The way things stand as of July 7th/8th polling

A bit of amateur psephology here, looking at how the parties are doing, region by region, according to a YouGov poll published today. While of course there are myriad variables in politics, there seems to be a gradual trend against the government; clearly, it will be key whether David Cameron is mired in the sewer by his News International associations, as Peter Oborne so astutely pointed out here. It will interested to observe whether the trend continues and Labour gain a regular 10-15% lead; if the economy falters, then I would expect leads of 15-20% Anyway, here we go... The figures in brackets are the change in voting intention from the General Election result last year.

LONDON

CON 41% (+6.5)
LAB 41% (+4)
LD 9% (-13)
GP 1% (-1)
UKIP 4% (+2)
BNP 1% (-0.5)
OTH 3% (+1)

COALITION 50% LABOUR/GREEN 42% THE RIGHT 5%
Government Approval 33% Disapproval 50% (-17)
Cameron Approval 45% Disapproval 47% (-2)

An area where the Tories have been polling perhaps surprisingly well since the GE. Clearly as much of the LD vote of 2010 is as willing to consider the Tories as Labour, in contrast to much of the rest of the country. Not that I would expect many Tory gains, mind. A near three-way tie like Hampstead and Kilburn will be an interesting one to watch next time, though I wouldn't be anticipating a Tory gain. Sad that institutions like the Richard Steele has been given a corporate makeover, and the excellent Tricycle Theatre is under threat due to Arts Council cuts.

The UKIP are doing surprisingly well in an area that I would not count as natural territory, and fairly lacklustre for the Greens, clearly.

Approval for the government is low at 33% and yet the Tories seem to be doing so well as people are just about giving them the benefit of the doubt and Cameron remains relatively popular (though down from +1 in February).

Admittedly, another recent poll put Labour 6 points ahead in London, but then ones in May showed the Tories 6 ahead. As ever, London is the key... in 1992 it stuck with the Tories; in 2010 Labour did crucially well enough here - gaining an unexpected 2% lead over Cameron's Tories - to avoid an outright defeat.

REST OF THE SOUTH

Con 44% (-3)
Lab 33% (+16)
LD 11% (-17)
GP 3% (+2)
UKIP 7% (+3)
BNP 1% (-)
OTH 1% (-)

COALITION 55% LABOUR/GREEN 36% THE RIGHT 8%
Government Approval 33% Disapproval 51% (-18)
Cameron Approval 46% Disapproval 47% (-1)

Almost straight transfer from the LDs to Labour and the Greens. Not necessarily bad news for the Tories, who can probably go on to pick up some LD seats on the strength of the calamitous LD decline. A 9.5% swing from Con to Lab, however, would surely put Essex and Kent seats into play, and Labour will be able to gain a clean sweep in more urban places like Bristol, Luton and Slough. The key battles will be the aforementioned seats East of London and places like Exeter, Norwich, Plymouth and Swindon. Cambridge, as ever, will be fascinating and not necessarily typical...

UKIP do very well across the South, but a 3% transfer from Tory to UKIP is hardly going to move seats to the Farage column. It may just hamper the Tories in their battles against Labour and the LDs, however... There is increasing evidence of right-wing anger against the perceived 'leftism' of this government; whilst this is a grotesque misunderstanding, it clearly means that Cameron and others will struggle to keep all of the 10.7 million voters of 2010.

A recent poll of just the South West showed: CON 42%(-1), LAB 28% (+13), LDEM 16% (-19), GRN 5% (+4). A strong performance for the Greens, who are likely to do well in Stroud, Bath and other such places. Disastrous for the hapless LDs, as this is one of the heartland areas; these results are back to 1950s/60s levels, where Labour was the clear second party - and indeed could be a strong player on the sort of Devon council featured in the Norman Wisdom film, Press for Time (1966). While the Tories would be likely to gain from the LDs, it is crucial just how big a swing Labour achieve in Tory-held marginals.

THE MIDLANDS & WALES

CON 32% (-5)
LAB 50% (+18)
LD 8% (-12.5)
GP 1% (+0.5)
UKIP 5% (+2)
BNP 1% (-2)
PC 1% (-2)
OTH 2% (-)

COALITION 40% LABOUR/GREEN 51% THE RIGHT 6% NATIONALISTS 1%
Government Approval 25% Disapproval 60% (-35)
Cameron Approval 37% Disapproval 57% (-20)

For me, the crucial region alongside London. At least on this poll, Labour look let to win big. They currently hold 65 seats to the Tories' 72; many of those 72 would look very vulnerable to an 11.5% swing. This polling suggests a Midlands & Wales result similar to 1997/2001. A poll before the News of the World scandal broke showed the Tories on 39% and Labour on 44% suggesting a mere 5% swing. Even this would take things back to 2005, where Labour did just well enough in these regions to win. The reality is probably somewhere inbetween - a probable 7-9% swing. Midlands and Wales voters' approval figures for the government and Cameron must be deeply worrying to Downing Street: down by 12% and 6% respectively since February.

As always, the Midlands is a crucial battleground, and it is going to take a significant political turnaround for the Tories to do better than they did in 2010, or even get back to par here. Having said all that, the Midlands should never be taken for granted; its voting behaviour in 1970 and 1974 was crucial in both the defeat of Wilson, and then Heath, and it then swung very heavily to Thatcher and Blair... The recent news about job losses in Derby will hardly help the government, and, of course, future economic developments will be important. The region to watch...

THE NORTH

CON 32% (+1)
LAB 52% (+13.5)
LD 6% (-16)
GP 3% (+2)
UKIP 5% (+2)
BNP 2% (-1)
OTH 0% (-1)

COALITION 38% LABOUR/GREEN 55% THE RIGHT 7%
Government Approval 24% Disapproval 63% (-39)
Cameron Approval 36% Disapproval 58% (-22)

I am willing to predict we will see a minimum of a 15% Labour lead in the North, come the next election, representing at least a 3.5% swing. Polls in late May/early June showed swings of 6-11.5% Labour is clearly performing well, winning most of the collapsing LD vote, along with a strong Green showing. In Sunderland, the Greens outpolled the Liberal Democrats in all bar one of the council wards in which both parties were standing.

There were several seats only just gained by the Tories, such as Stockton South and Carlisle, which will almost definitely revert to Labour. Just as the South is a Tory stronghold that will always return a solid phalanx of blue-rosetted automatons, so will the North return Labour MPs - and I would estimate Labour should make a minimum of 15-20 gains across the North.

The LDs hold 11 seats in the North; Clegg's will be a fascinating, possible 3-way battle, if indeed he stays to fight it in 2015. Without Alan Beith, it is entirely possible the LDs could lose Berwick Upon Tweed to the Tories, or even Labour in what could be a close three-way battle. The Tories will clearly hold Hexham and Penrith and the Border, but many other of their 42 seats could be vulnerable. Westmorland and Lonsdale should be a LD hold, given the popularity of independent-minded Tim Farron.

SCOTLAND

CON 13% (-4)
LAB 48% (+6)
LD 5% (-14)
GP 2% (+1)
UKIP 1% (-)
BNP 0% (-)
SNP 29% (+9)
OTH 2% (+1)

COALITION 18% LAB/GREEN 50% THE RIGHT 1% NATIONALISTS 29%
Government Approval 18% Disapproval 69% (-51)
Cameron Approval 29% Disapproval 64% (-35)

Some polls this year have shown the Tories as high as 23% - which must be rogues, more clearly so than their surprisingly strong numbers in London. Absolutely terrible for the LDs - who could stand to lose most if not all seats barring their Highland fringe. Clegg's leadership has undone all of the good work Kennedy achieved for the Party in Scotland, and could take them back to the days when Jo Grimond was one of a handful of LD MPs. This poll is terrible for the Tories and the LibDems, showing the LibDem voting halving from 11% compared with February, and government and Cameron approval around 10 points more into the negative.

Scotland, like London, saw an unexpectedly strong Labour performance, and other 2011 polls have shown Labour even as low as 35% north of the border; come a General Election, however, I would not expect them to go below 40%

The SNP are the prime gainers from the Lib Dem fall, though I wouldn't expect them to challenge Labour much in a Westminster election; only a 1.5% swing is indicated here, and the recent By-Election confirmed this. I do think they could gain one or two seats where they are close behind Labour, but this would depend on the SNP administration in Edinburgh still being as popular. Salmond is clearly playing a canny social-democratic game - gaining many previous left-of-centre Kennedy voters - but then hatred of the Tories might limit the gains his party can make at Westminster.

GB

CON 35% (-1)
LAB 44% (+15)
LD 8% (-15)
GP 2% (+1)
UKIP 5% (+2)
BNP 1% (-1)
NAT 3% (+1)

COALITION 43% LAB/GREEN 46% THE RIGHT 6% NATIONALISTS 3%
Government approval 28% Disapproval 57% (-29)
Cameron approval 42% Disapproval 52% (-10)

Labour were only 49 or so seats behind the Tories at the last GE. Even given boundary changes slightly favourable to the Tories, an 8% swing to Labour would clearly lead to a majority Labour win and the end of David Cameron's political career, without him ever having won an election. The key is clearly for Labour to appeal to non-ideological voters nevertheless interested in fairness, who may easily be convinced that David Cameron, tainted by association with the most depraved elements in our media, is 'not one of us'. Of course, Gideon Osborne's great economic gamble will be crucial too; at the moment, it seems the deficit is likely to increase with sluggish if any growth and rising unemployment - and under-employment, with many having to work part-time against their will.

Social and Liberal Democracy and other enigmas

This first PPB is well constructed and argued, with Cleese acting as a liberal pedagogue. He personally represents the sort of well-schooled and open-minded professional middle-class person of his generation who was disquieted by Thatcherism's effects on society overall but personally did well out of it. The kind of social-liberal who could never vote Tory, particularly Thatcher-era, but did not rely upon the public services himself.

It could of course be sharper in identifying how Thatcherism was destroying the sort of 'decency' and 'moderation' presumably cherished by liberals, certainly of the David Steel and Jo Grimond ilk.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTLR8R9JXz4

This second PPB of course carries a rather grotesque irony in that the Con/LD coalition is now about to carry out more extensive public-services cuts than were ever carried out by Thatcher - one has to recall that Thatcher decimated heavy industry and presided over manufacturing decline but not especially significant cuts to education funding per se.

One wonders whether Brian Eno is as staunch an advocate of the party now as he was during the election campaign - wherein he sanctioned the use of his gloriously evocative Apollo theme in the above broadcast. Eno is perhaps one of the few figures to aesthetically provide a bridge between Europe and America, where Blair so epically failed on a political level. The Apollo album is a merging of European minimalism - think Gavin Bryars and Ligeti - with the wide open spaces of the US: 'Deep Blue Day' and its cavernous, submerged country twang:



It evokes the awe so many young people felt in the Space Age, but also an academic distance and intellectual thoughtfulness that is particularly European. Of course, he had previously evoked an Englishness redolent of Britten, Ballard, MR James and Paul Nash, amongst many others. A Britain that is not Tory or Labour, that we might associate with the venerably irreverant Jonathan Meades or the liberal paternalism of Sir Hugh Greene. A cultural lineage that greens and socialists should be seeking to claim now that it has been abandoned by Clegg, with his attachment to the Carlton Man/Murdoch racket.

The Owen and Steel-led Alliance in 1987 received a marginally smaller percentage of the vote than Clegg's Liberal Democrats in 2010. One doesn't suspect that Shirley Williams, Roy Jenkins or David Steel would have countenanced serving alongside Thatcher in the event of a hung parliament; David Owen might have, as he was the proto-Blair/Clegg, with a modicum more social democracy about him but with careerism put before principle. There may have been an arrangement of case-by-case, policy-by-policy support 'in the national interest', but no Coalition. Orange Book free-market ideology has clearly overwhelmed Social Democracy or Beveridge Liberalism within the Liberal Democrat party. Clegg is the willing advocate of a rightwards-shift in political and economic policy.

48. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch - 'The Mont-Bazillac' (1913)

'Here was another thing - I'd never been drunk before, and I haven't been drunk since: but all the same I knew that this wasn't the least like ordinary drunkenness: it was too - what shall I say? - too brilliant. The whole town of Bergerac belonged to me: and, what was better, it was lit so that I could steer my way perfectly, although the street seemed to be quite amazingly full of people, jostling and chattering. I turned to call Jinks's attention to this, and was saying something about a French crowd - how much cheerfuller it was than your average English one - when all of a sudden Jinks wasn't there! No, nor the crowd! I was alone on Bergerac bridge, and I leaned with both elbows on the parapet and gazed at the Dordogne flowing beneath the moon.'
(Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, Selected Short Stories, Penguin Books, 1957, pp.112-3)

'Besides, the Conservative blogger Iain Dale has examined the TV schedules during this year's Lib Dem spring conference, when this incident is supposed to have taken place, and found that Strictly Come Dancing was not being shown - and nor was Strictly Dance Fever or any other such programme.

If this fable is typical of the communication agency's strategic advice then Campbell would do well to think twice before accepting it.

It is hard to imagine him prospering with an approach that treats any sign of education or enthusiasm for the finer things in life as a guilty secret to be hidden from the electorate.'
(Jonathan Calder, 'Let Ming be Ming', The Guardian, 31 July 2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2006/jul/31/liberaldemocrats.comment)

A palpably bourgeois excursion and a good deal more worldly than the M.R. James, with his protagonist's ascetic 'Evening Drink of small Ale in a silver vessel of about a pint measure.' I came upon this book at a Tynemouth book fair last year and, recalling the author's name and - it must be said - fetishizing the belisha orange Penguin design, I bought the musty smelling 52-year-old book (its inner cover inscribed 'R.H.H. Jones, MARCH 1965' in starchy red ink).

One could make obvious points regarding this being published with the world on the edge of the precipice.

I prefer to highlight Quiller-Couch's role as a pillar of the establishment past: educated, simultaneously liberal and conservative. Not tied to social conservatism; indeed open to the bohemian, but skeptical of 'modenity' in its economic sense. This story reflects Q-C's position as cultured cultural arbiter: telling the story of an Oxford undergraduate's rites of passage in the Loire Valley, south France. The story centres on Bergerac, a market town 'on the edge of claret country' and particularly on the unique drunken experience produced by a near-mythical, 'extinct' local white wine named Mont-Bazillac (one which produced no hangover). It is a delicately sweet wine, with almost a trace of the madeira about it - one of my favourite drinks, immortalised in English song by Flanders and Swann.

Ungodly Church of England vicars, gentle mockery of the 'teetotal craze', 'old boys with grizzled moustaches' and 'prize Baden-Powell scouts', ease among classicist porticos; these symbolise the culture inherited by the likes of the late Sirs Hugh Carleton Greene and John Mortimer, both critical figures in the liberalisation of Britain in the 1960s. One can easily trace the lineage through to the jocular Horace Rumpole, with his love of liberty and fine clarets. There is an instinctive, well-heeled Europeanism at play, not especially political but cultural.

Having recently finished Martin J. Wiener's English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit: 1850-1980 (Cambridge University Press, 1981), one can identify AQC as in the lineage of prominent figures who shaped our culture in that period through suspicion of industrialisation and materialism: John Ruskin, Charles Dickens, William Morris, G.K. Chesterton, Herbert Asquith, Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and Aneurin Bevan, to name but eight. He is a not a Liberal in the free-market libertarian sense as Nick Clegg, but a Keynesian Liberal. Liberals tend to accept the prevailing consensus of their day, but their value is in achieving significant reforms - the like of which Roy Jenkins and David Steel achieved, but which it seems doubtful that Clegg will, hitched to a discredited economic programme.

'Q', as he was known, wrote novels and verse, as well as teaching and becoming a key player in English literary criticism pre-F.R. Leavis. He edited the vastly popular Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250-1900 (later extended to 1918), constantly referenced in Mortimer's Rumpole of the Bailey. His daughter was the inspiration for Kenneth Grahame's Ratty in The Wind in the Willows, he completed unfinished works by Robert Louis Stevenson and a certain Alastair Cooke was a notable student of his. In addition, this native of Cornwall was active in local Liberal Party politics.

An interesting footnote to this tale is that  the village of Monbazillac - near Bergerac - was designated in 1936 as an AOC (Appellation d’origine contrôlée), a specific regional wine classified by central government as adhering to traditional standards of wine production. The sort of preservationist ideal inherent in the controversial EU legislation, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and the popular Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) over here in the UK.

Ultimately, this is a light, jocund story; how much you enjoy it will largely depend on how partial you are to old-school liberal values, or indeed to sweet white wines from the Loire Valley.

6/10

No you can't go back

PJ Harvey on the Andrew Marr show last Sunday - 'Let England Shake'. It felt as if a new country was willing itself into being. With the curious shots of Marr and Brown watching the performance intercut with the performance itself: eerie forties American sample - 'take me back to Constantinople / no, you can't go back to Constantinople' (covered by the Residents) - and PJH, raven-like, with a ghostly autoharp refrain:


However many caveats I might attach to a vote for the Liberal Democrats, I am much closer to that position now in my seat - with a choice of Labour, LD, Con, BNP, UKIP in Sunderland Central.

If Clegg can make the case for Europe tonight, we could be in a different area altogether... Brown is likely to weigh in alongside Clegg regarding Cameron's shameful alliance in the European Parliament, associating with homophobes and racists. Maybe the Clunking Fist might be able to do some good at last.

Any reservations I most certainly still have about the LDs are submerged whilst they are the appointed enemies of the Mail and Murdoch. All the more reason to get behind them, to try and gain greater democracy in Britain; with potential of future social-democratic consensus.

Brown might come to be seen as enabling some positive change... Most especially if we get a result close to my prediction a few weeks back (with surely a greater number of LDs than I anticipated). A referendum offering STV, AV and PR would surely be a must if the LDs gain to the extent that is possible.