Jeremy's Den

06/09/2020

A Tale Of Two Conventions. Almost.

Try not. Do. Or do not. There is no try.

(Master Yoda, Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back, 1980)

There are only two seasons in Washington, lovers of liberty

Tax season, a shameful time when your nation’s leaders

Rob you blind for their own amusement and unending sloth

And election season, a shameful time when your nation’s leaders offer you

Empty platitudes in exchange for your votes and your hard-earned cash

I can smell the change in the air

It smells like hairspray and apple pie and fresh manure like America itself

So let’s rejoice, lovers of liberty, all the leaves are brown but the sun is out and the sky is blue

(Sally Langston, Scandal: Wild Card, 2016)

So it's this time of Election Year when American political parties have had their National Conventions. Or some version of them. As this year they have been mostly covided out and replaced by socially-distanced micro-events and Zoom sessions, which the punditariat will of course punditify about for days without end, just as they have done with the full-fledged conventions of years past. Of course the best moment of the Republican Convention was Donald Trump Junior telling his audience that Joe Biden is Nessie and Loch Ness is a swamp. Which would not have struck American audience as odd, as most of them probably think Loch Ness is an amusement park near London. Then we had the next news cycle totally hijacked by right-wingers outraged at Bette Midler's comments on Melania Trump's speech. Which were indeed unfair as Melania does speak better English than her husband. Pundits will now keep a close watch on post-Convention polling, awaiting the proverbial Convention bounce that could benefit Trump. The last time the Republicans actually had a Convention bounce was in 2008. when they got Team Blue all sweaty for a few days as John McCain briefly overtook Barack Obama in national polls. Then Sarah Palin spoke and Obama cruised to victory. But this year Trump would need way more than a bouncelet to prevail, as the trend of national polls and the weighted average of the six most recent ones conclusively show Biden ahead by a safe margin, even with a few less good polls recently. And remember this is the USA, so Red is Blue and Blue is Red.

Now Biden's main problem will be to keep the momentum for the next two months and avoid any embarrassing gaffes. He still has a margin of progress in a few states if he wants to upgrade from 'convincing victory' to 'fucking Trump-woodchipping landslide', even if most of the South and Midwest look like lost causes. If you think Trump's core electorate in the backwaters of America, from Appalachia to Terrebonne Parish, are going to desert him because he went campaigning in 'Frorida' before discussing 'Yo-Semites' going on vacation (that's American for holiday) in 'Thighland', just bear in mind half of America can't even spell 'G8', and those who can think it's some sort of car engine. Never forget this is a country where a solid third of voters will never mind being ruled by an illiterate psychopathic moron because they are illiterate psychopathic morons themselves, who still think that Father Knows Best, there would be fewer deaths in school shootings if all the kids carried guns and universal publicly funded healthcare is a plot by Communist reptilian aliens hell-bent on removing God from the American Way Of Life. Or something like that involving France and North Korea. But right now even Trump calling Biden 'Joe Hiden' will misfire as most people are likely to conclude he was just mispronouncing and not trying to make a lame joke.

Of course what really matters is what state-level polls say, and how many Electoral Votes (EV) they predict for each candidate. The punditariat are as always punditifyingly cautious but sill lean Biden's way, with the most recent 'pundit consensus' predicting 278 EVs for Biden, 169 EVs for Trumps and 91 tossups (which, as you remember, is American for marginals). This is already enough to take Biden to the White House as 270 EVs are needed, but I think the situation is actually worse for Trump as my own calculations have Biden with a more solid base of 302 EVs to Trump's 111 EVs and 125 possibly going either way. The most likely outcome is Biden winning with a projected 334 EVs and possibly more. Biden still hasn't gained back Iowa and Ohio, two swing states won by Obama and then by Trump but both are extremely close. It says a lot too that several states supposedly safe for Republicans are now close to a tie like Arkansas, Georgia and Texas. So a pro-Biden upset in the last stages of the campaign appears now more likely than a pro-Trump upset, and the map below shows what my calculations say, with thanks to 270ToWin for this and other templates.

Compared to the 2016 result, Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Wisconsin are predicted to switch from Trump to Biden for a total of 101 EVs. No state this time is predicted to switch from Biden to Trump. Compared to Obama's winning map in 2012, Biden would add North Carolina (which Obama bagged just once in 2008) and Arizona (which Obama never won). But he would lose Iowa and Ohio, both of which Obama bagged in 2008 and 2012. That leaves out just one difference with Obama's 2008 map: Indiana, which Obama won then to everybody's surprise including his own as Democrats had not won it since Johnson in 1964, and before that Roosevelt in 1932 and 1936. The most interesting case here is Arizona, which voted for a Democratic candidate for the last time in 1996. Here the demographics have slowly changed the Democrats' way, with both the Latino population share and the Latino turnout increasing. These are the same trends that made New Mexico first and then Nevada and Southern California turn Blue, including Richard Nixon's home turf in Orange County, the affluent southern suburbs of Los Angeles. And might even switch Texas back to the Democrats for the first time since 1980, probably not at this election but quite possibly at the next one. The current projections have Biden in a very strong position anyway as even his worst case scenario would still have him winning by a convincing margin. What remains to be seen though is the impact of Trump's Project Fear, switching to a hawkish 'law and order' message and calling major unrest in a few cities the 'Biden riots'. It doesn't seem to have switched many voters so far, but of course the effect of deception and lies on swing voters should never be underestimated.

The main event since my last post has been of course Joe Biden choosing California Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate. Harris is a clever and yet safe choice for several reasons. The first and obvious one is that she is a woman, only the second time in US history a woman has an actual shot at becoming Vice-President. She is also of Indian and Jamaican ancestry, both her parents were immigrants to the USA in the 1960s and she self-identifies as African-American. Which ticks quite a number of boxes on the Democratic scorecard, though her background is definitely a privileged one, quite far away from the deprived inner cities. Then she has held elected office continuously since 2004, meaning she has been vetted often enough and under scrutiny for long enough to make any unpleasant surprise highly unlikely. In a country that loves nothing more than having all skeletons in the closets dusted off and lined up so they can have a good look at them, it's a safe bet that Republicans will not unearth any smoking turd from Harris's past. But paradoxically the main positive in selecting Harris is that she is ideologically ambiguous enough to be a difficult target for the Trump campaign. They will have a hard time making the 'radical left' label stick to either Biden or Harris (but bear in mind that, by American standards, the SNP would be radical left and Jeremy Corbyn totally off the chart), while the Democrats have plenty of ammunition to fire at Trump and his far-right nutcase of a Vice-President and running mate, Mike Pence (who, by British standards, would still be a far-right nutcase). Ironically the best weapons Trump would have come from disgruntled supporters of Bernie Sanders, but he can't use them as they hit at Biden-Harris for not being radical enough. So my best educated guess now is that Biden will win the Electoral College by at least the same margin Trump had in 2016, and probably by the same margin Obama had in 2012 when the Republican candidate was way saner and had a lot less baggage than Trump.

Hope is like the sun
If you only believe in it when you can see it, you’ll never make it through the night
(Leia Organa, Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi, 2017)

The day we stop believing democracy can work is the day we lose it
(Queen Jamillia of Naboo, Star Wars: Episode II – Attack Of The Clones, 2002)

The Senate is a gilded cage, a place of great comfort and wonderful perks

Where you think that you’re making a difference, but you’re not

It’s just you and 99 others grimly reminding yourselves every day

That the only way out of this, the only way to make your mark, is to be President

(Senate Majority Leader Edison Davis, Scandal: Pencils Down, 2016)

The second major battle is for control of the Senate, and the Democrats' prospects also look really good. 33 of the 35 seats up for re-election this year are the same that were up in 2014 when Democrats lost control of the Senate, so we have 23 Republican incumbents to only 12 Democrats. Republicans are clearly on the defence here and Democrats on the offence as several key seats are in states that are predicted to give a majority to Biden at the presidential election. Democrats now have 45 seats and need only 49 to take back control as the two Independent Senators (Angus King of Maine and Bernie Sanders of Vermont) caucus with them. Which could be translated into English English as 'take the Democratic whip' if there was anything like a formal whip in the US Senate. But there isn't and Senators have voted outside of party lines multiple times without any consequences, even during the more ideologically polarised last four years. And technically the Democrats actually need only 48 seats as it would lead to a clean 50-50 split. If Joe Biden is elected, Kamala Harris, as Vice-President and ex officio President of the Senate, would have the 101st and tie-breaking vote. There is a distinct possibility of this happening as the current spread of projected seats is 48-53 Democrats and 45-50 Republicans. But polls actually predict 50 Democrats and 48 Republicans when you sort out the marginals, which would avoid any heart-attack-inducing suspense on key votes. And this result has also a direct impact on the United Kingdom as the Senate is constitutionally empowered to ratify international treaties, or not. Including.... aye.... you got it.... a US-UK trade deal. Not that Democrats in charge would necessarily make a bad deal less likely or less threatening to the food industry or the NHS, but there is definitely a slightly-larger-than-fuck-all probability that the worst could be avoided. So here is what we have now, with the grey states indicating no Senate election this year. Projected Democratic gains: Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Maine, North Carolina. Projected Republican gain: Alabama which Democrats won by serendipity at a 2017 by-election and don't really expect to hold.

Democrats are unlikely now to stage an upset in Kansas, though the Republicans' position remains surprisingly weak in a state that has been represented by two Republican senators continuously since 1938. But it says a lot that polls suggest Iowa could kick out their incumbent Republican Senator after just one term and bring back a Democrat, even with presidential polls predicting the state's EVs will go to Trump. Or that 'moderate' Republican Susan Collins, who has an ambiguous record on alternating between opposition and support to Trump, would fight the one election too many and lose her seat after 24 years in the Senate. Another significant gain for the Democrats would be Arizona, both politically and symbolically. The Democratic candidate there is Mark Kelly, a retired Captain in the US Navy and astronaut who flew four Space Shuttle missions, two as Pilot and two as Commander. Kelly is also the husband of Gabrielle Giffords, a former Democratic Representative for the city of Tucson, who retired from politics after being severely wounded in an assassination attempt in 2011 and has since become an icon for the supporters of stronger gun control, which Kelly has also fully embraced during his campaign. Less emotionally charged but probably more politically significant would be a Democratic gain in Georgia. Atlanta, the state capital and largest city, is home to a successful, affluent and well-organised Black community who massively supports the Democrats. While the rural areas, once part of the historic Cotton Belt, are mostly Republican strongholds. Remember this is where Gone With The Wind was set and it was not all fantasy, though of course the Democrats were the evil slaveowners and the Republicans the progressive abolitionists back then. So now we have the perfect mirror image of that, with demographics again vastly favourable to the Democrats.

It is my experience that senators focus only on pleasing those who fund their campaigns
And they’re in no means scared of forgetting the niceties of democracy in order to get those funds
(Obi-Wan Kenobi, Star Wars: Episode II – Attack Of The Clones, 2002)

There’s no such thing as a clean campaign, it’s an oxymoron

(Fitzgerald Thomas Grant II, Scandal: A Criminal, A Whore, An Idiot And A Liar, 2013)

Current polling for the House of Representatives is also very favourable to the Democrats, though it is not much different from the 2018 result which was already a very good year as they took back control of the House after eight years of Republican majority. So this year's polls predict Democrats cruising towards a second consecutive victory at the House elections, something that has not happened in twelve years. The trend and the weighted average of the three most recent polls both point to a higher Democratic vote share than in 2006, the midterms of George W. Bush's second term, when they took back the House on 52.3% of the popular vote and 233 seats. Or 2008 when they rode Obama's coattails to 53.2% of the vote and 257 seats. The discrepancies between past results and today's projections show the impact of heavy-handed gerrymandering in states controlled by the Republicans during the redistricting cycle that followed the 2010 census. A rough estimate is that Democrats need a 5% lead in the popular vote nationwide to achieve a tie in seats, and beyond that the dominoes will only fall slowly as Republicans post-2010 mostly avoided the post-2000 dummymandering that cost them dearly in some states in 2006 and 2008.

The weeish swing in the popular vote would only switch a few swing seats from Marginal Red to Marginal Blue. The punditariat's expert opinion says five to ten and my model says seven. Enough anyway to solidify the Democratic majority in the House and turn the elections into the Magic Trifecta result every party wishes and doesn't always get even when they win the White House. And even a Trifecta in a presidential year can be overturned at the next midterms. Clinton, Bush Junior, Obama and Trump have all known this, not to mention all earlier Presidents who suffered the same fate. Now the seat projection is an exact mirror image of the 2010 midterms, when Republican took back the House in the middle of Obama's first term. But at these elections, the last held before the last redistricting, the Republicans needed only 51.7% of the popular vote for their 242 seats, which again illustrates how the post-2010 gerrymandering in Republican states was used to make a victory more difficult for the Democrats. The next redistricting cycle (what would be called a boundary review in the UK) will probably be less controversial than the last two as about a third of the states have now taken it out of hands of the state legislatures and devolved it to an independent commission without political interference. For now we have Democrats cruising to a 50ish-seat majority, give or take. And we can expect a stronger party loyalty in the current ideologically polarised context, with 'centrist' Democrats (who, in British terms, would be the left wing of the Conservatives) much less likely to vote with Republicans to defeat 'progressive' legislation (which, in British terms, would be the Liberal Democrat manifesto, no shit).

What matters most for the Democrats is that even their worst case scenario has them holding their majority in the House. But the bigger the majority, the better it is for the progressive wing of the party as the House has the final say on the federal budget and a stronger Democratic majority makes 'compromise deals' with 'moderate' Republicans less likely here. Another challenge for the Democrats is to take back control of state legislatures they have lost over the last ten years, especially in the now Republican states where redistricting is still under political control and produced obvious gerrymandering in the last cycle. Which is definitely a square-the-circle thing as the states the Democrats need to gain back the most are also the ones most heavily gerrymandered by the Republicans like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina and South Carolina, so a string of uphill battles even if some are projected to turn blue at presidential or senatorial level. Finally the major key to all of this year's elections in how much PAC money (which would be dark money in British terms) each party can inject into their campaigns. The Democrats certainly have an advantage here as unfavourable polling will force the Republicans to divert resources to some states that were supposedly safe for them, and don't look like it now like Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania or Georgia. The larger the state, the more money you need to pour into it and the less you have for competitive states, something Democrats don't really have to worry about as their own safe states like New York, Illinois, most of New England and the Pacific West, definitely look immune to any sort of Republican offensive and could even prove safer than expected. There is even a double-whammy against Republicans here as political advertising is already more expensive in large states with large cities, and the more competitive the state gets, the more the prices rise again and again. Still two months to go before we know how the whole circus ends....

We need a system where the politicians sit down and discuss the problem

Agree what's in the best interest of all the people and then do it
If the people don't agree, well, then they should be made to by someone wise
Might sound an awful lot like a dictatorship but, well, if it works...

(Anakin Skywalker, Star Wars: Episode II – Attack Of The Clones, 2002)

25/08/2020

Where Have All The Voters Gone? - A House Of Cards Update

When all the laughter dies in sorrow and the tears have risen to a flood

When all the wars have found a cause in human wisdom and in blood

Do you think they'll cry in sadness?

Do you think the eye will blink?

Do you think they'll curse the madness?

Do you even think they'll think?

When all the great galactic systems sigh to a frozen halt in space

Do you think there will be some remnant of beauty of the human race

Do you think there will be a vestige or a sniffle or a cosmic tear?

Do you think a greater thinking thing will give a damn that man was here?

(Kendrew Lascelles, When All The Laughter Dies In Sorrow, 1971)

I have a great belief in the people of this country

I think they know the kind of government they want

A government that's firm and fair, a government that is not afraid to govern

I would like to see a bit less ideology and a bit more common sense

A bit more common humanity in our conduct of affairs here and abroad

(Francis Urquhart, House Of Cards, 1990)

It looked quite quiet on the polling front earlier this month with Commons in recess, Boris in Scotland, pollsters trapped on Lanzarote and all that. We were left without a new poll for a whole week, which is a bit like when Hal is cut off from his blood supply in Series Five of Being Human. YouGov were a bit sloppy in publishing their weekly polls on time, but they were busy in Scotland in the meantime, more on that later. Opinium skipped one of their weeklies for The Observer, then came back from the break with a vengeance and a new poll that is just as bad for the Conservatives as the last pre-break one was. Even Redfield and Wilton, a newcomer to the game but working hard to establish themselves as one of the major players, skipped one and took a two-week break, but they were busy in London, more on that one too later. Now the back-to-business general election polling we've had recently remains as puzzling as it was a month or two ago. Of course all pollsters predict that the Conservatives would be ahead but what matters is the size of the lead. Would it be 6%, which could deliver a smaller but still workable Johnson majority? Or just 3%, which would deliver a strongly hung Parliament and trigger a Tory backbenchers' rebellion that would overthrow Johnson? Or as high as 9%, which would almost duplicate last December's result in seats thanks to the LibDems crashing? Right now the trend is somewhat 5-to-6%-ish, which would be just a wee smitch worse than 2015 for the Conservatives and could easily turn again to being as bad as 2017.

Interestingly, the trend of 'Preferred Prime Minister' polling bears a uncanny resemblance to the voting intentions trends. That is when you factor in all polls and not just the more Starmer-friendly Opinium and YouGov as I disingenuously did last time to make another point. Guess it reflects public opinion's perplexity on where Labour actually stand. Which is what happens when Starmer tries to repaint Labour both as Labour Friends of Likud and the Labour Woke Party simultaneously. Another problem is that Labour are busier rewriting their already rewritten recent history than being a convincing opposition, and it's hard to imagine a winner finally emerging from the War of the Narratives, especially when the next battle is due to happen in court. It's also quite enlightening that even The Guardian can't find a truly positive argument in favour of Sly Keir and are basically reduced to portraying him as something like 'best potential PM by default'. A lot of politicians fit the proverbial 'all bark and no bite' profile, but Sly Keir's problem is that he is neither barky nor bitey enough to make a lasting impression on swing voters. The electorate have become bored with his once much-vaunted forensic CPSish act at PMQs and seeing the same script unfold episode after episode, and he actually comes out as bland in many people's minds. But centrists are genetically engineered to be bland, aren't they? Of course Not-Too-Hardy Keir still has some three years to up his game, unless Boris gets thrown overboard by backbenchers and the next First Minister of England decides to gamble it all on yet another snap election. Which is unlikely to be manna from heaven for Labour. As pretty much every character in every Star Wars movie said at least once, I have a bad feeling about this.

Then you have to wonder why Labour and Starmer are not doing better in the polls, when they face a Government that couldn't even be trusted with making sure the neighbourhood's Tube station's vending machines don't run out of fun-size Crunchie bars. Do people really believe than they wouldn't have done better than Boris over the last eight months, even with massive evidence that nobody could have done worse? Of course writing in The Daily Mail urging English parents to send their kids back to school no matter what doesn't help Keir's credibility, especially one week after he challenged the English Government on their 'back to school no matter what' policy. Critics from the left now have all the ammunition they need to paint Sly Keir as the establishment candidate whose forensic approach to opposition has quickly reached its limits, just as I predicted in a couple of earlier articles. The odd part in this polling is that YouGov, once considered for good reasons to be biased in favour of the Conservatives, are the only one who had Starmer ahead of Johnson in the Preferred PM surveys, and even twice in a row. Most pollsters have Starmer's and Johnson's ratings quite close to their parties' voting intentions, while YouGov and also Opinium have Johnson's ratings significantly below Conservative voting intentions. Another unsolved mystery in the pollsterverse. But of course the main mystery remains why so many voters, especially in England, still rate Johnson higher and fail to see his massive backlog of failure, deception and lies. Or do they actually believe he has a world-beating record? Which he definitely has, just not the way he spins it.

You hurt the ones that I love best and cover up the truth with lies

One day you'll be in the ditch, flies buzzin' around your eyes, blood on your saddle

(Bob Dylan, Idiot Wind, 1974)

I know a thing or two about prophecies, they’re bullshit and mind games
Seems to me that they only get dangerous when you actually start believing in them
So if you’ve come to tell me about real things in the real world
Then yes, go on and tell me but if this is more nonsense, I think we’re done here
(Annie Sawyer, Being Human: The Graveyard Shift, 2012)

Since my last article, we have also had a brand new London poll, conducted by Redfield and Wilton on 5-7 August, and a brand new Scottish poll, conducted by YouGov on 6-10 August. Both are disastrous for the Conservatives who would lose 3% of the popular vote and five seats in London, 5% of the popular vote and all their six seats in Scotland. Redfield and Wilton's London poll is quite a relief for Labour, as it shows them in a better position than the only other London poll conducted since the snap election, which had them losing votes and a couple of seats to the Conservatives. Then it is not as spectacular an upset as the seat projection would make you believe, as it shows Labour just back to their December share of the popular vote. The main factor here is the Liberal Democrats gaining back projected votes they had lost in the previous poll. Which benefits them directly and Labour by domino effect as these born-again LibDems obviously come from the Conservative side. Then I guess a lot of people beyond Labour and LibDems ranks would love to see this new poll become reality, as it predicts ultra-right poster boy Iain Duncan Smith would lose his seat, with former ministers Theresa Villiers and Stephen Hammond also going down. All it takes is keeping fingers crossed until the next snap election following Boris Johnson being kicked out by angry backbenchers.

YouGov's Scottish poll also doesn't sound like an upset as it just confirms a trend seen in all polls of Scotland since the last election, and is basically just 2015-on-steroids for the SNP. Even Alistair Carmichael and David Mundell, survivors of the 2015 Yellow Wave, losing their seats is not that much of a surprise as the SNP missed unseating them back then by only 817 and 798 votes respectively. Also bear in mind that the Liberal Democrats suffered a significant setback at the 2019 by-election for the Shetland Holyrood seat, and held it with their majority slashed by almost two thirds. The only seat that still sorethumbishly stands out is Edinburgh South where Ian Murray would survive even with his majority cut by half on this poll's projected results. Of course it's not like Ian is anything like a cockroach that would survive an hydrogen bomb coupled with a massive release of sarin gas. He's more like a Tory-backed-and-funded cockroach who would lose it all if the local Tories decided to have a go at the seat and pulled the rug from under him. So nothing can be ruled out even if most SNP supporters have a hard time believing it could actually happen, and Unionists are definitely in denial about their massive rejection by the Scottish electorate. It's an interesting moment when a journalist from the New Statesman seems to have a better understanding of the workings of Scottish politics than the leaders of the Unionist parties in Scotland, even if he still gets it wrong on some points. Then of course and as usual, the next elections are definitely the SNP's to lose if not the Unionists' to win. Fingers crossed here too then.

But of course even the best polls of London and Scotland tell us little of the direction the UK as a whole are taking, and UK-wide polls paint a much less rosy picture. At the next election, the key to victory will again be in Little England outside London, and Labour still need to up their game to regain lost ground and make inroads into Tory territory down there. The subsamples of voting intentions by English region are large enough to offer a reasonably accurate picture and they oddly show Labour doing rather well in the Tory-dominated South where they could even snatch a few seats thanks to the LibDem vote crumbling down, even if they're still far from the level of support New Labour enjoyed down there in 1997 and 2001. But Labour is still struggling in the North and in the Midlands where the Red Wall is far from being rebuilt, and these not-so-good prospects also extend to North Wales where they could even lose another couple of seats. Not really the best situation for Labour and a warning to Sly Keir that he should stop playing the long game, even if that worked for him in the Labour leadership shambles last year, and start playing the man and not the ball if he really wants to score big against Boris Johnson before Tory backbenchers do his work for him and kick Bozo out to save their sorry arses, once he has Got Brexit Terminally Done and outlived his usefulness as the poster man-child for The Dark Side Of The Yoons.

Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness
(Terry Pratchett, Men At Arms, 1993)

When people say things are a lot more complicated than that,
They mean they're getting worried that they won't like the truth.
(Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum, 1998)

My Poll'O'Polls for today includes the last five GB-wide polls, as Northern Ireland is as usual not covered, fielded between 13 and 21 August with a super-sample of 8,745 and a theoretical 1.05% margin of error. A few days old as there is again a wee lull in polling this week. And it's definitely not good for the Conservatives who are leading by barely 4.5% overall and just 9% in England outside London, where the real battleground is. The interesting part here is that the last poll from YouGov, who were labelled as pro-Tory often in the past, shows the Conservatives leading by only 2%, their worst headline performance in two-and-half months. The previous YouGov poll, which is outside the timeframe of this super-sample, had the Tories leading by 9%, so the most recent poll really says something about changes in the electorate's state of mind. The updated seat projections, whichever model you trust most, are worse for the Conservatives than what we had in early July after a wee Tory bounce, and almost as bad as in June when the Cummings Effect struck. The Williamson Effect in England surely explains a lot, after the downgrading debacle that turned out to be far worse and more badly handled in England than its Scottish counterpart just a few day before. The massive irony here is of course that Gavin Williamson would have avoided the worst of the backlash if he had followed in John Swinney's footsteps and acted more quickly and more decisively. But, Good Heavens! God forbid the English Government take their cues from those Pesky Jock Nats. Perish the thought even if it again proves they're just a swarm of gimboid smegheads who couldn't outwit a used teabag.

Current polling drives us squarely into this twilightish zone where some of the competing projection models say the Conservatives would end up a couple of lettuces short of an allotment, while others say they would bag a wee majority that probably wouldn't survive the first year's by-elections, and melt away faster than a whippet would run with a dynamite stick jammed up where only customs men dare to probe. Which can't be spinned (I like the sound of it better than the grammatically correct 'spun') as an encouraging prospect even by the Cummings Team of data manipulators. The alternate scenarios, based on my model only and reallocating marginal seats one way or the other, are also quite unsatisfactory for the Conservatives. Their best case scenario would be slightly worse than Labour's performance in 2005 and we know it did not end well. Then Labour's best case scenario would be quite a dilemma for Keir Starmer. Would he rather give up his opportunity to become Number Ten's tenant than lending an ear to the SNP's peace offerings and proposal for a minimal confidence and supply agreement to kick the Tories out? Or would he stick to his current position that pandering to English exceptionationalism is a better career choice than accepting the inevitability of Scottish Independence? I guess we already know the sad answer to that as Not-So-Sly Keir would rather listen to Ian Murray than to voices of reason within Labour who don't have to be Scottish to get a better grasp on Scotland's state of mind than the Tory-strutted MP for Morningside Polo Club. But of course if you're hell bent on missing a golden opportunity handed to you on a sliver platter, you have to come up with some stunt to make it look marginally rational. Keir's loss, not ours.

Labour might want now to capitalise more aggressively on the Government's most obvious weaknesses and not just be content with Starmer's increased name recognition, and that includes shifting from 'constructive criticism' to making a case for alternative policies on all matters where the current English Government has failed and displayed nothing but crass incompetence. You definitely know there's something worth trying here when even The Guardian makes the case for it. Starmer has to hit hard after the now unavoidable Autumn Reshuffle where Gavin Williamson is sure to be sacked and Matt Hancock an extremely likely fatality too, both victims of proven incompetence and failed attempts at blame-shifting. Labour will have a golden opportunity then to stress how shallow the talent pool is when Johnson restricts himself only to Vote Leave yea-sayers, and calling Steve Baker back to the frontbench would look like the zenith of audacity in out-of-the-box thinking. Too bad Boris can't get a two-for-the-price-of-one deal with the ERG now that Private Mark Francois is lethally indisposed. Labour should also capitalise on support coming from unlikely areas like the rural South from Hampshire to Sussex, already up in arms against Johnson's proposed reform of planning laws in England, which will benefit only Tory donors in the real estate business. Strange days indeed when Deep Blue Nimbyism works against Whitehall and, next thing you know, the Countryside Alliance rally their troops against them. Naw, just kidding, but don't rule out Winter of Discontent 2.0 just yet. The seeds have been sown and it would take very little to make a Hundred Flowers bloom....

Who's the more foolish? The fool or the fool who follows him?

(Obi-Wan Kenobi, Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope, 1977)

04/08/2020

A Scottish Play Reboot - Episode I: The Woko Menace

You can get any result you want from a poll by massaging the questions

You can make people say anything you want them to say

But you can't make people do anything you want them to do

You can never be absolutely sure of people, can you?

(Sarah Harding, House Of Cards: To Play The King, 1993)

Luck is the intersection of preparation and opportunity

(Seneca and Mac Taylor, CSI NY: The Lady In The Lake, 2012)

A month ago we had another Scottish poll from Panelbase, who have now fielded three out of four Westminster polls, four out of five Holyrood polls and five out of eight IndyRef2 polls conducted since the December 2019 general election. I think it's definitely a good thing to have one single firm becoming the 'pollster of reference' for Scotland. That way we have the exact same methodology applied to each successive survey, so changes from one poll to the next are really happening and are not the result of some unquantifiable house effect. Which does not rule out random variations, but Panelbase gaining more experience on the Scottish electorate's thought patterns also means they can readily identify random variations from real changes, which is also a bonus. Then the way the poll was spun (or should that be spinned?) had a definitely hilarious side. So we had the Yes vote skyrocketing to 54% from.... uh... err... 54% in the previous poll. And we're not even there yet as this is the usual result with undecideds removed, and I have already made the case that undecideds matter and might be the key to the actual vote ending in victory. Or not. What the last poll actually says is 49.8% Yes, 43% No, 7.2% undecided. Which is actually quite an improvement over the previous one that said 49.7% Yes, 43% No, 7.3% undecided. No shit. Winning the undecideds 0.1 by 0.1 is the way to go, and now we can celebrate being just-a-wee-smitch-North-of-slightly-better-than-even-but-not-quite-there-yet odds, as the weighted average of the last four IndyRef2 polls shows:

All jokes about over-enthusiasm aside, this is really another encouraging result, especially at a time where feelings about the State Of The Precious Union are quite depressing for Unionists. A recent YouGov poll shows that 59% of respondents GB-wide think the relation between England and Scotland is weaker than five years ago while a measly 2% think it's stronger and 23% think it's the same, with 15% undecided. The feeling is shared across all nations and regions, including a massive 74% of Scots and even 53% of Conservative voters agreeing with the majority that the relation is weaker. Of course this new poll again triggered a healthy amount of bickering within the Yes camp because, ye ken, that's what we do best, don't we? I must say the best moment in the revival of the 'Path To Indy' debate was when Oor Precious Pete Wishart, after months spent blocking every tweep who disagreed with his opinion that anything but a Section 30 Order was a dead end, came up with an oven-ready dead end of his own. Because obviously nothing makes more sense than expecting the European Union to meddle with the United Kingdom's internal affairs, and we don't even need a policy expert or the Conservatives' fake outrage to figure that out. Guess Oor Pete needs to check where he is on the map just as much as Dominic Raab, and remember this is Scotland, not Kosovo. But of course the serious issue is how many Yes supporters are increasingly impatient with the SNP and want them to get out their sheet music and play the real waltz. If the SNP think that "we have a mandate and we're so sorry England will have none of it, but there's nothing we can do" is good enough, I'm afraid that dog won't hunt and next year's election might not be as good as they think, whatever current polling says.

If it's nearly impossible, then it's a little bit possible, so go for it and conquer

(Detective Danny Messer, CSI NY: Vigilante, 2011)

So, Chaos destroying Evil? Sounds like gang ideology!

(Doctor Sheldon Hawkes, CSI NY: Seth And Apep, 2013)

But before we move on to the Holyrood part of the poll, let's have a word about one of the likely key issues. Aye, THAT one again. I guess you have noticed the conversations about gender self-identification on Twitter have already skipped to 'Episode II: Attack Of The Wokos' and usually end in MAB (Mutually Assured Block). But we don't actually know where Scottish public opinion stands on this, for lack of a recent comprehensive survey exploring all issues in the debate. The only poll I found was conducted by Panelbase for Stu Campbell in October 2019 and surveyed only SNP voters. But I guess SNP Central care more about what SNP voters think than public opinion generally, and the absence of a real debate probably means positions have not changed much in nine months. Then scroll down to Q20 on the sixth page of the report to get the full mouthful of a question that was unleashed on the unsuspecting respondents. Depending on where you sit, you might consider the question outrageously biased and leading as it is obviously phrased to elicit the highest number of negative answers, or you might praise it for being detailedly honest as respondents have to assess the practical consequences and not just the concept. Then I guess the crosstabbed results show the respondents' response was quite balanced as they actually don't show a convincingly massive opposition, and neither a convincingly massive support. 39% opposing and 36% supporting is as statistically tied as you can get when the poll's margin of error is some 3%. But the biggest support comes from where you probably least expect it: young women, who probably think women's rights are a given and can't be jeopardized in any way. But unfortunately also the kind of result that makes SNP Central feel safe in supporting school-age Wokos in £200 two-tone shirts who make as much sense on the real major issues as a squashed hedgehog on the route of the 7B to Kelty.

For lack of better evidence, let's say that it would be wise to seek updated data on this. But, with more than a third of SNP voters opposing the GRA reform nine months ago, the party should be cautious with this. Especially as provisions about gender identity in the Hate Crime Bill will certainly prove to be highly controversial as the debate unfolds, and might not go down that well with significant parts of both the general public and the SNP electorate, especially after the Scottish Police Federation publicly said they wouldn't enforce it in almost as many words. I suspect the Wokos' favourite breeding ground is somewhere in the posh liberal enclaves of post-Blairite Labourgravia in London, not in the Scottish Highlands. So it's quite bewildering to see how the contamination has spread to the highest rungs of SNP Central, when there is no PPE against this one except basic Scottish common sense, and how a fringe extremist faction like "Wokus Dei" is advancing their agenda to hijack the party's machine. But they succeeded by being one step ahead of their opposition, obfuscating the real issues and painting their opponents as the bigots and themselves as the victims. It's pretty much the pattern described in The Spectator last December, and coming from Boris Johnson's former employer does not make it less valid as it relies mostly on an outside source and not the columnist's own opinion. If you don't want to buy that one, you might want to listen to voices from within the LGBT community like Allison Bailey, who has first-hand evidence on how the Wokos wage their own brand of culture war to intimidate and silence dissenters. Let's just hope SNP Central will not dismiss every inconvenient truth as 'hate speech' and come back to their senses, or won't they?

What about principle? Is that even a thing anymore?

(Director Leon Vance, NCIS: One Step Forward, 2018)

Politics is a blood sport, the prizes are big and you lose a lot when you don't win

And that's understood by all the grown-up players in the game

(Neil Kinnock live on BBC One, Election Night 1997)

Of course the pièce de résistance of the Panelbase poll was the Holyrood voting intentions part. Not that we actually learned anything new here. There is a strongly favourable trend in all Scottish polls conducted this year. The combined voting intentions for the pro-Independence parties haven risen from 51% to 58% on the constituencies, and from 47% to 58% on the regional lists since the first poll at the end of January. Which translates into the pro-Independence parties bagging an outright majority on both votes in six out of seven Holyrood polls fielded since the December general election. A lot has been said about Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP enjoying some sort of 'Covid Honeymoon' but the trend started earlier, with the December general election also a very likely trigger for the shift towards the SNP. The massive and ever wider divide between England and Scotland proved again that Scotland has nothing to expect from the crumbling Union, and Covid-19 has only made this even more obvious. Massive internecine feuds within Labour and the Conservatives have also definitely hurt their credibility, which is why the SNP are so careful to avoid any such ferrets-in-a-bar brawls in their own ranks. Uh... wait... errr... naw... just pulling your leg here. Anyone who has watched the earlier episodes knows that the kerfuffle in Edinburgh Central and the failed coup in Glasgow Cathcart are just the appetizers before the hors d'oeuvre in what promises to be a juicy 2020-2021 season where own goals will be a-plenty. But the SNP haven't yet run out of feet to shoot, though the NEC have already expanded quite a few with their brainless shenanigans, so let's just rejoice for now at what this latest poll predicts. Which is the SNP bagging a 19-seat majority, the largest ever for any governing party or coalition since the Scottish Parliament reconvened twenty-one years ago. And also of course the Little Green Men losing any sort of leverage to blackmail the SNP into making dick moves they would have made anyway.

Of course such a spectacular result has an obvious downside: it could prove just too good to be true. There has often been a point in the time-space continuum of post-2015 elections when SNP Central are too far into their comfort zone and start being complacent. It did not happen in 2019, but then the very short campaign and the tsunami of rejection of both Conservatives and Labour were probably enough to overcome ant weakness in the SNP's campaign. But 2016 and 2017 tell different stories. In 2016, the SNP vote fell by 10% on both the constituencies and the regional lists between the end of January and Election Day. And the pattern was repeated almost to the decimal place in the run-up to the 2017 general election: 10% down between the last poll conducted in January and Election Day. And of course the SNP need to remember and be reminded that the mandate they get from their voters is to Get Indy Done, not to Get GRA Done. But, as always, the SNP are not different from you and me: their fate is in their own hands. But for now we have Scottish Labour and Conservatives looking like the maizefield after the elephants walked through it on their way to the watering hole. I will certainly miss Jackson Carlaw struggling with his 'we won because we lost' prepared remarks on Election Night, but Douglas Ross might prove good comical value for money too. Dougie will certainly have some fitba-inspired Cummings-approved jokes up his sleeve. Though I would advise him to not even try anything remotely close to 'SNP-yellow card' when they end up with more seats than any party ever bagged at any Holyrood election. But of course any 'Labour-red card' joke will work, provided of course nobody in Team Blue has leaked it to the SNP first, just to piss off Dougie. Then he still would have the Johnsonian oven-ready narrative that worked so well with Covid-19: it's not that bad because it could have been worse, and I lost only a quarter of our seats, not half as Jackson did in 2019. Definitely no honour among gits.

Somehow, 'ouch' doesn't even start to cover it

(Doctor Sheldon Hawkes, CSI NY: Sangre Por Sangre, 2010)

If you can't ignore facts, you have no business being a politician

(Sir Humphrey Appleby, Yes, Prime Minister: The Tangled Web, 1988)

Of course this new poll has once again revived the debate about an hypothetical list-only pro-Indy party, let's call it an alt-Yes party, bagging some of the SNP's 'wasted' list votes. But it has now taken quite an unexpected turn, though in hindsight you might say the new scenario was bound to surface at any time before the election. It started with failed MSP and perennial mythomaniac Marc Whittet publishing fake news about a non-existent Survation poll involving Alex Salmond in Whittet's fantasies. Then, as predicted by Newton's Third Law Of Motion, this triggered an equal reaction to the action with Stu Campbell commissioning his own poll to test the 'Alex Salmond Party' scenario. I guess some will be happy to find out that Obnoxious Bathman, despite losing in court to Kezia Dugdale and suspending his crowdfunding, still has enough dosh in the bank to buy himself a £10k Panelbase poll. To his credit the wording of the question was not outrageously leading to trigger the maximum 'SNP Bad' response. For once. So I'll take it for valid until further investigation. The core element here is how many votes the hypothetical Alex Salmond Party (ASP) would take from the other parties and the results are quite interesting. So here's how other parties' voters, based on the December 2019 Westminster vote and not current Holyrood voting intentions, rate their own likelihood to vote for the ASP from 'definitely possible' to 'definitely never happening':

Interestingly Green voters are not included in these crosstabs and you can only wonder why. Notwithstanding the ASP, if it ever existed, would snatch a very sizeable part of the potential SNP electorate and also quite many Labour voters. The numbers here are quite close to the share of Labour voters who also support Independence. Obviously this part of the Labour electorate can't quite bring themselves to vote for the SNP but would welcome an alt-Yes list, possibly no matter who would lead it. The share of Conservative and LibDem voters who would switch to the ASP is quite surprising, but I guess they would do that only to fuck the SNP by creating another opposition bloc, as their own parties are not predicted to do very well. This means the hypothetical ASP would bag a much larger vote share than the Scottish Greens ever did, and could even end up the second party. Then I don't think this is the most likely scenario as I don't see Big Eck leading a rebellion against the SNP, even after this week's shameless denial of democracy by the party's NEC. But I can definitely picture him, and/or some of his supporters, helping SNP dissenters if some deselected MSPs choose the Margo MacDonald way and stand as independents on the list in a few regions. Which of course would be massively ironic when you remember how and why Margo herself made the decision to stand as an early version of alt-Yes. But let's just fancy for a moment that the ASP is actually a thing, and here are their potential vote shares based on the voters' own ratings applied to the Holyrood list voting intentions as predicted by Panelbase. 'Low' factors in only those who would definitely vote for the ASP, and 'High' adds the likely voters.

Below is the summary of the list votes, as the constituency votes are supposed to be unchanged, and the seat projections for both ASP scenarios. So the math says again that the alt-Yes list seats would not be on top of the already projected pro-Indy seats, but partly instead of them. Five to ten seats in the ASP scenarios above, or one third of their total seats, and this is a limited-damage situation as the ASP would also hypothetically snatch votes from the Unionist parties and not just the SNP. Of course this kind of scenario is just wild speculation as long as nobody knows what Alex Salmond intends to do, other than publishing his Book Of Revelations close enough to the election to make sure the SNP can't do any effective damage control. Then of course SNP HQ are already entangled in some tricky damage control and can only blame themselves for the backlash after this week's NEC's votes. That they have already been forced to backpedal on one of the controversial rulings shows how amateurish the Woko faction within the NEC were. And I have a hunch it's only a matter of time before the anti-Cherry ruling is overturned too as even Angus Robertson now openly opposes it. You may remember I expressed concern earlier that the fight for Independence might become hostage to the fight over gender self-identification, and become something of an afterthought. We probably have reached that point and sped past it already, and the fallout might prove disastrous. Then what the SNP should fear most now is probably not an all-out rebellion across the whole nation, but smaller uncoordinated bush fires in a number of regions, like the one who kept Margo MacDonald in Holyrood after Alex Salmond had her relegated to an unelectable position on the Lothian list. Snatching the seventh list seat requires between 5.5% and 7% on current polling, depending on the local configuration of the list votes. I would definitely not rule out something like that happening next year, instead of some People's Front of Alba that is already riddled with squabbles even before it's born.

Some will also argue that the the political argument for an alt-Yes list party is far more convincing than the flawed math used by some of its supporters. There is no doubt 13 years in power have brought out both the best and the worst in the SNP. Right now voters obviously think the best far outweighs the worst, but the SNP should be considering the real risk that the exact opposite could happen some day. According to the Panelbase poll, up to 21% of the electorate could abstain and 12% of the likely voters are undecided, which makes about 30% of the electorate who will need to be convinced to get the fuck out of the couch on Election Day first, and then to cast their votes for the SNP. The downside for the SNP is that these voters are an unknown quantity who might very well turn a deaf ear to the 'managerial competence' talking points and be swayed by opposition campaigning targeting gender self-identification and probably the flawed and unenforceable Hate Crime Bill too. Finally and for your complete information, Gordon McIntyre-Kemp at Business For Scotland has published a thought-provoking and well-researched article on tactical voting and the possible prospects of an alt-Yes strategy going after the SNP's list votes. What we need now is a fair assessment of the electoral potential of the alt-Yes, and also the alt-No list-only parties. All that Panelbase have to do is to add the ISP, the newborn AFI and whatever alt-Yes pops up next week to their list of prompts, and UKIP and George Galloway too as both have indicated willingness to stand and we wouldn't want to miss seeing how alt-Noes can split the Yoon vote.

Be seeing you.... after the next poll when we see the combined impact of Boris Johnson's Tour Of Scotland and the SNP's NEC's massive clusterfucks.

We're not always right, but it's not always because we're wrong

(Doctor Sheldon Hawkes, CSI NY: Rest In Peace, Marina Garito, 2010)

If the future’s all worked out, horoscopes, all that stuff

It means we’re not responsible for anything we do

It means we’re just actors saying lines in a script that’s been written by somebody else

I don’t wanna believe that, I wanna believe I’m in charge of me own life, me own destiny

Tomorrow’s a new day, a fresh page in a book that’s not been written yet

What happens in the future is up to me, not some predetermined destiny smeg

(Dave Lister, Red Dwarf: Cassandra, 1999)

04/07/2020

The House Of Wounded Hearts - Fourth Of July Update

244 years ago today just after lunch, the Thirteen Colonies

rose against oppression and freed themselves from the yoke of tyranny

Well…. uh.… how shall I put this.... wasn't quite like that…. not even close

But there is a wee smitch of truth in every myth, or isn't there?

And.... uh.... pubs have re-opened in Berwick today.... just sayin'

I have a great belief in Britain, you know

We are not a nation of social workers or clients of social workers

We are not, please God, a nation of deserving cases

We are a fierce and proud nation and we are still, God willing, a nation to be reckoned with

(Francis Urquhart, House Of Cards: To Play The King, 1993)

It is my conviction that we can do most good for Europe by being resolutely British

By showing Europe the way to go rather than trotting on Europe's heels

Europe has a great deal more to learn from the cradle of democracy than it has to teach us

(Francis Urquhart, House Of Cards: The Final Cut, 1995)

It was bound to happen some day. Eleven days ago was the last of Boris Johnson's Covid-19 daily pressers, in which he admittedly was but the occasional guest star, and instantly The Guardian made their picks for the incoming 'Greatest Misses' DVD. Of course the First Minister of England had to host this last episode of the scheduled series himself and leave on a high note. Which he dutifully did by announcing that theatres in England would be allowed to reopen today, but would not be allowed to host live performances. Aye right, Boris. We have this kind of theatres in Scotland too, we call them cinemas. Odds are Series Two is already in the making and will hit the screens some time around the rumoured Equinox Reshuffle. Of course some parts will have been recast and it's safe to bet lockdown-flouter Robert Jenrick will be let go as his rendition of Corrupt Donor's Little Helper fell far short of becoming a crowd favourite. But we will still be treading familiar waters though, as Dominic Cummings has every chance of being retained as executive producer and chief scriptwriter. In the meantime, the Conservative Party's position in the general election polls has barely improved, as they still bear the scars of the Cummings Scandal and have something of a weekly quota of self-inflicted wounds. Even Boris Johnson's announcement of his "Build, Build, Build" master plan falls into that category, as the "live from the construction crew's locker room" setting left many quite flabbergasted. And that was before they discovered the £5 billion of extra funding are in fact no extra funding at all as it covers shovel-ready projects that are already funded.

Many observers have already made it clear that Johnson's Stimulus is in fact but a smallish RHINO (Roosevelt Hardly, In Name Only) package. Soon enough the people will realize that Johnson's New Deal is the same ad the Old Deal, and only a minute infusion of taxpayer dosh into laissez-faire capitalism. Of course Richard Desmond and his drinking buddies will welcome the end of 'newt counting' in the processing of planning applications in England, and are celebrating it at the local Wetherspoons on pints of warm Carling. Robert Jenrick certainly wishes it had been enforced a long time ago, as it would have saved him a fuckload of problems and a multi-episode PR disaster. But I guess the common people will not find sufficient incentives to 'bottle and swig their superhuman psychic energy', once they are done scratching their heads over what this mince actually means, or does not. Let's just wait until it dawns on them that Johnson's 'economic generational challenge' actually means the next generation will have to pay for this year's massive borrowing, that sent the UK's National Debt skyrocketing to an unprecedented all-time high in peacetime, and see how it impacts the Conservatives' electoral fortunes. For now, here is what the current rolling average of general election polls says. Based on the last six fielded between 18 June and 1 July, super-sample size being 12,005 and the very theoretical margin of error 0.89%. Of course it has been much worse for the Conservatives not so long ago when their lead over Labour melted down to just above 3%. Then the worst of an annus already quite horribilis might be yet to come as Boris's whole master plan now looks like standing his ground on quicksand, backed only by a confederacy of dunces whose brains went pear-shaped a long time ago.

The only silver lining for Boris will be that he will finally Get No Deal Done in time for the New Year and possibly even for Christmas, as was always planned and he gambled his presidency..... oops, sorry.... uh.... premiership on it. He has set his life upon a cast and he will stand the hazard of dice. And that'll be the day Europe says 'Bye, Bye, Oafs' and Dominic Raab finds out White Cliffs Matter, sure as fuck they do. Now that Boris has put a tiger in the tank, he will definitely prove that what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, to use one of his catchphrases. And the oven-ready PR plan has been fully rehearsed already, if nothing else has. Just blame it on those pesky unelected bureaucrats in the European Parliament who wouldn't let Boris renege on the pledges he made to get his Worse-Than-May's No-Deal Deal through Parliament, thanks to that snap election he never really wanted, but then the Liberal Democrats and the SNP strongarmed him into it, or didn't they? Just as these pesky European bureaucrats will leave him no choice but to grudgingly accept the No Deal Deal Tory donors and Jacob Rees-Mogg's business partners have been expecting for so long, so they can at last cash in on their offshore investments against the pound. But of course that will have no adverse effect at all on the economy as The Covid Did It. Or didn't it?

It's not all Queensberry rules with Europe, you know

Occasionally, one needs a bit of pepper on the gloves

(Francis Urquhart, House Of Cards: The Final Cut, 1995)

I used to think you were an honourable man but I don't think that anymore

You and your party are intellectually and morally bankrupt

It's time for you to go and you know it

(The King to Francis Urquhart, House Of Cards: To Play The King, 1993)

Of course an important part of the electorate's decision making is how they feel about the two top contenders for Number Ten. Jeremy Corbyn was never much of a player here as even Theresa May outpolled him two-to-one, and the Tory-cuddling media made sure he was trampled underfoot by Boris Johnson. But Keir Starmer is in a totally different league as he humiliates every week at PMQs a bumbling Johnson who has become a world-beating specialist in handbrake turns amidst peak hour traffic and can't even get his own lies straight. Which is quite the problem with lies: you have to remember the ones you said last week if you want this week's new stash to sound even remotely well-rehearsed. Boris obviously can't and it makes him look like a goldfish suddenly bereft of a bowl, definitely not what you would expect from someone so well versed in Josef Goebbels's principles. Starmer now coming nose-to-nose in the Preferred Prime Minister polls, or even a noselet ahead, is quite a verdict on the First Minister of England, who has already reached the bottom of credibility, but is still digging a hole and putting the earth back in behind him. I guess this goes hand in hand with Johnson plummeting from a peak +39% net approval rating in early April to -6% now, when Starmer bags a +27% net rating which is not even his peak.

But now we know Starmer has surprisingly inherited Corbyn's uncanny ability at scoring own goals, and even managed two in one day. I guess the sacking of Rebecca Long-Bailey will have more consequences than Sly Keir expects, as there are still about sixty hard-core Corbynistas in the Parliamentary Labour Party and they will definitely not move on. His outright rejection of another Scottish Independence referendum will in many ways close not just a chapter, but a whole book. Labour was born in Scotland and now Labour in Scotland dies its final death. First they lost the voters, now they lose the members. The SNP should grant Sly Keir lifelong honorary membership for eliminating the competition in the center-left quadrant of the political compass. I must confess I was just being cutely witty when I dubbed Starmer's regime 'New New Labour', but it turns out I was quite spot on as he has now shown his true colours, including his infamous outburst on live TV about the 'Black Lives Matter moment' that was worthy of Dominic Raab. Future polls will tell how Starmer's lurch to the right will affect his popularity and credibility, but it seems to work so far. For example, the evolution of the Conservatives' lead over Labour in voting intentions is quite similar to the Johnson-vs-Starmer trend.

It is not unusual for the governing party's support to go down early in a parliamentary term. In fact all sorts of situations have been seen in the past, and the winning party's lead down from 12% to somewhere between 4% and 6% in six months would never have made headlines in the past, the Government of the day might even have seen it as mildly satisfactory. What makes the current situation unique is that you do not often see the governing party's support skyrocket and then plummet the way it did for the Conservatives since the December election. The Conservatives have probably bounced back a little during the BLM protests because riots at the fringe of some demonstrations triggered some reptilian law-and-order gag-reflex in some parts of the electorate. But it was short-lived as the many failures of the current English Government can't be ignored for long, when each news cycle brings more of them into the spotlight. Boris Johnson might be "fit as a butcher's dog and full of beans", which is quite a weird way to describe your own condition, but the English Government have now been reduced to a herd of Stonehenge-Apocalypse-grade shit-gibbons only able to deliver a daily inverted pyramid of piffle, to quote the First Minister of England himself, in a different context of course. But this will end soon because, ye ken, Nostradamus prophesied that Boris Johnson will sack Dominic Cummings, be replaced by Michael Gove after a backbench rebellion, and then Gove will call a snap election midway through the current term and lose it. No shit, Nostradamus really said that.

Du règne Anglois l'indigne dechassé

Le conseiller par ire mis à feu

Ses adherans iront si bas tracer

Que le bastard sera demy receu

(Nostradamus, Century III, Quatrain 80, 1558)

Sorcery is the sauce fools spoon over failure, to hide the flavour of their own incompetence

(Tyrion Lannister, A Song Of Fire And Ice: A Clash Of Kings, 1999)

The seat projections from the current polls are of course far less damning for the Conservatives than what we had three weeks ago at the peak of the Cummings Scandal. Which does not mean that Boris Johnson is safe in the long run, as there are also lots of ambiguities and uncertainties in current polls. They show different trends between England and the devolved Nations, and also between London and the rest of England. Conservatives have lost the upper hand in Wales where they bounced to first party in some polls earlier this year, do poorly in London and abysmally in Scotland. But they still have a strong base in England as the latest batch of polls are far less favourable for Labour than what we had a month ago. Since my last projection the Conservatives' lead has increased by a measly 1.9% overall, but by a more significant 3.6% in England outside London, which directly translates into far fewer losses. The regional subsamples within England, with all the usual caveats, also show that Labour have not lost much ground in the North and South in the last few weeks, but are definitely struggling in the Midlands where the Conservatives have unexpectedly bounced back to a convincing outright majority of voting intentions. So the seat projections from the usual models now say that Johnson could hold a tiny majority of seats.

On current polling, my model says 48 seats would change hands, ranking this election between 1987 and 1992, which were just setbacks for the Conservatives, though the latter was quite miraculously so. But on such numbers, Boris Johnson would find himself in a much trickier situation than John Major in 1992. It took Major almost the whole term to lose a 21-seat majority so it's fair to predict it would take Johnson far less time to lose a 4-seat one. There are more similarities here to Harold Wilson's situation after the October 1974 election when he started with a 3-seat majority and lost it two years later. Seats that were previously held by Labour for a long time and fell in 2019, but are currently predicted to be held by the Tories, like Sedgefield, Workington, Barrow and Furness, Bolsover, West Bromwich West or Blackpool South, would be the most likely to switch back if a by-election was held in the near future. Then if you want a reference to an election everyone is old enough to remember, the current projection is quite close to 2015. Which is not a good omen when you realize it was the focal node in the space-time continuum where all the omnishambolic clusterbùrach started, and worse is still to come. Bear in mind though that there still is a potential of about fifty truly marginal seats, and another hundredish that would be won by slightly larger but still uncomfortably close margins, so an alternate timeline might still emerge in due course.

Even in their best case scenario, the Conservatives would not duplicate their December performance. You might even see a Sign From Heaven Above in Conservatives in that case matching Tony Blair's performance in 2005, which was the beginning of the end for New Labour. The best case scenario for Labour would be Back To 2010, with LibDems and SNP again Back To 2015 instead. Which again would leave Keir Starmer with only two options: negotiate in good faith with the SNP, or deliberately keep the Tories in power because, ye ken, standing up for the mythical concept of Oor Precious Most-Successful-In-The-Whole-Galaxy Union is more important than standing up for the people of this Union. Of course Sly Keir still has a third option: stop obsessing about a fantasy 16 seats in Scotland and seriously go after the really winnable extra seats elsewhere. Only sure thing is that New New Labour will not find their extra seats in Scotland, now that they have managed to alienate pretty much everyone North Of Gretna except the Morningside Polo Club. Sly Keir probably believes that unquestioning Unionism could result in a zero-sum game with Scottish voters: Labour would gain as many from the Conservatives as they would lose to the SNP. But it could rather be a totally different zero-sum game, the one where Labour end up with zero Scottish MPs after the next general election. So long, Merry Ian….

We are, please God, a nation of very fierce bad rabbits

(Beatrix Potter and Francis Urquhart, House Of Cards: To Play The King, 1993)

A man of state needs helpers, little elves and sprites to do his bidding

Even unwitting pawns who don't know who they serve

(Francis Urquhart, House Of Cards, 1990)

As Trumpistan celebrate the UDI they deny others, some useless and irrelevant trivia.

Only one American President was born on Independence Day: Calvin Coolidge in 1872.

Three died on Independence Day: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, both in 1826

on the Fiftieth Anniversary, and then James Monroe in 1831. Class dismissed.