I wrote this for Politico Europe, but they weren’t interested after much editing about. Apparently there were too many charts. A clear statement about migration, says Theresa May of the vote for Brexit. The last thing you’ll find in the data is clarity. Or migration. There has been a wealth of efforts to understand Brexit…
Read More A clear statement about migrationThere are some books I re-read regularly. Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 is one; I read it every time there’s a presidential election on. In 2008, the first time around, it was a ghastly memento mori for the failure of a great movement campaign, and also a reassuring reminder of…
Read More Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972, in 2016Chuka Umunna is apparently off to Boston, Lincolnshire to understand Brexit. He should save himself the journey. You can understand Boston really well from the simple fact that it has elected a Labour MP – indeed anything other than a Conservative – precisely once in history, immediately after the First World War. It’s really conservative.…
Read More Please stop looking for Labour voters in the Fens. They never existedHere’s a translation of the Israeli Defence Forces’ new strategic concept, from the Belfer Centre at Kennedy School of Government. From the section on “Characteristics of the Operating Environment”: Increased threat of fire on the home front (volume, pace, accuracy, size of the payload, survivability) and an attempt to create a strategic threat against national…
Read More Wild speculation rides again!Picking up on a tip from Jo Mitchell’s excellent post here, I replotted the data in the previous post using the Leave lead in votes, rather than percentage terms. This is, of course, appropriate because referendums aren’t counted in terms of parliamentary constituencies. Also, this means that tiny outlier constituencies – looking at you, South…
Read More A Brexit charts tipEver wondered how austerity affected Brexit? Sure you did, but there’s a reason nobody made a nice chart yet. To answer the question, you’d need a breakdown of consolidated central, regional/national, and local government spending by some geography or other (parliamentary constituency, local authority, super-output area, whatever). That in turn means you’ve just constructed your…
Read More Austerity And BrexitI spent Wobbly Weekend 2: The Wobbling, in part, going through the effects of a deceased relative. I guess it was the right weekend for it; it wasn’t going to depress me any more. Anyway, we found this envelope of briefing documents, dated 1963 at the earliest. A reminder, I think, that things could be…
Read More Something cheerful to take your mind off itWhat worries me about the referendum is the trust. Every poll I can think of shows people on the Leave side claiming they trust no-one. At the same time, Nigel Farage says smoking is just the best for your health and the official Vote Leave campaign issues maps suggesting Iraq and Syria are candidates for…
Read More Leave: the biggest 419 e-mail everOne thing the referendum campaign has cheered me up about, paradoxically, is the social acceptability of outright racism. One thing it’s profoundly depressed me about is the social acceptability of outright bullshit. Consider the Leavers’ arguments about immigration. If you’re not going to make some essentialist argument that foreigners are just bad – i.e. to…
Read More The public rejects racism, but sadly you can’t say the same for bullshitMartin Kettle is all worked up to learn that Michael Gove is either a cynic or an extremist, now his extremism, or cynical pose of same, affects an issue he cares about. Where was Kettle when Gove wrote a whole book about the secret rulers of the world’s scheme to hand Europe over to the…
Read More Yes, Michael Gove is an extremist and has been for years