Against polling

This week: I appreciate the irony, but I’ve decided we’re spending too much time thinking about the polls. Also: yet another set of British counties; and some types of murder.

Please excuse any typos and/or legally actionable comments in what follows. I’ve got that horrible cold that’s going around, and Jasper is on holiday, halfway up a mountain, with no internet connection, perhaps never to return. All of which means that I’m a) coughing, pathetically, b) hoping Jasper doesn’t fall off, which knowing him as I do seems an unnervingly plausible outcome, and most importantly c) publishing a newsletter without a second pair of eyes having seen parts of it. All being well, my trusty amanuensis will be back in a fortnight, and I’ll be up and about long before then.

The last possible date for the next British general election is Wednesday 15th August, 2029. Here are some things that will happen before then.

At least four budgets, plus multiple spending reviews and other fiscal events. Five sets of local elections. The US midterms. The next US presidential, and – unless something unspeakable which it is best not to think about takes place – the final departure of Donald Trump from the White House. Elections in France. Elections in Germany. Elections in Italy, Canada, Japan – yes, that is every other member of the G7 – plus two sets in Australia, because they love an election and thus vote every three years. If I’ve forgotten your favourite democracy, don’t worry, there’s a fairly high chance there’ll be an election there, too, because four and a half years is an unusually long time to go without an election. It will also see the turnover, to be euphemistic about this, of perhaps 1 in 20 of the British electorate, through nothing more than the relentless march of time.

You take my point: the next general election might be fifty four months away. Go back that far, and it takes you all the back to August 2020, an awful time when the golden spring we spent in lockdown had been replaced by a grey, humid summer with the air like soup; when the world was half open yet Rishi Sunak was subsidising middle class people to eat out and to hell with what they’d spread; when Donald Trump was in the White House but thank God we’d soon be rid of him! Even in my 40s, when it feels like I can blink and another 18 months have gone by, all that feels like an age ago.

The next British general election is not for a very, very long time.

So is it helpful, do you think, that a sizable proportion of political commentary at the moment concerns the apparently unending flow of polls, showing that Labour is in trouble?

The polls are not, to be clear, good. Last week’s YouGov tracker showed Nigel Farage’s Reform moving ahead for the first time, albeit by a single point, a result that would be terrible for Labour, for the Tories, for anyone who dislikes Nigel Farage, which is almost everybody, not to mention fans of a functioning state. This is the worst poll. It is not that out of line with the trend.

But – it is just a poll. And again, the election is not for ages, and at this point in the cycle polls have essentially no predictive power. People are bad at predicting their own views and behaviour years hence, and anyway use midterm polls to express dissent and frustration. In May 2019, Nigel Farage’s previous vehicle the Brexit Party topped an actual set of elections, the last European parliamentary cycle in which Britain took part. The ruling Conservative party came fifth. That did not stop the latter from winning an 80 seat majority in the election held just half a year later.

Even close to the wire, sometimes polling is just wrong, because it is extremely hard to do. Because you get the “likely voter” screen wrong. Because people who don’t respond to polls sometimes still show up to vote. Or, most unnervingly of all, because the polling itself has an impact on the result, by making particular groups of voters more or less likely to turn out. (My theory about the British electorate, at least, is that those who broadly want to keep the Tories out of office are more likely to think “meh, Labour don’t need me” than those on the other side. A good poll for Labour is thus self-correcting, in a way a good poll for the Tories is not.)

Perhaps this latest data does herald the oncoming death of the Conservative party, and the rise of Reform: stranger things have happened. More likely, though, events will intervene. Perhaps the Tories, sick of waiting for Kemi Badenoh to become a different politician entirely, will sack her and try again. Perhaps the prospect of Farage in Downing Street will cause voters on the broadly liberal left side to hold their noses and back Labour. Perhaps our entire party system will implode, or by 2029 we’ll be at war with [insert terrifying country of choice here]. Who the hell knows? The polls, right now, are meaningless.

None of which is to suggest that I think that Labour are governing especially well. I’m not going to list the things they’ve done that annoy me of late, because I did that last week and if I start following that thread again now there’s a danger I won’t find my way back. But the one example I am minded to cite – this, from barrister Colin Yeo, about how the government seems to be banning refugees from acquiring British citizenship if they come to the country illegally; a moral abomination of the sort that makes me wonder why the hell the people responsible ever joined an ostensibly centre-left party in the first place – makes an important point. To whit:

Focusing on the polls this far out from an election is not merely a distraction, which results in short-termism and constant triangulation. It is actively pushing the government towards stances that might actually make the polls worse. Labour can’t hope to out-flank Reform in appealing to people who want the government to be shitty to immigrants. But attempting to do so quite possibly will cause a bunch of voters on the more liberal wing of the party’s coalition to think “sod this”, and refuse to turn out for you when you actually need them.

The right is not the only flank from which Labour can bleed votes.

Pollsters conduct regular polls because they serve as advertising. The media loves them because they’re easy clicks. And we are all, after years of rolling chaos and a government that felt like it could collapse any day, used to thinking that they matter. I, through my obsession with polling all through the first half of last year, am as guilty of that as anyone, if not more guilty.

But the next election is four and a half years away. The only way Labour will win is if life in Britain – the economy, the NHS, the public realm – is better in 2029 than it was in 2024. It will not achieve that through obsessive triangulation, or performative cruelty.

Forget the polls. There is a time to worry about them, but that time is a long way off and they won’t get better if you don’t also govern. Right now, they simply don’t matter.¹

Publication day approaches…

…for A Brief History of the End of the F*cking World, , my sometime co-author Tom Phillips’ new book about three thousand years of waiting for the apocalypse. Here’s the blurb:

“If there’s one thing that people throughout history have agreed on, it’s that history wasn’t going to be around for much longer. This is a book about the apocalypse, and how humans have spent several thousand years believing it to be very f*cking nigh.”

“Oh also I made one of those lil ‘links to buy it’ websites if you ever need to point people to where to buy it,” writes Tom. Rude not to, really.

It is a good book, and it is out on Thursday 27th. Buy it. You will enjoy it.

Map of the week: another set of British bloody counties

One of the problems with a historic tendency to divide these islands into counties – there are, I believe, others – is that counties can and do change their boundaries. If you’re the Association of British Counties, resolute believers in the divine right of Middlesex, this is merely annoying. If you’re a naturalist, interested in the life and works of our non-human neighbours, it’s something that could mess up your data entirely.

So in 1852, the botanist – and, rather more unnervingly, phrenologist – Hewett Cottrell Watson came up with a plan. He divided the entirety of Great Britain into 112 units, each roughly half the size of a medium sized traditional English county. This removed all the oddities like enclaves – separated parts of counties – that bothered the map at the time, thus pre-empting the reorganisation of 188. It also established a set of territorial units that would persist, regardless of what politicians did with the local government units they were based on.

Watsonian vice counties – the name reflects their size – are still in use today. Here’s the southern half of the map: