led by sociopaths, and seats lost at by-elections because being in charge will show they are just a swarm of incompetent nincompoops. Fucking wankers, in plain English. Once they have exhausted the joys of banning flags, or other Trumputinist wet dreams like burning books and retconning local history, they will see that the hard part is planning the bin collections and they haven't the fuckiest scoobie how to do it. So excuse me if I'm not shitting my jeans just yet, mates.
They said dreams only come true in Hollywood, but soon you will just need to take the A421 to Bedford.
© Peter Gabriel, Horst Königstein, 1980
If you're a Tory voter who doesn't want a pro-Russia foreign policy, how does a merger with Reform work for you? If you're a Reform voter who thinks the Tories failed for fourteen years, how does it work for you? Both sets of voters are being conned. It would be a disaster for the country.
(Kier Starmer, 28 April 2025)
It's not even fun anymore when Jeremy Hunt is heard whining about the next general being an Extinction Event for the Conservative Party, which it will surely be if the polls remain totally unchanged for the next four years. Something we know happens all the time, or rather never at all. Jez ranting that the old two-party system could be coming to an end is also not the smart insight he thinks it is, as it already has since 2010, with semblances of a resurrection in 2017 and 2019 being just transient shadows on a moving wall. But we have a problem, Surrey. If the general population followed Jezza's reasoning, that we are switching to summat of a multi-party patchwork quilt, they should embrace a tectonic shift of voting system, to the one that represents every tessera in the mosaic according to its weight. Only they don't, as More In Common found out in a post-mortem poll fielded just after the English local elections.
Proportional representation may have had its day, but it clearly wasn't this year's Star Wars Day. On that day, supporters of the good old FPTP won the game with a 10% margin. Interestingly, there is not much of a generational divide, and the geographical differences are not massive. Obviously, voters of the two Big Ones favour the status quo, while voters of the Wee Ones lean towards change, as it would benefit their favourite party. Except, to my surprise, Green voters who were split in almost equal parts between the two options. Looks like they have more common sense on this one that the leadership of their pet party, would would love nothing more than parliamentary chaos in which they could cosplay kingmakers and extort extravagant concessions from the party who would most need their MPs' votes. Which is definitely not where FPTP is leading us now, if the trends of voting intentions are true to reality. Which they may not be, we have learned that the hard way last time around.
Of course, the Realm's Great Matter had nothing to do with a distant general election, a trade deal that isn't really a trade deal with Trumpistan, as is fairly obvious from the actual text published by the Department of Business and Trade, or the election of an American Pope. It was the Supreme Court ruling reiterating that sex is sex, and that's that. Many shocking scenes ensued, illustrating again the true nature of the 'trans rights' lobby. From a political perspective, the most shocking part was Ministers and MPs plotting to circumvent the ruling in defiance of the separation of powers. Ironically, this was never mentioned in The Guardian, and sadly didn't elicit any reaction from Keir Starmer despite the clear breach of Parliamentary Standards. The suspense became unbearable when Starmer publicly approved and praised the ruling. How many of the virtue-signalling Ministers and MPs would resign and transition to the Greens? Don't hold your breath, none has and none will. Interestingly, YouGov had polled this very question already last December, on behalf of Sex Matters. The verdict of the Great British public was unequivocal.
Four moths before the Supreme Court ruled, a majority of Brits supported changing the Equality Act so that sex is defined as meaning "biological sex". YouGov's full wording. The poll showed more support than opposition in each and every demographic, even the TikTok Generation. A non-appealable decision from the highest court in the Realm, plus unquestionable popular support, mean that it should be an open-and-shut case. But it's not, oddly not just because of the frenzied mantrums of Jonathan Willoughby on Twitter. It is just so fucking weird that this became the main focus of the metropolitan media and even dominated PMQs, when there are so many much more important issues to deal with. But Kemi Badenoch wanted to keep it alive too, just because of the golden opportunity to embarrass Keir Starmer. Using all of her six questions on it was quite the overkill, but that also saved her the embarrassment of letting the public again see that the Tories have no alternative strategy to Labour's on any of the real issues of the day.
This is a question about moral courage, Mr Speaker, about doing the right thing even when it is difficult. And the truth is, the Prime Minister doesn’t have the balls.
(Kemi Badenoch, PMQs, 23 April 2025)
© Peter Gabriel, Horst Königstein, 1980
Power resides where men believe it resides. It's a trick, a shadow on the wall, and a very small man can cast a very large shadow.
(George R. R. Martin)
Of course, we had to know where British public opinion stands now, after the Supreme Court ruling. Quite revealingly, none of the major mainstream pollsters, who are always so eager to poll everything, touched it. Too feart that the results would ruffle sone feathers and trigger a tsunami of abuse from the usual suspects? So, Electoral Calculus did it on behalf of The Telegraph, with a poll conducted by Find Out Now. Of course, The Torygraph couldn't resist rubbing Keir Starmer's nose in it, but he kind of asked for it, didn't he? First we have to reframe the debate in terms rooted in reality, like data from the 2021 Census of England and Wales. This was the first including a specific question about 'gender identity', and it found 262,138 persons having a "gender identity different from sex registered at birth". Their wording, not mine. These results were criticised and then disowned by the Office for National Statistics, implicitly admitting the number was grossly overestimated, though being only 0.54% of the population aged 16 and above. Also bear in mind that only 8,500 persons in the whole UK have been granted a Gender Recognition Certificate over the 20 years since the commencement of the Gender Recognition Act 2004 that created them. This being stipulated, the new poll found an even larger majority than in December agreeing that sex is 'biological sex', as ruled by the Supreme Court.
The approval of the notion of biological sex looks quite consensual when you filter it through the very basic demographics like place of residence and social class. Then we all know, or at least have a hunch, that the divides about this actually not complex at all issue lie elsewhere. Which the other crosstabs from the poll fully illustrate. The one surprise is that it is a 'gendered' issue, with women surprisingly being much more likely to disagree with the basic concept of biological sex. But the totally expected divides are generational and political. Of course, the Zoomers are the most likely to accept the ideologically fabricated concept that self-identification trumps reality, while the Boomers massively reject that nonsense. It is also no surprise at all that Green voters totally embrace it, as it has been the party's dominant concern for like a decade, totally overshadowing real ecological issues for the sole benefit of the bourgeois luxury beliefs of the metropolitan middle-class. That one works in Scotland even better than in England, even if Scots overall reject it more strongly than the GB-wide average.
Find Out Now then probed their panel about the impact of the ruling on women's rights and on discrimination against transpeople. Which I consider a biased way of dealing with the fallout of the Supreme Court ruling. It has obvious implication for the very foundations of women's rights, and it's not an exaggeration to say that it has also consequences for their safety. The real statistics of violence against women are here to prove it. But why instantly jump to discrimination against transfolx? Especially when this 'discrimination' is never defined, just as 'trans rights' are never defined. Or are we supposed to accept that refusing to submit to the doxa of gender ideology is discriminatory? This is surely what the bulk of the transactivists have in mind, we have many examples of that right at home in Scotland. So I'm really tempted to say that this specific question is irrelevant and makes little sense.
But let's just admit, for the sake of appeasement, that the juxtaposition of these two questions actually makes sense. So what we have here is a very classic 'conflict of rights' issue, a concept just as old as the definition of human rights in the Age of Enlightenment. We could even have benefited of Ian Hislop's take on John Stuart Mills' take on it, if 'trans allies' Hat Trick Productions had not chosen to cut it from the first episode of Have I Got News For You? recorded and broadcast just after the ruling was published. You have to wonder why, when they had hired Julian Clary as the spokesman of 'trans allies' on the show, and not one word about it was included in either of the broadcast versions of the episode. Maybe it wasn't Hislop who got censored here, but Clary, as it is very easy to imagine him delivering a totally testerical and hyperbolic rant that would have totally demolished and discredited the case against the ruling. But we will never know, will we?
Any passionately held opinion is going to cause conflict. Choose a god, choose a footy team, back a politician, you’re now a part of the great divide.
(Cleaver Greene, Rake, 2010)
© Peter Gabriel, Horst Königstein, 1980
It is a curse that pushes the cockroach to worship the path that leads to the henhouse.
(Abdoulaye Baba Tapily Diallo)
Quite expectedly, the idiotic debate on the Supreme Court ruling also dominated Scottish politics, when even my dog knows that Supreme Court rulings are not up for debate. Love it or hate it, they're final and they are the law of the land. End of. The Scottish Government again did what they do best, obfuscating and procrastinating under the guise of accepting the ruling. Because they have no fucking choice. End of. But the Greenies had no problem making total fucking morons of themselves again, with Mad Mags Chapman deliberately breaking the law, and making it clear again that the Greenies do not care about their constituents. They never have, and care only about the tiny abusive fringe draped in boy blue and girl pink. But they are again failing to read the room, as shown by the follow-up question in the Electoral Calculus poll. About Scotland's national treasure J.K. Rowling, who also enjoys strong support all across the UK.
Here, I have to quote the exact wording of the question, that goes "Do you approve or disapprove of author J.K. Rowling’s efforts to help fund organisations that advocate for women-only spaces?", so all about her actions and not her opinions, real or alleged. A majority of Brits support her, and she even has more support in her native Scotland than in the rest of the UK. Bear in mind that we are talking about initiatives like Beira's Place, the only women-only service for victims of rape and abuse. Joanne designed it that way, and made sure it was immune from ideological interference, pressure and blackmail from the Scottish translobby, by funding it entirely with her own money. Aye, the proceeds from the Cormoran Strike and Harry Potter books and their adaptations, and that made Radcliffe, Watson, Grint and Mad Mags Chapman livid. The total absurdity of the activists' reaction is even more obvious when you look at the age and politics crosstabs.
It's hard to imagine that two thirds of Green voters oppose offering safe services to abused women, but it's happening. This is clear ideological capture, just as the very anti-Rowling feeling in the younger generations points to massive indoctrination through social contagion, As usual, the replies don't fit with the question. What huge parts of the panel assessed here has nothing to do with J.K. Rowling's actions, but how the establishment transallies distorted her opinions, to paint her as the reincarnation of Enoch Powell. Thank Dog, a majority of the Good British People don't buy that bullshit, and are also quite clear about "which spaces it is acceptable to exclude trans women" from. Their wording again. Sports, prisons and loos are a clear no-go, other common-sensically single-sex spaces less so, which is a bit disturbing. But, more reassuringly, only one out of six Brits think that there should be no restrictions at all.
What we are seeing now is that the moral panic triggered by the Supreme Court ruling among the establishment transallies is far from subsiding. Clearly, the most fanatical faction of the translobby can't take No for an answer, a typical trait of abusive men. The real problem we have with transactivists is that they will never define what 'trans rights' actually are, and will call you a fascist bigot for just asking. The real reason is obviously that the very concept of 'trans rights' is an ideological fabrication, imported from the privileged white middle-class roaming the corridors of American universities. Reality is that transpeople in the United Kingdom have never been denied any right that the general population enjoyed. There is absolutely nothing similar here to the past situation of gays and lesbians, who were denied rights that everyone else had for centuries, like the right to marry, adopt and donate blood. These are genuine human rights. "Bringing your whole true self to work" is not, but chopping off your own dick is, kinda. As the Great Suzanne Moore wisely said, "Is there a more rigid system of thought than gender identity ideology with its uptight imposed morality? It’s binaries of good and bad people, believers and heretics".
Well, according to his picture in last Sunday’s paper, the Cheviot Murderer was an adorable baby.
(Jane Marple, The Body In The Library, 1984)
© Peter Gabriel, Horst Königstein, 1980
Scotland is not a colony, a semi-colony, a pseudo-colony, a near colony, a neo-colony, or any kind of colony of the English. She is a junior but highly successful partner in the general business enterprise of Anglo-Scots imperialism.
(Tom Nairn, 1968)
Any month would be dull without another Full Scottish. So the Diffley Partnership, who have close ties with Angus Robertson's Progress Scotland, saw to it that we got one, fielded on their behalf by Survation. Very oddly, Survation fielded another poll two weeks later on behalf of True North, that delivered the same results on the Independence referendum, but radically different ones on the Westminster and Holyrood elections. Then I guess the dosh was worth it, from both sponsors equally. But if you really believe that 5% or 6% of Scots have switched their vote to Reform UK in two weeks, just because the English local happened in between, I have a Fourth Bridge up for sale in Edinburgh. I won't display the trendlines for the Independence vote this time, as they have barely changed. The snapshot is still nearly a tie, with No ahead by 1 or 2 points. I mean, even I would have to reframe my trauma if I heard the First Minister waffling and stammering about LGBTQI+ being the bedrock of society, knowing what it actually means. The trendlines of the Westminster voting intentions are more fun, going back to the 2019 election, with the 2024 election results highlighted along the way. You thusly see Labour's massive rise, followed by Labour's massive fall and Reform's massive rise, while the SNP are stagnating.
That's where the magic of FPTP serves the SNP. When you are the second party on a third of the vote, you lose big. But if you are the first party on one third of the vote, and the oppositions are scattered to the four winds, you win fucking big. 43 MPs on 32%, per Survation for True North. Then The Scottish Pravda again summoned the overhyped faux expert John Curtice to deliver some more bullshit. It's totally asinine to brag about Reform UK being less popular in Scotland, when you see the pace at which they're rising. We're now where the GB-wide average was two months ago and it's like COVID-19. The UK was three weeks behind Italy and two weeks behind France but, despite all of Boris Johnson's gloating, it struck. And it struck harder because the poseurs-that-be had been in denial about it. It's actually quite stupid denial here too now, when you look at the trendlines of the Holyrood voting intentions.
You see pretty much the same patterns as in the Westminster voting intentions. Labour is crashing while Reform UK is rising and the SNP is stagnating. I hate to sound like a broken clock here, but it just reflects reality. We have now reached what I saw coming and predicted at least two articles ago, as we have a poll predicting that Reform UK will be the second party in the next Scottish Parliament. It's a shite state of affairs to be in, and all the denial in the world won't make a fucking difference. The seat projections from Survation's twin polls also confirm what we already knew, and I have been saying for months now. The strongest majority in the next Scottish Parliament will be a coalition of the SNP and Labour. It will happen, no matter what the student-politics wing of the SNP wants. And John Swinney will have to go, as he is definitely not the man to lead a coalition of the adults in the room. Suck it up, resistance is futile.
I couldn't resist the joy of showing the two Survation polls side by side. So you can see how much they differ, with only two weeks and no major event in Scotland between them. I must also say I find it more and more ridiculous and irritating when someone refers to "projections from Prof Sir John Curtice", when all the faux guru does is run whatever figures he finds in a poll trough a very public website, and regurgitate them as if they were original research. Then I guess The Scottish Pravda do need him to support their narrative, even when their conclusions defy logic and common sense. Part of it is scaremongering about a highly overhyped "fascist threat" in Scotland, that would probably justify the usual "Both Votes SNP" narrative. Which works only if you believe that the SNP are the best barrage to Farage. I don't even believe this will be a good campaign soundbite, as I surely hope Scots won't be deceived by the very simplistic logic of "us or fascism", when there are so many other options on the table.
Border collies are the most intelligent dogs, When it comes to chasing their own tails, shitting on driveways and sniffing each other’s arses, border collies truly are the Einsteins.
(Jimmy Carr, 8 Out Of 10 Cats, 2014)
© Peter Gabriel, Horst Königstein, 1980
The game will begin shortly, a battle of wits, and then a king shall fall. Beware, beware. Death will come. The dragon shall feast.
(Anonymous, The Big Four, 2013)
As if Keir Starmer hadn't received enough bad news already over the last two weeks, YouGov released their first Full Welsh in more than five months, predicting a massive shitstorm of doom and gloom for Labour in Wales. This has not gone unnoticed by the establishment metropolitan media, with a new narrative emerging about Starmer being the first Labour Prime Minister to lose Wales. Which is certainly a bit premature but would be true if it happened, as the electoral history of Wales shows. Even Ramsay MacDonald, who was elected in Wales at the time before migrating to County Durham and then to Scotland, managed to hold a plurality of Welsh seats in 1924, one of the low points in Labour electoral history overall. The plausibility of a trainwreck is fully supported by the trendlines of Welsh voting intentions since the 2019 election, with the 2024 result highlighted on the way. 2024 was already quite mediocre for Welsh Labour, and it's definitely getting worse now, with both Plaid Cymru and Reform UK siphoning erstwhile Labour votes.
This month's YouGov poll goes far beyond just an alarm for Welsh Labour, as it shows Reform UK and Plaid Cymru tied first at the next general, with Labour a quite distant third. This would favour Reform UK as their vote is predicted to be much more evenly spread than Plaid's. This only shows where the most socially conservative and Eurosceptic parts of the Welsh working class would go, on pretty much the same patterns as in the English North and Midlands, leaving Labour with a mostly metropolitan middle class vote. With Labour petty much confined to the Cardiff Metropolitan Area, and Plaid Cymru remaining most prominent in rural Western Wales, this basically lets Reform UK roam free and nicking seats all over the nation. The trends of Senedd voting intentions are just as distressing for Labour, though there is a subtle difference with the Westminster vote.
Labour come third again here, but Plaid Cymru are first and Reform UK only second. There is definitely some logic in that. If the Good People of Wales are ready to repudiate Labour, they'd rather give the keys of the cottage to the party of Independence, and not to the Dic Siôn Dafydd 2.0, some of whom have gone through their political apprenticeship in the ranks of the Abolish The Welsh Assembly Party. It also looks like all of Welsh Labour's attempts to distance themselves from Labour HQ have been in vain, like a beached cod gasping for air at Milford Haven. On top of it all, Starmer's unnecessarily rude putdown of Liz Saville-Roberts at PMQs might just be the albatross that takes Welsh Labour to the bottom. It would have been a really dick move two months ago, when polls predicted that Labour would need a deal with Plaid Cymru to stay in charge of the Welsh Government. It's even worse now, when Labour's main task should be stopping their voters migrating to Plaid Cymru in droves, The Senedd voting intentions in the last YouGov poll, and seat projections therefrom, again prove they have massively failed.
Labour would not only lose Wales for the first time in recorded history, they would also suffer the ultimate humiliation of ending up third, only a few cables ahead of the Tories. The most remarkable part is that the unprecedented swing towards Plaid Cymru would see them bag seats in each and every of the sixteen new constituencies, even in areas where they were just a minute presence in 2021. Ironically the new electoral law, that was designed to help Labour, would now boost both Plaid Cymru and Reform UK, compared to a theoretical single national list. Wales would still need a coalition to form the new government, and the most likely combination would be Labour begging Plaid Cymru to take them in as the junior partner. Plaid would obviously have to accept their former rivals' capitulation, but surely on their own terms, as the losing party never has a strong hand in that sort of negotiations. I can even imagine First Minister-elect Rhun ap Iorwerth adding insult to injury, just for the fun of it, and soliciting the Liberal Democrats too for some sort of Progress Pride Flag Coalition standing up to fascism. Or summat.
In war, you only get killed once. In politics, it can happen over and over.
(Laura Roslin, Battlestar Galactica: Colonial Day, 2005)
© Traditional. arranged by Peter Gabriel, 1980
Democracy is built on the unalienable right to express moronic opinions.
(Cleaver Greene, Rake, 2010)
To complete the Triple Crown of Nations Within The Nation, Find Out Now also surveyed the Imperial Capital. Remember that, if Greater London voted to become an independent country, they would have the 7th nominal GDP in the European Union, and the 3rd per capita nominal GDP. Not bad for a 'country' that would rank 15th in population within the EU. But independence for London is not on the table. Yet. So Find Out Now polled voting intentions for a general election, a Mayoral election and an Assembly election, which has a mixed system of constituencies and London-wide list. We thusly have a neat 'One Year On' picture for all four votes, as the Mayoral and Assembly elections were held on the same day as the last general. And all four are, as you probably already guessed, quite catastrophic for Labour. Even in Keir Starmer's back garden, voters are merciless.
There is clearly the same sense of disillusionment in London as anywhere else, especially in reliably Labour-supporting parts of England. Even in Red London, Labour are losing a third of their votes, which totally fits the patterns seen GB-wide. And not all of them switch straight to Reform UK, a large number also seek refuge with the Greens or the Liberal Democrats. In London too, Labour can thank Boris Johnson for having switched Mayoral elections to first-past-the-post, as it would allow Sadiq Khan to get a fourth term on a third of the vote. The Mayoral voting intentions hint heavily that he wouldn't survive the instant runoff if it still existed, as Reform UK and the Conservatives would obviously have major incentives to pre-arrange tactical second preferences to get an iconic trophy on their wall. But we still can trust Sadiq Khan to do something cretinously offensive that would totally disembowel the Labour brand at the next Mayoral election, because that's what he does best. And that would be very bad news indeed for Labour, just one year ahead of the next general, for which the trends of voting intentions are already pretty bad.
The interesting bit is that London Labour wasn't hurt by the various episodes of Johnson Bounces that made the Conservatives more optimistic GB-wide in 2020 and 2021. Londoners had experienced Bozo first hand long enough to know that they shouldn't have granted him a second Mayoral term based solely on the Olympics Euphoria, and were determined to not repeat the same mistake because of Covid Euphoria or Vaccine Euphoria, no matter how successfully both boosted Bozo in the rest of the UK. Then came Keir Starmer, and Labour's voting intentions crashed down instantly even in his own back garden, deeper than Bozo had ever achieved. If the last Find Out Now poll is right, London Labour are now threatened with their worst performance since 1983. But changed voting patterns also mean that it would not have the same disastrous consequences on their harvest of seats, as we can see from the three Full Londoners fielded since the general.
Back in 1983, the Conservatives bagged the whole of the right-wing vote, unlike now. A fragmented opposition, pretty much split four ways between four parties, means that a weakened Labour still reaps massive benefits from first-past-the-post, as the first party always does. The seat projections are far less disastrous than in the rest of England, despite the massive loss of votes, because most Londoner Labour MPs are sitting on massive majorities. But so did they in Runcorn and Helsby and most of the wards they held in Doncaster and County Durham. Just saying. The most important part, though not necessarily the one that catches everybody's eye, is Independents rising to three seats. Which would imply unseating Rushanara Ali in Tower Hamlets and Wes Streeting in Ilford. Then we must re-contextualise that, not from the perspective of the "Gaza Candidates" backed in 2024 by Jeremy Corbyn and George Galloway, but from the perspective of Corbyn transitioning his parliamentary Independent Alliance into a real political party, possibly absorbing the remains of Galloway's Workers Party of Britain. That would surely be the best way for the performative Protest Left to capitalise on their small successes in 2024 and gain new seats, including unseating their pet hate Streeting for defying the woke doxa of permaoffended student politics.
Nowadays, it is the maladjusted lives and the complexes that bring together the young people.
(Hercule Poirot, Hickory Dickory Dock, 1995)
© Peter Gabriel, Horst Königstein, 1980
Cricket. The English enigma. I know not of any other game where even the players are unsure of the rules
(Hercule Poirot, Four And Twenty Blackbirds, 1989)
Now, you may ask, where do we go from here? Or maybe, where do we start from? Not from Labour's happy place, that's for sure, and you may argue that they are fucking asking for it. The last days have been quite a roller-coaster for Keir Starmer. First, there was a quite successful summit in Kyiv, where Europe looked united in a common determination to act tougher. Until Donald Trump brought his whole true self to the table again, that is, his perennial persona as a trustworthy ally of Russia and saboteur of everything European. Then, for some unfathomable reason, Sly Keir channelled his inner Enoch Powell with an impromptu statement that clearly sought to appease the far-right by borrowing both their rhetoric and their proposals. The sad part is that Starmer is definitely right to mention "the obligations we owe to each other" to make "a diverse nation like ours" work. But he instantly ruins it with the "island of strangers" bit that can only echo, even for a relatively well-disposed person like me, the infamous "rivers of blood" of the past. The current snapshot of polls clearly shows that Starmer's incremental shift to the right just does not work, and Labour are still stuck in second place behind the true heirs of Enoch Powell. This is from the last six published polls, fielded between the 9th and the 16th of May, with a super-sample of 11,835.
This is the worst snapshot of public opinion for Labour since the general 10 months ago, and by a quite considerable margin. Reform UK are just 15 seats short of the theoretical majority of 326, or just 11 short of the actual working majority of 322. It is safe to bet that the rump Conservative Party, reduced to smouldering rubble pretty much everywhere and overtaken by the SNP for the fourth party slot, would be more than willing to provide the necessary reinforcements in return for some crumbs from the Cabinet table and a few oil-guzzling ministerial cars. The second most striking result is that the Liberal Democrats would gain both votes and seats, something even Mister Ed himself probably thought unachievable after their unprecedented success in 2024. Who'd have thunk that falling off a sailboard into a river of shit would make the LibDems the people's preferred incarnation of resistance to the return of rivers-of-blood xenophobia? The breakdown of voting intentions by nation and region hammers the point home, with Reform UK in the lead everywhere but Scotland and London, and the LibDems confirming their solid roots in the English South.
The seat projections we get from this are even more depressing, with huge swathes of Reform turquoise almost everywhere thanks to the supernatural powers of first-past-the-post. But don't think for one second that proportional representation would make things better. You don't need a PhD in quantum physics to see that, on current voting intentions, PR would also deliver Reform UK as the first party in Commons, and a Reform-Tory coalition as the next government. The current seat projections also confirm something you see in the trends of voting intentions, just in a more visually brutal way. For a long time, Reform feasted and grew on Labour voters changing sides. Mow they are also adding a large number of Conservative voters to the diet, which explains how the Tories are going through a Muskian unscheduled disassembly across the UK. Except in London, where they possibly retain some credibility, in Wales, where Labour's total collapse opens opportunities for everyone, and in Scotland, where there are just not enough Tories left already. An honourable mention to the LibDems too, again, as they prove themselves the best barrage against Farage in the English South West, and a credible one in the South East.
There is definitely some irony, which may have escaped Starmer himself, in that the subset of the British population most likely to clap his tougher persona are the Brexiter tax exiles who have colonised Benidorm. And who would be the first to be asked to go back where they came from if Spain responded in kind and required a A-level in Spanish for all residents. But you have to wonder whom Starmer actually took his cues from. Was it really Enoch Powell? Or was it Mette Frederiksen, the Social-Democratic Prime Minister who made Denmark's immigration laws among the the toughest in the European Union, evidence that you can Take Back Control™ without needing a Danexit or dropping out of the ECHR? I would bet that Starmer also had an eye on election results in Denmark, and the far-right Danish People's Party losing two thirds of its votes and seats after the Social-Democrats switched to a restrictive "hostile environment" policy, supported by talking points that would be deemed exclusionary and islamophobic in the UK. But Keir seems to have misread Hamlet, if he thought that though this be madness, yet there is method in’t, when he should have remembered that loan oft loses both itself and friend, and now he has become the man the Great British Public will trust as they will adders fang'd.
Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck, and the entirety of it is stored in the balls.
(Emmanuel Kant, more or less)
© Peter Gabriel, Tom Robinson, 1979
Viktoriia Roshchyna (6 October 1996 - 19 September 2024)
Tortured and murdered by Russia for reporting on their many war crimes against Ukraine
Never forget, never forgive, Слава Україні! Героям слава!
