Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Sheilbh]

He did a Twitter thread (inevitably) that was sort of about it after the local elections/Hartlepool:

Dominic Cummings
@Dominic2306
When pundits who 'explained' why Vote Leave's plan to realign politics was mad/stupid/impossible now give post hoc 'explanations' for why it's all so logical/inevitable ... ignore their babble... Pundits = noise not signal. Eg 'the centre ground' DOES NOT EXIST, it's pundit fiction
Eg. 2014 https://dominiccummings.com/2014/06/30/my-report-for-business-for-britain-on-the-dynamics-of-the-debate-over-the-eu-and-a-small-but-telling-process-point-on-the-eu/
& 2016, CTRL+F centre ground - https://dominiccummings.com/2017/01/09/on-the-referendum-21-branching-histories-of-the-2016-referendum-and-the-frogs-before-the-storm-2/
. Vote Leave strategy in 16 & 19 was based on SW1 theories re 'centre ground' = false. SW1 didn't learn after 2016 & provided a chance for us to win again in 19, ignoring pundit howling

KS is a beta-lawyer-gamma-politician, like ~all in SW1 he obsesses on Media Reality not Actual Reality, he's played the lobby game (badly) for a year WITHOUT A MESSAGE TO THE COUNTRY, now the pundits will a/ savage him, b/ tell him he needs to focus on them more, more exclusives!
A measure of how bad KS is: until I googled yesterday I didn't know who Shadow CHX is & when I looked at photo I had 0 recognition, she never touched my consciousness in a year...
Caveat: in 2020 I didn't attend PMQ mtngs, Cabinet, ignored politics/communication as much as I possibly could (contra pundits noise), but still that tells you something: *0 impact of any LAB econ message of any kind!*
A sign KS trying to improve: sustained effort on violent crime, not 'a crime week in the grid' (usual sw1 crap) but SUSTAINED, month after month after month. P(80-90%) won't happen. KS OODA will stay Media Reality, not Actual Reality cos reorienting= infuriating media on own side
Other signs: SUSTAINED intelligent activity on a/ the huge productivity agenda, b/ bringing in serious ppl from outside SW1 to help, e.g hire @davidshor & tell ShadCab to do as he says, Shor understands politics better than any LAB MP or KS office. Again P(80-90%) won't happen
Politics will for a while resemble DC/GO vs EM: two groups focused on the media but not as good at it as Blair, neither focused on country or *being a serious gvt*
The optimal political strategy for CON *&* LAB a/ is almost identical & b/ wd be described by pundits, as VL strategy 16/19, as 'incoherent/mad' cos does not fit SW1 ideas of lt/rt/centre, but wd be wildly popular. Neither will do cos both=oriented to MediaReality>ActualReality
Why does this happen? Politicians are PROVABLY NOT RATIONAL even about their own election/comms! They orient to internal chimp gangs + media, not to public/ActualReality, cos of party etc incentives + political media=so noisy the politicians can't learn their errors from there
If LAB had a leader 80% as good at comms as Blair + focused on ActualReality, they'd win next GE easy. They don't/won't, P(80%), so impossible now to be confident re what will happen, both parties cd easily be hated/held in contempt at same time
& pundits ignore counterfactuals: e.g If LAB had played the Establishment's collapse 16-19 smart, they cd have destroyed Tories, who wanted to ignore Vote Leave's plan for how to adapt; if vaccine decisions had been conventional spring20, today wd have been terrible for CON etc
Politics is always more contingent, more branching histories that nearly happen, & less 'inevitable' & less 'strategy', than the fairy tales you are given by the media... remember, the world in which neither Brexit nor Trump happened v nearly existed... ENDS

I think he has a point on violent crime. It is remarkable that after 10 years of sustained austerity affecting law and order and social services/local government that Labour isn't pushing a "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" style message. The only person I can think who's tried that is Shaun Bailey - who is from the governing party that is responsible for that austerity.

David Shor is someone who had worked for Obama and with Nate Silver, I think he was on the Biden campaign but there was some sort of "cancelling" for some reason - I don't know the details. But basically he's a little bit Languish. His basic thesis, from what I understand, is that Democrats are on the cusp of basically being locked out of power semi-permanently because Republicans are anti-democratic and Democrat constituencies are drifting to the Republicans. His solution is that Democrats should talk about popular stuff (infrastructure spending, healthcare etc) and not talk about unpopular/divisive stuff (immigration reform, culture war issues, Senate procedure). But I've not read much about him.

Edit: Oh and for AR Labour are starting to be a little more confident - apparently a very good ground game. Basically every councillor and MP in the country seems to have been out in Batley and Spen plus good GOTV - they're comparing it to Peterbrough (Labour MP recalled for speeding sentence, Labour won the byelection). But all "sources" speaking to journalists are very contradictory and the only people I'd trust on really gauging how well they turned out their vote are the Lib Dems - Tories and Labour are far less good at this normally and may be trying to manage expectations.

Tories a bit more downbeat - reporting people staying home because they're sick of the divisive campaign.

Interestingly backed up by betting figures though:

[Josquius]

I get some of what Cummings is saying there but my gosh so I want to punch him for the way he says it.

A bit languish?

Fingers crossed on spen. Hopefully the terrorism crossed a line and helped get some labour voters out.

[garbon]

It's so weird Dominic Cummings being very online now - complete with a paid Substack (next week apparently on how Labour can win), doing AMAs (Global Britain is bullshit made up by people who like maps with arrows - the real upside for Brexit is procurement reform), looking into doing a podcast (God help us all) and now this:

Dominic Cummings
@Dominic2306
Goddamn it #FreeBritney & consider how many non-famous non-rich people must be getting this sort of treatment too...

Ted Gioia
@tedgioia
This should be a wake-up call for reform. Many people are deprived of their civil liberties in a court hearing that can be as short as 10 minutes. And once you've lost those rights, courts almost never give them back. The system is not going to #FreeBritney, because it's broken.

I half expect him to complete the rest of the very online experience and be posting thirst traps within the week

I'm unclear on why we should care about Don and his blog.

[Sheilbh]

I get some of what Cummings is saying there but my gosh so I want to punch him for the way he says it.

Oh God - I know. He's an insufferable bell P(80%), but not entirely wrong.

A bit languish?

I think Shor thought aligns with what lots of people on Languish say.

[Sheilbh]

I'm unclear on why we should care about Don and his blog.

I suppose it depends what you mean by care.

But broadly for the same reason former campaign heads/senior advisers (especially embittered ones) get book deals. Though I'm baffled why we're in Volume 8 of Alastair Campbell's diaries covering 2010-15 when he left government in 2003. And it is rare for a senior adviser like this to be trying to knife his ex-boss because normally they appreciate that it reflects badly on them.

He's just doing it quicker and online with WhatsApp screenshots.

[Sheilbh]

Fingers crossed on spen. Hopefully the terrorism crossed a line and helped get some labour voters out.

And on this - no result until 5am apparently. But from a local reporter who covers Kirklees:

TonyLDR
@LdrTony
Turnout in the #BatleyAndSpenByelection is predicted to be around 70%. That's more than in 2019 (65.5%) and much larger than in 2016 when it was just 25.8% - one of the lowest turnouts for a Parliamentary by-election since 1945. This is the scene at the count. #LDReporter

That's extraordinary for a modern byelection (who knew it didn't have a hyphen ). Normally I think you'd expect about 2/3s of last general election turnout, which would be pretty good. We'll see if that holds up but the constituency has about 80k voters and 17k requested a postal ballot, which feels high.

In this sort of seat I'd think high turnout is normally good for Labour - and it might be. It might be people angry/disgusted at Galloway's campaign. On the other hand it might be a sign of an insurgent campaign, like Galloway's doing very, very well indeed. And, of course, it might just be wrong.

[The Minsky Moment]

At risk of derailing the thread, the kinds of stuff Shor is talking about is pretty obvious as strategy - not taking away from his insight into the data. Neither right wing nor left wing cultural or identity based politics plays well to a national electorate.  It's almost always optimal to focus on lunchpail issues as the Dems did in 2018.   The structure of the US political system however works against the strategic rationale.  The US is a two party system but party nominees are chosen by partisan electorates, and the voting pool in primary elections for each party is slanted towards the activist wing.  So candidates need to pander to the "woke" wings of their respective parties and true believers have a structural advantage in the nomination process. That works against putting together a disciplined message.

One of the reasons there is usually a tendency for the "out" party to perform well in elections is that that party that is frozen out has more incentive to be disciplined in general election messaging and suppress unpopular views - e.g. the way the Clyburn tried to suppress the defund police message in 2020.  Activist demands can be controlled because they accept (mostly) that getting the bad guys out is the paramount priority. The "in" party has a harder time as their activists expect and demand that their agenda will get heard as the reward for power.

This is obviously is US centric analysis but it has some implications for other systems including a pseudo 2 party system like the UK.

[Josquius]

BBC News - Batley and Spen: Labour narrowly hold seat in by-election
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-57691543

Labour win
Albeit just by 300 votes. Sadly the tories got 12000 whilst Galloway managed 8000.
Jeez that's a lot of fascists in waiting. Countering this anti woke crap really will be core to labour getting anywhere in the future.
Then again with the high turn out letting it burn actually proved in labours favour here, encouraging sensible people to turn out and vote against it.

[Tamas]

I get some of what Cummings is saying there but my gosh so I want to punch him for the way he says it.

A bit languish?

Fingers crossed on spen. Hopefully the terrorism crossed a line and helped get some labour voters out.

Do not underestimate the power of conviction. A lot of people like Cummings gain traction with others because they showcase such strong conviction it becomes convincing on its own - surely if he is being so arrogant about it, he must know his stuff!

Then events happen, some of the arrogant ignorant bullshitters are proven right by the necessity of probabilities, and then you end up with stuff like people like Sheilbh listening to the opinion of scumbags like Cummings.

[garbon]

I'm unclear on why we should care about Don and his blog.

I suppose it depends what you mean by care.

But broadly for the same reason former campaign heads/senior advisers (especially embittered ones) get book deals. Though I'm baffled why we're in Volume 8 of Alastair Campbell's diaries covering 2010-15 when he left government in 2003. And it is rare for a senior adviser like this to be trying to knife his ex-boss because normally they appreciate that it reflects badly on them.

He's just doing it quicker and online with WhatsApp screenshots.

It feels like Cummings is going to say crap for attention and to show off how cool he is. I'm not seeing why there is value in looking at that, particularly when he no longer has any pull.

[Tamas]

I'm unclear on why we should care about Don and his blog.

I suppose it depends what you mean by care.

But broadly for the same reason former campaign heads/senior advisers (especially embittered ones) get book deals. Though I'm baffled why we're in Volume 8 of Alastair Campbell's diaries covering 2010-15 when he left government in 2003. And it is rare for a senior adviser like this to be trying to knife his ex-boss because normally they appreciate that it reflects badly on them.

He's just doing it quicker and online with WhatsApp screenshots.

It feels like Cummings is going to say crap for attention and to show off how cool he is. I'm not seeing why there is value in looking at that, particularly when he no longer has any pull.

Exactly.

[Sheilbh]

BBC News - Batley and Spen: Labour narrowly hold seat in by-election
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-57691543

Labour win
Albeit just by 300 votes. Sadly the tories got 12000 whilst Galloway managed 8000.
Jeez that's a lot of fascists in waiting. Countering this anti woke crap really will be core to labour getting anywhere in the future.
Then again with the high turn out letting it burn actually proved in labours favour here, encouraging sensible people to turn out and vote against it.

The Tory campaign wasn't big on anti-woke/culture war stuff. It was old fashioned pork barrel politics - vote Tory because he'll get investment from the Tory government for this constituency.

Interesting piece on it being likely that Labour was reaching new voters and even converting some Tories (at last)

Labour held Batley and Spen against the odds by attracting new voters
Faced with George Galloway's advance among traditional Labour supporters, the party attracted new converts to compensate.
By Ben Walker

A narrow Labour hold in urban West Yorkshire is not a result typically received with breathless gasps of relief by the party leadership. But for Keir Starmer and those desperate for party unity, it is without doubt a victory snatched from the jaws of defeat.

On our respective visits to Batley and Spen, my colleague Anoosh Chakelian and I remarked that Kim Leadbeater, the Labour candidate, was an unquestionable asset to the campaign. She appealed to would-be voters and her literature was markedly less Labour in branding than previous efforts by the party, and one wonders if it was this which proved key to the final result.

When approached on his preference, for instance, one resident remarked last week to a canvasser: "Yes, I'll vote for Kim, but that doesn't mean I'll be supporting Labour!"

The party's newly-slashed majority of 323 votes over the Conservatives makes this seat a marginal one – one that warranted two bundle recounts last night. Indeed, it is a majority which has been reduced from 6.7 per cent in 2019 to just 0.9 per cent. This, however, is a better result for Labour than that in the May local elections, when Conservative candidates won by 0.3 per cent across the constituency.

As such, this is a seat in which Labour were already on the backfoot. For the party to withstand an insurgent challenge by the fedora-clad George Galloway makes this win both a sweeter sight for the party's war-torn canvassers and a remarkable one psephologically.

Demographically, this constituency was always going to be a tighter fight for the advancing Tories than Hartlepool, the seat the party gained in May. But Galloway's presence led many to write off Labour's chances. He has, after all, a history of attracting support from Britain's Muslim community – a community increasingly important to the politics of Batley and Spen. That Labour retained the seat poses a question: where did its votes come from?

Galloway won 21.9 per cent of the vote while Labour's share fell by 7.5 per cent. This suggests two things. The first is that Galloway's vote was not exclusively composed of former Labour supporters and the second is that Labour gained support from elsewhere, support without which defeat would have been inevitable.

We don't yet know where these new voters are but the party may well have gained among some of the affluent and mobile Tory-leaning voters in the Spenborough valley – a group that has previously flirted with Labour. They may be new voters, or former Conservatives, but shift they did.

Voter identities are in flux, and tribal loyalties are fraying. Labour held Batley and Spen against the odds, seemingly by turning out new converts.

Ben Walker is a data journalist at the New Statesman.

It feels like Cummings is going to say crap for attention and to show off how cool he is. I'm not seeing why there is value in looking at that, particularly when he no longer has any pull.

Sure - there's an element to that and you can ignore that. I think he's more interesting now he doesn't have pull because if he had pull what he'd say would just be determined by the Nr 10 press office. I feel like there's very little worth in listening to a senior adviser to the PM because we know what they'll say, a former senior adviser to the PM is almost always more interesting.

I think Cummings is interesting for three reasons.

One is he's the first who is doing this in a very online way that I kind of recognise. As I say there is no doubt in my mind that he would or has been offered numerous book deals. From everything I've read he's focusing on the paid newsletter, just like he used to blog and is investigating podcasts. It is a bit like Ed Miliband launching a podcast after he lost 2015. There is, I think, a generational shift going on and I think it is interesting because at the minute him and Miliband are just political who have sort of adopted the internet, but I think coming up behind them in the next 10-20 years will be a generation of politicians whose entire life has been online. I think it'll be an interesting shift in all sorts of ways.

Second - he's the most effective political campaigner of his generation. So when he's talking about political or campaign strategy, I think he's worth listening to. Now obviously you take that with the pinch of salt that it requires, but I think it'd be crazy to ignore.

Third - I think his analysis is often pretty good. He likes to portray and see himself as some sort of John the Baptist figure, which he isn't. But the points he makes around state capacity/how the state works and around science and innovation in this country are normally interesting and worth the time. But I think he's good at analysis, not solutions and he has a tendency to see everything as almost existential fights which makes him bad at being in government.

I also find it interesting that everyone hates Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings given that from their time in education they are responsible for the only reforms of the Cameron era that survive and that Labour still isn't committed to overturning. I think it's the single lasting accomplishment of those 6 years in office. Similarly from the reporting at the time and what's come out since it seems like they were the people who were closest to right (and closest to you and Tamas) on covid in Downing Street.

But for whatever reason people properly hate Cummings and Gove. They take the piss out of Hancock, other figures have been more or less rehabilitated by polite society like George Osborne (who was demonstrably wrong about almost everything) or Amber Rudd (who was Home Secretary during the Windrush scandal) or even Theresa May (hostile environment, "Go Home" vans etc). Even when Johnson was appointing a new Health Secretary people were terrified it would be Gove - who has been an effective minister in every department he's been in and on public services is basically centre-right Blairite - and even people on the left were relieved that it was Sajid Javid - who is a huge fan of Ayn Rand and on public services probably the most Thatcherite/economically dry/right wing member of the cabinet.

I don't get it because all of those seem the wrong way round to me.

[Tamas]

I should launch a poll: Will Sheilbh first vote Tory in 2024 or in 2029?

[garbon]

I should launch a poll: Will Sheilbh first vote Tory in 2024 or in 2029?

[Sheilbh]

I should launch a poll: Will Sheilbh first vote Tory in 2024 or in 2029?

Don't be daft I'd never vote Tory - I am absolutely 100% a tribal anti-Tory voter. I live in a Labour safe seat but if I lived in a marginal seat I would vote for any party to beat the Tories - even the Lib Dems (and I actually did vote for them in 2005)

I want them beaten and the earth salted