And the winner is….

Posted on June 7, 2019 by Guthlac

Congratulations to Lisa Forbes the newly elected person to represent the constituency of Peterborough (she will only become and MP when she has taken the oath sometime next week. )    There are all sorts of winners and losers from last night’s result but probably the biggest loser would be anyone who is going to try and predict where this takes British politics over the near term.  It was a by election and they are unpredictable creatures at the best of time.  In current febrile atmosphere that unpredictability can be multiplied by a factor of 100 or 1000 or whatever multiple of ten you might wish to use.

All that being said I am sure that it will be used by all the parties concerned to predict the future and claim victory for their vision of the future.  The first one to do this will be Jeremy Corbyn.  He has had terrible time over the past few weeks and it would be only natural for he and his supporters to argue that this proves that things are nothing like as bad for the Labour Party under Jeremy as their political enemies within the party would have you believe.  They may well say that this proves when the voters are asked to support Labour they still will.  Whether this is true only time will tell but if I were a Labour party stratiests I would be seriously concerned by the 17% swing against Labour.  This doesn’t say much for the party who is facing the collapsing Conservatives (swing of over 20% against) that there swing against was only 17% compared to 20%+.   General elections are not won with performances like that.

The second person will be Boris Johnson and his attempt to become the leader of the Conservatives and thereby the Prime Minister (perhaps*).  He will no doubt claim that Peterborough shows that the Conservative Party needs a leader who can claw back all those voters they have lost to the Brexit Party and as he is by far the most charismatic person in the race he is the person to do just that.  He is also a Brexiter to boot (the European Research Group may well beg to differ on that!)   With Boris at the helm the only way is up he will no doubt claim.   Again whether this is true will be judged over time however it is fair to point out that Boris is now very much a marmite political force and whilst he might attract Brexiters back from the Brexit Party he is likely to drive as many voters away from the Conservatives.  Then there is the trust question.   Can you trust Boris to do what he says he is going to do?  I will leave the Conservative Party members to answer that one.

The third person who could claim to be happy with this result would be Nigel Farage.  Afterall in the time it has taken Change UK to form and then collapse he has  created a political force that has shaken much of the established political thinking.  The only problem was that even with a 29% swing to the Brexit Party they lost and Nigel Farage has yet again fallen short when it comes to the need for political organisation compared to political bombast.  No wonder he disappeared from the count early, refusing to talk to the media (possibly a first, not talking to the media that is rather than losing in Westminster elections.)

In the end no one can truly know what the result last night really means beyond that Lisa Forbes won.  Let her enjoy her moment of success and leave the rest for historians of the future to decide what the real meaning of the  Peterborough By Election might be.

*A person will only be asked to be Prime Minister if he/she can command a majority in the House of Commons – this is far from certain for any of the potential Conservative leaders including Boris Johnson.  If he can’t then we may well be heading for a snap election because it pretty certain Jeremy Corbyn can’t in this parliament.

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D Day…

Posted on June 6, 2019 by Guthlac

So the draft dodger in Chief has left our shores after celebrating the bravery of many  thousands of his fellow citizens who didn’t cry off when called to serve – I’m not sure if that is ironic or telling?  For the record my father was recovering in an Indian hospital after being shot on some unknown road in Burma by a Japanese snipper whilst trying to recover the body of a fallen British soldier.   What it does make you wonder is if the situations were reversed just how would we have reacted if called?   What we also have be thankful for is that we have never had to make that choice.  So let’s remember everything those brave men and far more than a few women sacrificed for us, their children, grandchildren and great grandchildren.   This world may not be pretty at times but I suspect it is a whole lot better because of their sacrifice than what might have been.

What a strange and wonderful place England is – lest we forget.

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It must be unicorn season….

Posted on June 3, 2019 by Guthlac

Because I am that type of sado I have been paying attention to the first week of the proxy war that is the Tory party leadership election and I have to ask whether any of the minor runners have actually been inside of the chamber of the House of Commons for the last six months or so?  If they have then they clearly weren’t paying attention as they all seem to be offering unicorn solutions to the ever increasing political and constitutional crisis that is Brexit.   Some of the highlights from the weekend include these great pearls of wisdom:

Sajid Javid  offered a unicorn solution to the EU/Northern Ireland border whilst at the same time managing to sound ever so patronising to the Republic of Ireland.  His solution is that the UK Border Force, a Home Office function, should take over policing the border and put in place the non existent  digital enforcement technology.   As a sweetener he offered for Britain to pay for the whole lot.  Now I am not sure whether this man has ever visited the border or has even the first clue as to the complexities involved but apparently it would mean that there wouldn’t have to be any technology/border checks actually on the border.  So that is nice but I don’t think that he understands that the Republic of Ireland’s border with Northern Ireland is the European Union’s and so it is with the EU that any border policies have to be agreed not the Republic who I am sure are so happy that the Brits are willing to help them out of their little local difficulty;

Andrea Leadsom has decided her solution is to rebrand No Deal Brexit as a Managed Withdrawal or something like that.  Her plan is that a British ministerial team will visit all EU 27 countries to sort this mess out, thus by passing the EU altogether.  At the same time she would place a number of bills on the floor of the House of Commons to put in place local fixes that have been agreed as part of the Withdrawal agreement with the EU.   So on the one hand she wants to deal with the EU and at the same time by pass the EU.   It is logic like this that allowed her to be beaten last time around by Theresa May;

Rory Stewart’s unique answer is to form a citizen’s council or group to replace the deadlocked House of Commons to listen to the experts and then put forward their recommendations that the House of Commons would then unquestioningly put into action.  This novel approach will take ‘…about 5 weeks…’ to be put in place.  Disregarding the fact that the House of Commons has got to agree to this, less than zero chance I would guess. We then have to select 100 good men and women to represent the whole country, sounds a bit like the House of Commons to me but only 1/6 the size, during the summer holiday period when of course everybody is available at the drop of a hat.  Rory does sound plausible until he starts to go beyond his well rounded back story when he too seems to have an attraction to mythical creatures;

And finally we come to Dominic Raab who is clearly going for the Alan Bas’tard vote.   He seems to not have noticed that the world has moved on and there isn’t that many votes for the Tories being the nasty party.  (I might be misrepresenting what he has been saying but that is the overall impression I get everytime he says something).

The two front runners, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, have kept a relative low profile, if you don’t count Boris being prosecuted for his part in the referendum campaign  and given the less than impressive showing by some of the other candidates that would seem the best strategy.

So to recap, the last three years haven’t happened and all of the candidates seem to think that the British only have to put on stern faces and the EU will roll over and give us everything we want.   None seem to be aware that this is all just nonsense and are clearly refusing to face the realities:  Brexit has changed everything; The EU 27 has  are much more united as a result of Brexit; the 31st of October is not that far into the future to achieve anything substantial and to try and force anything through this parliament will cause the biggest constitutional crises for over 100 years and most probably lead to the collapse of the government.  Given the current identify driven, Remain or Leave, sentiment of the electorate the likelihood of a Tory party being reelected with anything other than a small rump of MPs doesn’t seem to have crossed the minds of any of the candidates minds at all.  Even thinking that trying to play the Corbyn card isn’t going to help as many of the disgruntled voters will go to the Brexit Party, Lib Dems or Greens rather than Labour (See Euro elections for guide).  The outcome would be that we would have an even more divided parliament than before.

Still at least we’ll have all those unicorns and the giant baby Donald Trump blimp.  So that is nice.

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Then what?…

Posted on May 28, 2019 by Guthlac

Having re read what I wrote yesterday about the problems that the Labour Party faces after the European Elections I feel I might have been a little harsh.  After all there is no suggestion that the party is about to collapse into total anarchy as is likely to happen to the Conservative Party after the election of their new leader whomever he  may be (I don’t think a woman has much of a chance this time round as the boys seem to be drawing all the attention – perhaps I will be proven wrong I hope so.)   Yet Labour have huge challenges ahead none of which they seem to be able to take on.   The greatest challenge is this – with such an incompetent Conservative party why is it that Labour is incapable of winning any national vote?   I have no idea but clearly whatever Labour is doing isn’t getting through to the voters and I find this a real shame.   It would be great to try something different which may not work but given the record of the current ruling party there isn’t a lot of success on the other side either.  It just fills me with despair.

Enough of despair lets try and address the question in the title of this post – Then What?  The Conservatives appear to be hellbent on selecting a new leader who is going fight the last battle – let’s call it the battle of Nigel – and are not interested in the future of their party let alone the country.   But the 31st October 2019 isn’t that far away and as things stand we are going to leave the European Union (EU) without any kind of withdrawal agreement but then what?   I have always assumed that in the short term companies that want to export to the UK from the European Union will still want to and so they will no doubt have come up with their own contingencies to get around the problems associated with having a hard border between the European continent and Great Britain.   I have also assumed that the UK/EU southwest land border will cause all sorts of unintended and unknown unknown consequences some of which may well lead to violence.   Just to illuminate this a little further Sein Fein have had a bad set of election result in the Republic of Ireland and any tensions along the border would be used by them to bolster their support.  Again where this might lead is anyone’s guess.

However, away from all this you have to look at what the European Research Group (ERG) view of what should happen next – we should start to work on a free trade agreement with the EU who, after all, represent our largest external trading partner.   Of course the first thing that the EU is going ask for is what they see as the unpaid bills of the UK – circa €40bn and are unlikely to budge until this dealt with.  Then they will want to ensure that the UK doesn’t have an unfair advantage over working practice ie low pay and working conditions compared to the rest of the EU and of course they will want to ensure that the EU citizens that live and work in the UK are fairly treated.   They will also want some form of judicial oversight of any agreement  to ensure that both sides are playing fair. Oh one final thing there will need to be some form of agreement that ensures that any problems along the UK/EU land border are reduced to a minimum.

If any of this is starting to sound familiar well of course it is because this is what was negotiated and agreed between the UK government and the EU in the withdrawal agreement and it doesn’t matter whether Boris Johnson, Dominic Raab or Steve Baker is the new Prime Minister these are the same problems they are going to face and all the fluster of Nigel Farage won’t change any of this.  However don’t expect any of this cold light of reality to enter into the ever crazier things that these people are going to say over the next few weeks.   Whoever is the next Prime Minister he (see above for disclaimer on personal pronoun) will have a honeymoon as long as it takes them to finish their acceptance speech.   They will have hard choice to make in very short order even if we leave the EU without a deal. (This is unlikely to destroy the Brexit Party as I am sure that Nigel Farage has already thought of this and will morph the Brexit Party into another vehicle for his political ambitions.   You have to admire his political skills if you don’t agree with his political aims.)

This will require a politician of great skill and cunning to try and sort out.  Which of the declared candidates have any of these skills?   I suspect only one but that is a story for another day.

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It’s a funny old world…

Posted on May 27, 2019 by Guthlac

So it is time to reveal just how accurate/inaccurate my European Election predictions were.   Without further delay here they are:

Predictions

  1. Brexit Party 30%
  2. Lib Dems 25%
  3. Labour 15%
  4. Conservative 10%

Final Vote Count

  1. The Brexit Party Vote share:31.6%
  2. Liberal Democrat Vote share: 20.3%
  3. Labour Vote share: 14.1%
  4. Green Vote share: 12.09%
  5. Conservative Vote share:9.09%

I have to say that wasn’t that bad at all as the predictions were made two weeks before the final vote.  The one thing I clearly didn’t account for was the strength of the Greens vote.  However in the following blog post I did address this and what I wrote did appear to chime with what actually happened.   Now before I disappear into hubristic self congratulatory smugness I think it is only far to say that  one set of predictions doesn’t make anyone anything other than I probably got a bit lucky.

What lessons can be learnt from last night’s vote?   I guess the most important one is that there would appear to be very little between Remain and Leave votes in percentage terms.  At the moment there would appear to be just the slightest edge in favour of remain but that is all.   However, as this whole Brexit mess is based on a similar percentage vote advantage to Leave then this may well prove to be important going forward in some way or another.

The second lesson is that the collapse of the Conservative party will gather pass.  Any candidate for the leadership who has the slightest stain on their Brexit soul will be doomed.  Only true believers in Brexit will be considered.  This actually puts the front runner Boris Johnson in something of a bind.   There has always been the whiff of chancer about Boris when it comes to Brexit i.e. he only supported Brexit because he thought it would help him get selected to be the leader of the Conservative party.  He doesn’t really believe and was as shocked as anyone when Leave actually one.  If the forthcoming Peterborough by election goes badly then I suspect these suspicions about Boris will grow, no doubt fuelled by Michael Gove and Dominic Rabb’s whispering.

Talking about the Peterborough by election the third lesson would be that this is way too close to call.  On the face of it this would seem to be somewhat rash thing to say given the result of the European election:


Source: https://www.peterborough.gov.uk/council/elections/european-parliamentary-elections/

On this result the seat should be taken by The Brexit Party.  However, I suspect something much more complicated will take place:  Firstly, the Peterborough parliamentary constituency is only 60% of the total voters in Peterborough city council area and so I cannot say how many of the Brexit Party voters might live outside the constituency boundaries.  This could have a significant effect or none at all but it is worth taking into account; Secondly, this is a by election just two weeks after a major election and this will no doubt colour the voting decisions of the electorate.  Or to put it in a much more blunt way how will the remain voters vote?   Again I have no real answer to this as they may well consider that there is a substantive difference between the European elections and the by election.  This is a logical position but it is not supported by the history of by elections where all sorts of unexpected results come out.  One possible scenario is that it is run along Leave/Remain lines and the remain voters all vote for the Lib/Dems candidate.  If this were to happen then the Brexit party’s lead would come under serious strain.  Would it be enough?  We’ll only find out on the morning of the 7th June 2019.

The final lesson is that both Labour and the Conservative parties are in serious trouble.   Clearly the Conservative’s problems are far greater than Labour’s but it would be foolish to downplay the problems that Labour has which can be summed up with two words London and Scotland.  In Scotland they were they had a swing against them of almost 17%.   The situation in London isn’t anything like as bleak but nonetheless it will make it very difficult for Labour to pick up seats.   The best example of this is Barnet which has three very winnable Conservative marginal seats.  However, the Lib Dems won the European vote comfortably with Labour in third place.   Any hope of forming a Labour government would depend on winning these three seats.

Of course it is fair to say that European election voting patterns don’t map onto a General Election.  However, there is one other thing that is unique about Barnet – it has a large Jewish community which will have been following all the problems that the Labour party has had with anti semitic behaviour.   In short the European Election results have not made it any easier for Labour to find a pathway to government.

So to sum up:  Britain is in a right mess with no easy solutions.  Even if we leave the EU on the 31st October 2019 without a withdrawal deal none of the Brexit problems will be resolved.  I haven’t got the first clue how we get out of this mess and thankfully I can happily sit on sidelines throwing my two penneth in with the safe knowledge that  no one will listen to me and quite frankly that is just as well!   Still I did get the results of the European election about right which is something – I think?

If this all depresses you then here is a drawing of an elephant…it makes as much sense as Brexit.

 

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The Internet is Silly….

Posted on May 17, 2019 by Guthlac

One of the more crazy things about this world is that now is a whole industry developed to support the lunacy of Internet trends.   From Instagram spats to Twitter storms many people seem to lose any sense of perspective.  The latest nonsense is the froth that has built up around the latest episode of Game of Thrones.  The way some people go on you have to wonder if they have got anything better to do?  Well off course a lot of them don’t because they make money from  the hits they generate so they must stoke the flames of artificial controversy.  In a world where thousands are dying in armed conflicts around the world daily whether Daenerys Targaryen could undertake such wanton destruction isn’t really that important at all.

For the record I am frustrated by the final season because it does feel they have tried to squeeze at least two seasons into one.   Am I that bothered?  Not in the slightest because as  the Google entry says Daenerys Targaryen is a fictional character.

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Livin’ on a prayer….

Posted on May 16, 2019 by Guthlac

After a bit of a struggle I have found some inspiration again to enable me to draw/paint (In the digital world there really isn’t any difference.)

This year has been a bit all over the place – maybe thing might settle down a bit.  I don’t expect things to blow my doors off.

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Vote green go red….

Posted on May 15, 2019 by Guthlac

The other day I wrote my first piece about the upcoming European Elections for the European Union (EU) parliament.   The main conclusion I came to was that the Brexit Party would have the largest share of the vote and that  the Liberal Democrats (Lib/Dems) would significantly increase their showing as well.   I felt that the main political parties Labour and especially the Conservatives would lose votes because of their ambiguous Brexit position.   I also thought that the turn out would be much larger than the previous election in 2014.

The one unknown I didn’t really address was the Green Party of England and Wales (there is a  seperate party in Scotland.  The England and Wales party is who I am talking about here.)   In the 2014 election they got a larger share of the vote than the Lib/Dems.  However, traditionally the Lib/Dems get a much larger share of the vote so this is one  reasons why I didn’t consider the Green Party.  The other reason is that as the the Lib/Dems had a great local election and have much wider spread and so I think that they will attract more votes than the Greens (In 2009 they came almost within 1% of the Labour vote – the Greens were half that.)  The final thing is that the Lib/Dems are the best known unambiguous  Remain party with a very simple message – Bollocks to Brexit.

Since then I have started to think a bit more about the Greens relationship with Labour and I suspect the Jeremy Corbyn is right to fear the Greens.  In the Southeast and London regions there is a good chance that much of the disgruntled Labour vote, those feel rejected by the unclear push me pull you position on the question of Brexit, may well reject Labour for the Greens.  These voters are most likely to be younger, better educated with no real sense of loyalty to Labour compared to their loathing of the Conservatives.   They would also probably have a strong position on climate change as well holding a  positive view of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and what she stands for.   Because they are young it is very very unlikely they voted in the last Euro elections but I suspect they are going to vote in this.   If all these things are correct then the Green Party may will be a better fit than the once steller Labour Party of Jeremy Corbyn.   Once they have voted Green then there is a good chance they will continue to do so.   This is a really big problem for Labour.

The other factor in play here is that this election is about one thing and one thing only Brexit.  Again this will not help Labour who have constituents who are very pro Brexit and members who are the reverse – hence the ambiguous policy they are pursuing. This doesn’t really have any place in a campaign dominated by Nigel Farage on the one hand and Bollocks to Brexit on the other.   This conflict will be played out over the next week in the London region as well as the Southeast region  and if Labour aren’t very careful they could be main losers here as voters move towards the pro and anti Brexit parties (both regions have the most Green voters.)  I stand by my prediction of the Lib/dems coming second but maybe the Labour vote might collapse even more than I first thought.

All of this, of course, is pure speculation and there is still 7 days to the election so an awful lot can change.  Nonetheless, there is just the outside chance that the forthcoming election may mark the end of the Jeremy Corbyn Labour revolution and ironically it may come at the hands of the Green Party.  Perhaps.

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Back to some decent weather…

Posted on May 14, 2019 by Guthlac

As with most things decent weather is a relative statement.   One person’s sunny day is another’s pollen hell.  The past week has been marked by a significant amount of rain which is what we have really needed for some time as the ground has been very hard for this time of year.   However, that seems to have passed and we now have a period of sunny but not too warm weather.  This does mean that plants in the garden are growing at an almost exponential rate – almost.

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Bollocks to Brexit….

Posted on May 13, 2019 by Guthlac

Here we go again…Nigel Farage is exactly where he wants to be at the centre of the news whirlwind.  He has never had to actually get his hands dirty with the business of governing this country but that doesn’t matter to him.  In a way he must be admired amongst the politicos as they would love to be able to draw the crowds that Nigel can.   Of course this is also his great weakness.  He equates vox pop popularity to serious power and they really are not the same as he has discovered every time he has tried to  gain a seat in the House of Commons.   But credit where credit is due he is playing a blinder and with 10 days to go the European election there is more than an even chance that his Brexit party will gain the largest share of the vote. If this happens then he will claim that he has won the vote which will be not true but that doesn’t really bother Nigel.

What of the other parties going into the election – how are they doing?   Well the Change UK/Independent group are collapsing before our eyes – perhaps we could call it ‘doing a Chuka.’   I had hoped that they would have been able to get their act in some semblance of order by now but they really don’t seem to have the first clue as to how run anything.  They had assumed that they would replace the Liberal Democrats but after the local elections it is clear that isn’t going to happen and now have no real answer to the simple question ‘Why should I vote for you rather than the Lib Dems?’  Why indeed.

As for Labour they are in very great danger of being run over by events.  They have a leader who has always hated the European Union and rightly sees that should Britain stay within the European Union(EU)  his hopes of reengineering the British economy back to the 1970’s will not be able to be undertaken due to EU competition rules.   However, the membership of the Labour party would appear to be very keen on the EU and reject his attempt to prevent Labour being a pro remain party.   At the moment it is unclear as to what effect this will have on the share of the vote that Labour will get.  I suspect that they will hemorrhage a considerable number to the Lib Dems on the remain side and the Brexit Party on the leave side.  How large the number is it is far too early to say.

Now we come to the empty shell that is the Conservative Party.  It would seem that their approach to the upcoming election is to curl up into a ball in the corner and hope the beating won’t be too bad.   They have nothing to say on Brexit – nothing.  There is every chance that most of their vote will shift to the Brexit Party and they could do a Canada ( In the 1990’s the Canadian Conservative party collapsed and at the federal election they only got two MP – they had been the governing party before the election.)

So we now come to the other major Great Britain wide political party the Liberal Democrats.  Before the recent local elections they were looking a bit sorry for themselves.  They were rudderless and desperately trying to find a new leader.  However the election changed everything.  They were the only party that made substantial gains (Labour by contrast lost a large number of councilors when in truth they really should have been gaining them – especially with Theresa May as PM.)   Ever since this the Lib Dems  have been looking forward to the Euro elections.  They have taken a leaf out of the Nigel Farage playbook and coined the campaign slogan ‘Bollocks to Brexit’ (They actually purloined this from a Pro Remain pressure group but no one seems to be too worried about that .)

A number of well established politicians and political hacks have been very sniffy about this but it is perfect.   It is clear, concise and chimes with most of the remain voters views.  10 days out they look like the one remain party that will take the lion’s share of the remain vote.

The one final thing to consider is turn out.  Again, I believe Nigel Farage has done everyone a service.   His personality and ability to generate publicity will probably ensure that there will be a large turnout – in equal measure due to those who love him and those who loathe him. In 2014 at the last Euro elections the turnout was around 36% which was a slight increase on the last election 5 years earlier.   This time I expect it will be much higher – possibly way beyond 50%.   If this happens I suspect the overall share of the vote will something like this on a UK wide vote:

  1. Brexit Party 30%
  2. Lib Dems 25%
  3. Labour 15%
  4. Conservative 10%

(The rest of the vote will go to parties only standing in their respective nations such as the SNP.   This is not to suggest that their vote doesn’t count, far from it, but rather compared to the total UK wide number their actual number of voters is rather small. The population of England is over 10 times larger than Scotland’s for example.)

You will also note that I make no mention of Change UK as I suspect their vote will crumble just as the party probably will.

If this is the shape of things to come then goodness knows what will happen to the Conservative Party – especially if they are beaten in the Peterborough by election by the Brexit Party. (This will split the Brexit vote enough to ensure that Labour takes the seat.)

How much of this will come to pass?   No idea but one thing is true.  This European elections are not going to be ‘a joke‘.  Ironically something that the European Union has been trying to do for decades.  Life is rather strange don’t you think?

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