Thursday, September 8, 2022

What lies ahead in this post-Elizabethan era?

I was planning to blog today about Liz Truss' surprisingly assured performance at her first PMQs, and how in a perverse way it gave me heart for the cause of independence.  But I suspect it will now be practically illegal to talk about anything that doesn't involve the Royal Family for at least the next six months.  That being the case, let's briefly consider what the political implications of today's events could be.  (And if you think it's too soon for that, remember we live in a choice-rich multi-media environment and the BBC is there for those who prefer 12,748 uninterrupted hours of state-directed mass grief.)

The future of the monarchy: It's long been speculated that the accession to the throne of King Charles could be the natural moment for some of the remaining Commonwealth Realms to replace the monarchy with a homegrown Head of State, as Barbados did very recently.  The monarchy is much more firmly entrenched in the UK itself, although it's conceivable that a less popular Head of State and a relatively unpopular Queen Consort could increase the size of the minority who favour a republic, and that could prove to be of some significance in the very long term.  But on the other hand, Charles as King brings the undoubted glamour of William and Kate one step closer to the throne.

Liz Truss: If the new Prime Minister has some hardbitten and cynical advisers (as all Prime Ministers seem to), they're bound to be telling themselves that this is the most extraordinary, unique opportunity for Truss to connect immediately with the British public and to establish herself on the world stage, if she can just find the right words.  The obvious comparison is with Tony Blair, who eulogised Princess Diana as "the People's Princess" just a few months after taking office.  (The Quintessential Queen?  The Most Matriarchal of Monarchs?  Legendary Lillibet?)

Independence for Scotland: We always knew this moment would arrive, and we always knew it would be challenging for the independence movement, because events like this push Britishness to the fore.  However, the death of Princess Diana in 1997 was an event of almost the same magnitude as far as the public were concerned, and it didn't stop Scotland voting overwhelmingly in favour of having its own parliament in a referendum held just ten days later.  The difference here may be that there isn't going to be any natural closure after the funeral is over - there'll still be a sense of transition until the Coronation, which I presume could be a whole year away and will be the focal point for unprecedented media hysteria that will surpass any Royal Wedding.  (And will there also be an investiture ceremony for William as Prince of Wales at Caernarfon Castle?)  In the long run, though, an unappealing King Charles and Queen Camilla could diminish the value of the UK 'brand' and make independence seem less unthinkable for some.

The BBC: I just have this very slight feeling the BBC may over-reach themselves over the coming weeks, because their protocols for royal deaths seem to be permanently stuck in the 1950s.  I believe comedy and light entertainment programmes will be completely dropped for a prolonged period.  The BBC may be capturing the mood of Britain tonight, but after a few weeks of this will people start saying "yeah, Nick Witchell is great, but could we watch Mock the Week now?"

Posted by James Kelly at 9:02 PM 14 comments

Tuesday, September 6, 2022

Martin Kettle is wrong to suggest the manner in which Truss has come to power makes an early election inevitable

Conservative leadership election, result of final round:

Liz Truss: 81,326 votes (57.4%)
Rishi Sunak: 60,399 votes (42.6%)

I was asked a couple of weeks ago to give a view on Martin Kettle's article claiming that Liz Truss would have to call a snap election because of the allegedly unusual way that she was coming to power.  Now that she's actually in office as Tory leader (although as I write this she's still an hour or two away from becoming Prime Minister), it might be a good time to do that.  I have to say I think Kettle's logic is atrocious.  Basically he's arguing that something truly out of the ordinary is happening because, in the past, any mid-term change of Prime Minister has been decided by the governing party's MPs, or where it's been decided by party members, their choice has happened to coincide with the MPs' wishes.  He thinks that's as it should be in a parliamentary democracy.  But this time, the elected MPs appeared to want Rishi Sunak and the members have chosen Liz Truss - so, supposedly, to have any legitimacy, she'll have to get a mandate from the country at large.

There are a number of problems with this theory:

* There's no clear evidence that Sunak is the choice of Tory MPs.  He won a plurality on every round of MPs' ballots but was always well short of an absolute majority.  Under the old rules where MPs had the only say, the ballots would have continued until one candidate had 50% + 1.  That candidate might have been Sunak or it might not have been.  (James Callaghan, for example, trailed Michael Foot in the first ballot in 1976 but eventually won a majority.)  So nothing has been "overturned" by Tory members because there was no clear decision to overturn.

* A majority of the governing party's MPs categorically does not constitute the will of parliament in a parliamentary democracy.  For example, John Major was elected in 1990 with the votes of 185 Tory MPs - which constituted just 28.5% of the overall House of Commons.  The reason Major could be said to "command the confidence of the House" (a prerequisite for being appointed PM) was not that he finished in first place in an internal Tory ballot, but instead that he had 'losers' consent' from the Tory MPs who didn't vote for him and therefore was able to command an overall Commons majority.  Losers' consent is just as possible in a system which gives party members the final choice - it really just boils down to whether MPs accept the rules and constitution of their own party.

* And, actually, the Tory party has a system which allows MPs to effectively withhold losers' consent even without breaking the rules.  They can submit letters of no confidence in their leader to the chairman of the 1922 Committee at any time.  Presumably, that hasn't happened so far, or the threshold for a no confidence vote hasn't been reached.

* Last but not least, parliament can at any time bring down a sitting PM by a vote of no confidence in the government.  Any failure to do that is the true mechanism by which a Prime Minister secures legitimacy in a parliamentary democracy.  For that reason, Truss will have exactly the same constitutional legitimacy as any of her predecessors.

I think a much better argument for why Truss should be honour-bound to call an early election is the extent to which her plans diverge from the manifesto that the Conservative government was elected on in December 2019.  That's what perhaps does set her out from previous Prime Ministers who have taken office midway through a parliament.
*  *  *

We've already seen since Nicola Sturgeon's announcement that the overwhelmingly unionist mainstream media are attempting a 'shock and awe' campaign to try to kill off independence - and the misuse of polling is playing a key part in that.  If you'd like to balance things out with polling commissioned by a pro-independence outlet and which asks the questions we want to see asked, one way of doing that would be to help Scot Goes Pop's fundraising drive - see details below.

Scot Goes Pop General Fundraiser 

Scot Goes Pop Polling Fundraiser 

If you prefer another method, such as Paypal or bank transfer, please message me for details using the contact email address which can be found in the sidebar of the blog (desktop version only), or on my Twitter profile.

Posted by James Kelly at 10:47 AM 0 comments

Sunday, September 4, 2022

The surprise challenge for Truss on day one: delivering the REAL result of the 2016 Brexit referendum and getting Britain back in the EU

Over the last 36 hours, Team Truss have fundamentally changed our understanding of how constitutional referendums work.  Gone is the outdated concept of "the winner is the side which wins the most votes".  It turns out that instead the proponents of the status quo needn't turn out to vote at all, unless they just happen to fancy a stroll.  If you don't vote, you've in fact voted against change.  Might be news to you, but that's what you've done.

So far, most of the commentary on this startling new rule has focused on the potential impact on any Scottish independence referendum next year.  But in reality, a much more immediate concern is the fact that the result of the 2016 EU referendum has just been automatically reversed.  Here is the new result...

Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?  (23rd June 2016)

Remain / Abstain: 62.5%
Leave: 37.5%

So, contrary to our previous erroneous belief, the UK in fact voted by a landslide margin to remain a member of the EU in 2016, and all the tortuous negotiations over withdrawal arrangements since then have just been a very, very silly misunderstanding.  Doh! Doubtless Liz Truss will waste little time in correcting the error and implementing the real result, although it's going to be a bit awkward for her given that a) she'll need Macron's permission to rejoin the EU and she's just insulted him, and b) many of her supporters have been labouring under the misapprehension that her "I accepted the result" comment referred to the previous false assumption that Leave had somehow "won".  But it's just got to be done - people have got to be given what they voted for, even if they didn't actually know they voted, and even if they didn't know how they voted.

*  *  *
Tomorrow afternoon, unless all the polls, bookies and pundits are completely wrong, Liz Truss will be declared the new leader of the Conservative party.  On Tuesday, much to the horror of the absurd Nicholas Witchell, she will have to travel to Scotland - bloody SCOTLAND - to be appointed Prime Minister by the Queen.

This is obviously a completely ludicrous situation.  We're talking about an individual who is hopelessly unsuited to high office, let alone the highest office in the land.  But if we can bring ourselves to temporarily take this development seriously, there are two interesting implications.  There's been very minimal mention of the fact that Truss will be Britain's third female Prime Minister, which in itself is a psychological breakthrough, because it means that having a woman in the role has been comprehensively normalised and is now deemed barely worthy of comment.  I'm just about old enough to remember Mrs Thatcher bequeathing an all-male Cabinet to John Major, which made the first female PM look like a freakish historical aberration that was very unlikely to be repeated in our lifetimes.  For many years afterwards, when discussion turned to who might be the next leader of the two largest parties, women barely featured as possibilities, or if they did feature it always seemed like a bit of a long shot.  So we've come a long way in a very short space of time.  It must be hoped that from now on parties will always just choose the best leader available, rather than worrying about whether it "should be a woman this time" - although in Labour's case that's extremely unlikely.  They're going to be incredibly embarrassed about the Tories producing three female PMs before Labour have even managed to produce one.

Secondly, it does appear very likely that Truss will be an extremely unpopular leader, both in Scotland and south of the border.  That's obviously good for keeping support for independence high, but it could also lead to complications if the SNP end up using the next Westminster election as a de facto plebiscite.  If Labour appear on the brink of deposing Truss, could some independence supporters have their heads turned by Starmer?

*  *  *

We've already seen since Nicola Sturgeon's announcement that the overwhelmingly unionist mainstream media are attempting a 'shock and awe' campaign to try to kill off independence - and the misuse of polling is playing a key part in that.  If you'd like to balance things out with polling commissioned by a pro-independence outlet and which asks the questions we want to see asked, one way of doing that would be to help Scot Goes Pop's fundraising drive - see details below.

Scot Goes Pop General Fundraiser 

Scot Goes Pop Polling Fundraiser 

If you prefer another method, such as Paypal or bank transfer, please message me for details using the contact email address which can be found in the sidebar of the blog (desktop version only), or on my Twitter profile.

Posted by James Kelly at 9:51 PM 9 comments

Who has the most vital role in the British constitution - the Queen, or YouGov?

I don't pay the Murdoch Levy, so when I wrote my blogpost last night I didn't realise that the Truss cunning plan for making Scottish self-determination illegal comes in two parts.  Not only is there a near-impossible 50% rule for any referendum that is actually held, there's also a 60% rule to prevent a referendum happening in the first place.  There would have to be "evidence" over a long period that 60% of the Scottish public want a referendum before London would "allow" it.

I must say it's a novel principle in an alleged democracy that before the majority of voters get their way, they require an additional 10% just to be allowed to vote in the first place.  But more to the point, how is this "evidence" of 60% support going to be defined in law?  You can't really have a referendum to decide whether or not there should be a referendum, so I can only assume the new legislation will have to make some kind of reference, whether direct or indirect, to polling "evidence" - in other words to numbers produced by private firms such as YouGov and Survation.

I've written before about how polling companies seem to be assuming a de facto constitutional role, but this would take it to a whole new level.  If YouGov are to be given the power to literally determine the destiny of Scotland, how are they to be regulated?  Sleights of hand like the notorious "Kellner Correction", an artificial mechanism by which YouGov lowered the reported Yes vote in their indyref polls due to nothing more than a hunch by the anti-independence Peter Kellner, could no longer be pretended to be simply a private matter for a private firm.  It would affect the lives of us all.  So would there be a state regulator to keep the pollsters in check?  Would the British Polling Council be nationalised and become Ofpoll?

Incidentally, the extreme nature of the Truss plan demonstrates once again that people are missing the point when they complain that the SNP are closing off too many options too quickly as they rush towards a plebiscite election.  The world has moved on since 2012, and not even the most ingenious strategy has any serious prospect of bringing about an agreed referendum.  When you have a government in London that will go to the extreme of retrospectively outlawing any move towards an independence vote that the Scottish Government make, it's reasonable to conclude that the idea that a bit of extra pressure on the Tories would yield a Section 30 order is for the birds.  The reason why a plebiscite election is realistically the only game in town is that it's the one thing that can't be made illegal.

*  *  *

We've already seen since Nicola Sturgeon's announcement that the overwhelmingly unionist mainstream media are attempting a 'shock and awe' campaign to try to kill off independence - and the misuse of polling is playing a key part in that.  If you'd like to balance things out with polling commissioned by a pro-independence outlet and which asks the questions we want to see asked, one way of doing that would be to help Scot Goes Pop's fundraising drive - see details below.

Scot Goes Pop General Fundraiser 

Scot Goes Pop Polling Fundraiser 

If you prefer another method, such as Paypal or bank transfer, please message me for details using the contact email address which can be found in the sidebar of the blog (desktop version only), or on my Twitter profile.

Posted by James Kelly at 8:53 AM 2 comments
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