Sixteen points high and falling

What’s happening with the polls?

I’m glad you asked. This. This is happening with the polls:

That’s a bit of a ski-slope on the right, wouldn’t you say? Mind you, it started high. Only a couple of months ago it was up in the… low 20s? Can that be right?

OK, back up a bit. This chart covers the period from the beginning of December 2021 to the 20th of April 2023. The red line, plotted against the left-hand axis, represents the Labour Party’s polling average, with each point calculated up to and including a poll taken on the date on the X axis (or in a period ending on that date). The red mountain, plotted against the right-hand axis, represents Labour’s lead over the Tories in each of those polls; if you squint you can see a submerged blue ice floe at the very start of the chart, representing a brief period when Labour’s average poll lead was negative (i.e. the Tories were ahead). Both of these series are averaged over 14 days – which is to say, the figure against any given date is the average of any and all polls taken on (or ending on) that day and the 13 previous days: the figures for the 17th of April, for example, are averages of all polls from the 4th to 17th. The left and right axes are scaled 1:1; 0% on the right axis is matched with 40% on the left axis, for no reason other than convenience.

So, what are we looking at? First of all, yes, that is a bit of a ski-slope on the right. But let’s do it in order. The first thing you see here, in the leftmost ‘peak’ (circa the end of January 2022), is the discrediting of Boris Johnson. As the ‘Partygate’ scandal unfolded, Labour’s support rose from the high 30%s to the very high 30%s or even 40% – an undramatic improvement which nevertheless resulted in 5-6% leads over the Tories. This is worth pausing over, as it’s the result of the current leadership’s determination to take votes directly from the Tories. In 2017, a campaigning approach focused on mobilising non-voters and hegemonising the centre-left meant that Labour’s share of the (intended) vote could rise from 25% to 40% without the Tory share going below 42%; the current approach doesn’t run that risk. It does, however, run the risk of amplifying the volatility of the system, with every 1% movement towards Labour improving Labour’s lead by 2%. (And poll leads, like share prices, can go down as well as up.)

Anyway, after that first peak things settled down a bit; Labour polled a bit below 40% or a bit above, with round about a 5% lead over the Tories, from February through to July. In July, Boris Johnson resigned, Labour’s polling moved decisively above 40% and the poll lead started hitting 10%. (I don’t know what was behind that dip at the beginning of August.)

Then Liz Truss was elected leader of the Conservative Party, and whoa, Nelly: Labour’s polling climbs to 53% (up 11%) and their lead over the Tories, following the same pattern as before, climbs to 31% (up 21% – which isn’t twice 11, but it’s close). But all good things must come to an end: by November 2022, Rishi Sunak is Prime Minister, and Labour’s polling average has settled back down to 47-8%, with a lead over the Tories of 20-22%.

Yes, we’re in the sunlit uplands of the Twenty Point Lead – and there we stay, give or take a point or two, from mid-November 2022 through to the end of February ’23. After that, though, comes another phase, and that phase we are still very much in: not to put too fine a point on it, it’s the ski-slope phase. In the month and a half since the end of February, Labour’s average support has fallen by 3% (from 48% to 45%), and their average poll lead has (predictably) fallen by 6%, from 22% to 16%. Update: on 20th April those two averages dipped below 45% and below 16% respectively, for the first time since Liz Truss was PM.

Like all the other movements on this chart, this drift back to the Tories can be explained fairly exhaustively by two factors. One is the public perception of the Prime Minister, which in Sunak’s case was initially fairly unfavourable – after the debacle of the Truss premiership and Sunak’s anointment by default – but has improved over time, and (at least for now) is continuing to improve. The other is electoral gravity, a.k.a. reversion to the mean: it’s not a frequent occurrence for Labour to be polling above 45% or the Tories below 30%, and when something like that does happen the smart money is on it not happening for much longer.

What the factors driving Labour’s polling don’t seem to include is anything contributed by Labour. The Labour leadership isn’t making the weather when it comes to the party’s popularity; moreover, they haven’t done so for some time. Quite some time…

[wobbly dissolve effect]

What’s this? It’s the same kind of chart, with the same kind of scale (1:1 between polling average and average lead, zero matched to 40%), for the period September 2015 to March 2018.

There are three main periods. In the first, Labour’s polling under new leader Jeremy Corbyn starts low, then gets lower – 32% in September 2015, touching 25% in April 2017. The Tories’ lead over Labour starts at 8% and grows at a bit less than the 2x rate we’d expect, peaking at 20%. (The area with the bite taken out of it represents the period of the Brexit referendum, when some Tory support went to UKIP, and the Tory lead over Labour fell without Labour doing any better.) In April 2017 Theresa May called an election; between then and the election itself, in an extraordinary and memorable short campaign, Labour’s support (as registered in opinion polls) grew from 25% to 36% – a remarkable gain in support, which actually understated Labour’s support in the ballot box. (While Labour’s polling rose by 11%, incidentally, the Tories’ lead over Labour shrank by… 12%: almost none of that gain in support corresponded directly to a loss of support by the Tories.)

After the election, of course, the polls turned round for Labour, although in retrospect low 40%s and a 5% lead don’t look like that much of a honeymoon. It also wasn’t that long a honeymoon. The attacks on the leadership from inside the party may have quietened down for a while after the 2017 election, but the people attacking from outside never stopped – and in the Skripal poisoning they finally found a way of making Corbyn look ridiculous (or dangerous) that actually stuck.

This chart takes us through to December 2019. Between March 2018 and March 2019, Labour’s polling slides from around 40% to 33%, and the Tory lead over Labour grows from 3% to 7%; so far from gaining 2% poll lead for every 1% of support lost, the Tories aren’t even gaining from Labour’s lost support at a rate of 1 for 1. (The Greens and Lib Dems between them put on about 5% in those twelve months, possibly because the Brexit storm clouds were already gathering.) The European elections of 2019 see polling briefly go completely crazy, with support for both major parties collapsing; the Tories’ support collapses further and faster than Labour’s, leading to the bizarre sight of Labour taking a lead over the Tories while polling in the low 20%s. Labour’s polling settles down around 25% and, following the defenestration of Theresa May in July, the Tories’ recovers, giving them a solid 10% lead. In November an election is called. Labour’s polling recovers during a slightly less extraordinary (and very cold) short campaign, but not by enough: up 8% instead of 11%, and without the eventual understatement of votes cast. Strikingly, even less of the support recovered is pulled back from the Tories than in 2017: Labour begins the campaign polling an average of 25% with a 12% Tory lead, and finishes it polling 33%… with a 10% Tory lead. (The Lib Dems and Greens began the campaign polling around 20% combined, and ended it on 10-15% (14% on the day).)

But what is this? The bad times ended in December 2019, surely? Well, not quite. Trivia question for future politics quizzes: under which Labour leader did the Tories poll a 23-point lead in April 2020? The answer is, of course, Keir Starmer. To be fair, from that moment on Labour’s support rises steadily from 28% to 38% (10%), and the Tories’ lead falls from 23% to 5% (18%, very nearly double). In other words, the very first thing Keir Starmer did as leader was pull back support from the Tories, in the way that Corbyn had never done even when Labour were polling in the 40%s. (Given the lack of any correlation under Corbyn between rises in Labour support and loss of support by the Tories, those 8-10% of voters who came back to Labour for Starmer are a bit of a puzzle. I mean, where had they been hiding? One can’t help wondering how many of them had been supporting the Tories in 2019 and even in 2017 – and how differently those elections might have gone if they’d been won over earlier.) After that, though, the chart shows Labour’s support bimbling around in the mid- to high 30%s with a Tory lead of 5-10%, barring a period of neck-and-neck polling in December 2020 (which you may remember as Disastrous Pandemic Mismanagement Month). The leadership seem unable to land a glove on Johnson’s Tory government – or even present themselves convincingly as a more desirable alternative – until November 2021. At which point Partygate erupts, the British press turn on the government, and shenanigans ensue.

And that’s where we came in.

What these charts tell us is that there have only been three periods in the last five and a half years when there’s been a sustained rise in Labour’s support both in absolute terms and relative to the Tories: the 2017 election, the election of Keir Starmer and the election of Liz Truss. (Borderline cases are the 2019 election (which improved Labour’s polling in absolute terms but not relative to the Tories) and the removal of Boris Johnson (which improved Labour’s polling by 7% and their relative position by 15%, but did so over a period of eight months); including them wouldn’t change the argument, though.) Simply listing these events demonstrates how little – under the current leadership – Labour’s popularity has depended on anything the party’s representatives have done: instead, events in the Tory Party and its associated media seem to exert a tidal pull on levels of support for the Tories, with Labour support following as the default alternative. The election of Keir Starmer as leader might seem like an exception, but it really isn’t: the event that made the difference there wasn’t anything Starmer did or said but how he was received by the political-media establishment, and in particular how he was hailed as a decisive break from Corbyn.

As for where we are now, the most recent of these vote shifts, after an unsustainable peak (and the removal of an unsustainable Liz Truss) took Labour from averaging 42% and a 10-point lead to averaging 47% and a 20-point lead. (47-42=5, 20-10=10 – same ratio as ever.) It’s that lead which is now unwinding, with the current averages standing at or slightly below 45% and 16% respectively.

Will the Labour vote share (and lead) go lower? Almost certainly. Will it go a lot lower? Depends what you mean by ‘a lot’, but I can’t see anything militating against Labour support falling back to somewhere around 40%. Which might be OK on the day of an election, but could be disastrous going into an election – particularly for a party which has limited capacity to build its own support and has pinned its hopes on the Tories self-destructing.

On that topic, here’s one final chart.

Crowded and unreadable, I admit, but it’s not as if you’re interested in individual data points. All you really need to know is that the dotted lines mark election campaigns in the course of which Labour’s polling was pretty much flat (up a bit in 2005, down a bit in 2015); the dashed lines are campaigns during which Labour’s polling either went down a little (3-4% in 2010) or went down a lot (8-10% in both 1997 and 2001); and the solid lines are the ones where I went out canvassing with some friends. (Hey, what can I tell you? We knocked on a lot of doors.) The serious points here are that Labour’s polling went up by 6-8% during the 2019 campaign and 8-10% in 2017; that this was very unusual, and can reasonably be related to other things that were unusual about the party in those campaigns; and that, if we’re not going there again, past form says that we’re very unlikely to put on support during the short campaign, and pretty likely to lose it.

Now, you might say that another unusual factor is that there was plenty of room for improvement in the polls on both those occasions, and that this could also be related to the then leadership; you might also say that, when it comes to winning elections, Labour is better off starting in the mid-50%s and losing 8% than starting below 30% and gaining the same amount. All I’d say to that is that polling in the mid-50%s isn’t to be had for the asking – and we don’t want to go into the next election campaign on 42% (say) and lose 8% out of that.

At the moment, glancing back at that asymmetrical red mountain, I’d say that when the music stops and the ski-slope levels out, Labour are likely to be polling in the 38-42% region, with at best a low-single-figure lead over the Tories. And if that’s how we go into the short campaign (whenever it is), I don’t hold out much hope of a Labour majority.

[Update: after this post was published Labour’s polling average and their average lead continued to fall, hitting a low of 43.5% and 14% respectively around the end of April. They then recovered steadily, and are currently (20th May) standing at 45% and 17%. Maybe 45% – and, say, a 15% lead over the Tories – is the new floor. We shall see.]

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Burying the Red Wall

I stumbled on this Tweet the other day.

Actually filtering that chart into "2017 losses trying to regain" versus "Ye Olde Laboure Heartelandes" would be useful (as would a split of incumbent Labour MPs between "absolute danger expelled from Labour party" and "absolute danger not yet expelled from Labour party")

— Dan Davies (@dsquareddigest) October 8, 2019

The chart referred to is a list of the top 60 Tory targets in the 2019 election, ordered by the size of swing required (which effectively means by the size of the incumbent party’s majority over the Tories, but the figures look smaller). 24 are Labour seats, in England, with majorities of less than 5%; in the event the Tories took 19 of them (step forward Battersea, Bedford, Canterbury, Portsmouth South and Warwick & Leamington – good work, lads).

Here are all the gains the Tories made from Labour in England – well, almost all; the map doesn’t extend far enough south to show Ipswich, Stroud and Kensington, so there are 45 seats here instead of 48.

Following Dan’s suggestion, the colour coding on this map based on how many successive elections each constituency had had as a Labour seat when it was taken by the Tories. Pale blue are 2017 Losses, seats that Labour took in 2017, or in two cases in 2015. (Labour made quite a lot of gains in 2017, didn’t they? Wonder if anyone’s drawn any lessons from that.) The deep blue are Ye Olde Laboure Heartelandes, seats that had been Labour since at least 1983; most of them go back to February 1974 (the first general election under the current franchise). Medium blues are Labour going back to 1997 (or in one case 2001); lastly, greys are seats whose Labour election count stood at zero, as they had gone into the 2019 election with an MP who had already left Labour – and who was, in all these cases, actively campaigning against their old party. (I’m referring to John Woodcock, John Mann, Ian Austin, Ivan Lewis and Angela Smith. Any resemblance between this list and a list of “absolute dangers expelled from the Labour Party” is for the reader.) I don’t usually set much store by the Ned Lagg Effect – people tend to vote for a party, not an individual, as individuals ranging from Jim Sillars to Ivan Lewis have discovered to their cost. But 2019 wasn’t a normal election; in a campaign one of whose dominant messages was Are You Going To Hand Britain Over To Terrorist Communist Traitors?, the discovery that your own (formerly) Labour MP was actually endorsing the whole Communist-terrorist thing must have shifted a few votes in those constituencies.

First impression: there’s a lot of pale blue. There’s also a fair bit of deep blue, but it’s scattered all over the map and consists very largely of spread-out, semi-rural constituencies. But we can do better than that. Here’s a map from the previous Red Wall post – now revised and updated, incidentally, and featuring the definitive description of the Red Wall courtesy of its original inventor (tl; dr interesting, but I’m still not impressed). This map has 51 constituencies on it: the (only) 50 Labour constituencies where the Labour vote share went down in 2017 relative to 2015, and Scunthorpe (I’ll explain why Scunthorpe in a minute).

Edit 13/2 Thanks to the reader who pointed out that I’d misidentified Scunthorpe as Hartlepool. No idea how I did that – it’s not even on the coast! Corrected.

The colour-coding here is the version used in the previous post: the deep blues are long-term Labour seats where the 2019 Tory majority was 5% or more and the Labour vote had fallen by 10% or more relative to 2017 and the Labour vote was lower than at any time since (and including) 2001; the mid-blues are other long-term Labour seats that went to the Tories in 2019, while the reds are seats that Labour held in 2019. (Scunthorpe, in purple, is a ‘deep blue’ seat that doesn’t strictly qualify to be on this map, as Labour’s vote share rose between 2015 and 2017 – by half of one percent.)

Now, let’s tidy up and simplify a bit. I said at the top of the post that there were 24 seats where Labour’s margin over the Tories was 5% or less, and that the Tories took 19 of those. Let’s say for the sake of argument that any party having a good election is likely to have successes at that kind of level: if what we want to explain is why the Tories got such a big majority, or why Labour’s seat total fell so low, the sub-2.5% swing seats aren’t the place to look. So we’ll eliminate those 19 seats from the first map, to give 29 gains instead of 48, of which the map shows 29 instead of 45 (the three southern seats omitted from the map are among the 19).

As for the “long-term Labour, vote share down in 2017” map, let’s take out the Labour holds – we’re not interested in those right now – and, again, take out the 19 sub-5%-majority seats. We’re left with a fairly sparse map showing only 20 seats.

And here are those two maps.

Spot the similarity.

As I said, there are 20 seats on the right-hand map and 29 on the left; the set of Tory gains from Labour in England overturning a majority greater than 5% isn’t identical with the set of long-term Labour seats where Labour’s vote share fell in 2017. But it’s close. The left-hand map (Tory gains against a >5% majority) includes all 20 of the seats in the right-hand map (long-term holds, relative vote share down in 2017); of the remaining nine, five are pale blue (only taken by Labour in 2017), three are mid-blue (1997 gains) and the ninth is grey (step forward Ivan Lewis).

My conclusion here is pretty much the same as the conclusion to the previous, big post (have you read the big post, by the way? recently? it’s revised and updated, you know). In five words, Red Wall: real but small.

The phenomenon people refer to as the Red Wall was the unexpected, large-scale loss of Labour votes to the Tories, apparently caused by long-term Labour voters deciding that they’d liked Labour in the old days but they couldn’t be doing with all this here political correctness, and taking place in the North
the North-East and North-West
the North-East, parts of the North-West and parts of Yorkshire
the North-East, parts of the North-West and parts of Yorkshire, the East Midlands and some places around Birmingham
the North-East, some of the more rural parts of the North-West and Yorkshire, the East Midlands, some places around Birmingham although not Birmingham itself, and also Stoke
a whole bunch of places which really don’t have much in common other than being south of the border and north of Luton. I’m caricaturing, but I do actually think this is a real phenomenon: look at those two maps. But it’s only one phenomenon, and it wasn’t what won the 2019 election for the Tories – arguably it was only because the Tories were already winning the 2019 election that the Red Wall effect really kicked in.

If we’re interested in the Red Wall phenomenon, we’re interested in something that (a) genuinely happened and (b) happened up and down the country, but (c) only happened in a small number of places. Labour needs to make a lot of gains next time round, but whether it needs to make precisely those gains is more debatable – and whether the kind of Labour campaign that would win back Ashfield and Great Grimsby would win the country is very dubious indeed. Apart from anything else, look at the sub-5%-majority places that Labour did hold in 2019 – Portsmouth South, Bedford, Canterbury; look what happened to Labour’s vote share in 2017 in the south-east (scroll down, and brace yourself). If you were thinking tactically for Labour, which area would you concentrate on – the one where Labour lost vote share despite intensive campaigning and national media attention, or the one where Labour gained vote share with hardly anyone even noticing?

So if we are interested in the Red Wall phenomenon, at this stage we’re interested in it partly for purely historical reasons (something unusual did happen in those seats), and partly on a secondary tactical level. Nobody should be asking “how might learning from the Red Wall be useful for Labour?” – but “what errors might the belief that the Red Wall is useful for Labour lead to?” is an interesting and potentially useful question, as is “what biases and presuppositions are likely to have led people to believe Labour should learn from the Red Wall?”. And I think the answer is going to come from a closer look at those 50 seats. (Or 51 if you count Scunthorpe.)

In search of the Red Wall (8)

THE STORY SO FAR: There is no “Red Wall”.

To be more precise, it’s not possible to identify any group of constituencies that fit all the criteria for the “Red Wall” as it’s usually described (large numbers of previously long-term and solid Labour seats which went Tory in 2019, clustered together, somewhere in the North of England). The Tories did win in some surprising places in 2019, with constituencies which had been Labour for twenty years or more suddenly showing a 10-20% drop in the Labour vote. Long-term patterns of voting in these constituencies suggest that a disaffected, “none of the above” voting bloc has played a significant part for some time, and that the Tories’ success in 2019 was largely due to the capture of this anti-political vote by the Brexit Party and (in a bizarre irony) by the Conservative Party itself.

Here (again) are the voting patterns for one of these constituencies, Don Valley in south Yorkshire.

It’s not hard to see what’s going on. A sizeable Liberal Democrat protest vote in 2005 is joined by far-Right protest voting in 2010, eating into Labour’s normally substantial majority. In 2015 the Lib Dems had been discredited by their participation in the Coalition. The benefits go in part to Labour; there is also a new repository for antipolitical voting in the form of UKIP, which in addition gains support from right-wing Tory voters. Polarisation returns in 2017, with the Tories capturing most – although not all – of the UKIP vote. This means that their position relative to Labour improves again, putting them in a good position to capitalise when the next wave of antipolitical protest voting – spearheaded by the rebadged Brexit Party – peels votes away from Labour in 2019.

Disaffected voters express their opposition to both the “old parties” by voting for the Lib Dems in 2005; for the Lib Dems, UKIP and the far Right in 2010; for UKIP in 2015; and for both the (Brexiteering) Tories and the (anti-system) Labour Party in 2017 (but mainly for the Tories). Consequently, Labour’s position relative to the Tories goes Down between 2005 and 2010, goes Up between 2010 and 2015 and finally goes Down again in 2017.

For completeness’ sake we can also consider what happened in Bishop Auckland:

Which is… pretty much the same, except that Labour didn’t noticeably benefit from the Lib Dem collapse in 2015 – either because the Lib Dem votes they gained were mostly matched by losses to UKIP, or because antipolitical Lib Dem votes transferred to UKIP direct – with the result that Labour lost ground with the rise of UKIP as well as with their decline. Labour’s position relative to the Tories went Down in 2010, Down in 2015 and Down in 2017.

We see these patterns – particularly the first one – in a lot of the seats Labour lost. It’s a plausible, coherent story, too – the two motors of the whole process are the alienation of a substantial body of voters from both main parties and the failure to completely delegitimate the far Right, and both of those conditions seem likely to have applied in any number of places (particularly places with longstanding Labour councils).

The question then is: do these conditions obtain more widely? They may be scattered around the country and they may not have decided the election in themselves, but are the “red wall” seats just the most visible part of a larger problem? Bluntly, are the seats Labour actually lost in 2019 the tip of the iceberg?

There isn’t much in the way of good news in this story – sitting as we are amid the wreckage of the 2019 election – but the answer to this question does at least qualify as interesting news. Here are the details for the 418 English constituencies which have existed with more or less the same boundaries since 1979, and which were held by the main two parties in 2017.

Reading from the top, the dark red bloc are ‘UU’ seats, those where Labour’s position relative to the Tories went Up in both 2015 and 2017; the paler red are ‘DU’ (Down in 2015, Up in 2017); the pale blues are UD (Up in 2015, Down in 2017); and the dark blue, DD (Down in both 2015 and 2017). I haven’t distinguished between UUU/DUU, UDU/DDU, UUD/DUD and UDD/DDD, partly for simplicity and partly because including that level of detail would make very little difference. (Labour’s position went Down in 2010 in 387 constituencies out of the 418; the UUU subset accounts for 29 of the remaining 31 and UDD and UDU for one each of the last two.)

What do we see? We see that, in 2017, Labour’s position improved in over 70% of Labour constituencies and nearly 80% of Tory seats. Labour seats were considerably more likely to show improvements under both Corbyn and Ed Miliband than Corbyn alone; in Tory seats, by contrast, over 40% – the largest single category – saw Labour’s position deteriorate under Miliband and then improve under Corbyn. If we’re measuring the popularity of party leaders on the basis of the ability to improve the party’s vote share, particularly outside its existing heartlands – an eccentric idea, perhaps, but let’s go with it – then Jeremy Corbyn, as of 2017, was far and away the most popular leader Labour had had since 1997. I don’t recall this point being made very often at the time.

More importantly for the current discussion, where are those DUDs and DDDs? They are there, but – as it turns out – they’re not all that numerous. 39 Labour seats, around 20% of the total, fitted the DUD template that we saw so many times in the previous post; the DDD model only fits another 11. Nor was the pattern any more representative of trends in Conservative seats. 320 out of 418 seats – more than three-quarters – saw Labour’s position improve in 2017, under Corbyn; in 203 of them – nearly half – there were improvements in 2015 as well. Pitching to the DUD seats – and the disaffected 15-20% of Right-leaning antipolitical voters who made them that way – is no way to either gain votes in most Tory seats or hang on to them in most Labour seats.

Time for another map or two, or four. Here’s the north and centre of England, showing Labour and Tory seats where Labour’s relative vote share went down in 2017 (red for Labour, blue for Tory, keep up). There are fifty Labour seats in this category, about 45 of which you can see here.

And here are the Labour and Tory seats where Labour’s position improved in 2017 (slightly different red for Labour… you get the idea). There are 136 Labour seats in this category, of which you see about 65 here.

(Small squiggly constituencies, remember. There are twelve constituencies in the block running north-south from Doncaster to Bolsover, 40 in the east-west block from Birkenhead to Leeds.)

And here’s the south-east. Again, these are Labour and Tory seats where Labour’s relative vote share fell in 2017.

And here are the Labour and Tory seats in the south-east where Labour’s position improved in 2017. (You may want to sit down.)

Small squiggly red constituencies, again – forty of them in London, another ten in Birmingham. As for the blue ones… well, that’s a bit striking, isn’t it? I’m not saying that Corbyn was building a platform for power in the heart of the Tory beast – in a lot of these cases what happened in 2017 was that Labour came third with 10% instead of 8%. But, as I said, if we measure success for a party leader in terms of putting on vote share for the party…

NEXT: So, what did happen in 2019 (and where did it happen)?

In search of the Red Wall (6)

In the next post I’ll get into some analysis of what I’m going to be calling the real Red Wall – which is neither red nor a wall, but what else is new? Before that, a confession and a reality check.

First, the confession: I’ve been avoiding saying very much about “the Red Wall” with the current connotations of that phrase. This hasn’t made the argument I want to develop any easier to articulate. However, when myths are abundant it’s important not to add to them – and it’s almost impossible to say anything about the “Red Wall” without at least perpetuating some myth or other. And myths about the way people think and behave are extraordinarily powerful: they tell people not only what to look for, but how to understand what they find.

That’s not to say that what people look for and find isn’t real – it is; that’s the problem. It’s a standing joke on the Left that the rank-and-file workers quoted in the party press always turn out to have unusually clear and well-articulated views on the class struggle, but the joke only goes so far: perhaps “Jim Slack, rank-and-file member of the Fire Brigades Union” is better known to you and me as Jim Slack, local branch secretary of the Uniquely Correct Trotskyist Party, but the guy still is a firefighter. Even if you picked a rank-and-file union member completely at random, you’d have some chance of picking a Uniquely Correct Trotskyist – and if you went out looking for an articulate and committed trade unionist, the odds would shorten quite dramatically. Whether Jim is a typical trade unionist is another question, but nobody asked that – we wanted a union member, we got a union member, and here’s what our union member said. (Apparently the perspectives of the Uniquely Correct Trotskyist Party are, in fact, uniquely correct. Who knew?)

The mainstream press, of course, does exactly the same thing, although they’re considerably more likely to go looking for devotees of Farage and Johnson than of Marx and Lenin. What you look for you will, with a bit of persistence, usually find; what you don’t look for, you almost certainly won’t. As I wrote shortly after the 2017 election,

Any one of us can assemble a mental image of the white working-class voter motivated by social conservatism and unavowed racism. It’s a social type we’ve become familiar with through all those endless UKIP/Le Pen road trips and exposés, but – more importantly – it’s a type that we already knew about; it goes back to Love Thy Neighbour and Till Death, and to the dockers marching for Enoch. But here’s the thing: we can just as easily assemble a mental image of the working-class voter demanding better pay and conditions, the young idealist getting fired up by radical ideas, the middle-class liberal getting involved in campaigning and moving leftwards … All those social types were right there in the collective consciousness; if John Harris wasn’t going to go out and find them, at least Owen Jones could have had a go. But nobody did; everyone assumed that those people weren’t out there any more, just like they assumed that the working people of Britain had had their heads turned by Farage and Brexit.

I’m sure there are people out there who fit the “Red Wall voter” template – by which I mean (he added reluctantly) socially-conservative voters, middle-aged or older, whose loyalty to Labour went back decades but was associated with attitudes and beliefs for which Labour no longer stood under Corbyn’s leadership (and perhaps still doesn’t under Starmer), as well as with a class identity which for them had grown less salient and/or meaningful, so that they could switch to voting Conservative en masse without any perceived transformation of their beliefs and values, turning Labour strongholds into safe Conservative seats as they went. I’m sure you can find people like that to talk to if you look. Whether those people are typical or representative of the people whose voting choices actually ensured that the Tories won the last election is another question. While we’re about it, we could also ask whether – even if there were, as a matter of fact, a number of big Tory victories in decades-old Labour strongholds – a comfortable Tory victory could have been delivered without any of them happening, and if so what this tells us about the election and its outcome more generally. We could even ask if the centre-left campaign to abandon Labour under Corbyn had any effect on the result (it would be odd if it had none at all).

Or we could just carry on talking about the Red Wall. The big problem with the “Red Wall voter” story, and the reason why I’m reluctant to add to it, is the space that it occupies. Indeed, by now it’s more or less been accepted as a starting-point, so that any actual information about voter behaviour in 2019 fits into it as an extension or clarification (“so that’s what Red Wall voters really care about!”).

Hence the need for a reality check.

Before:

Not shown: Ipswich, Stroud, Kensington

After:

Not shown: Ipswich, Stroud, Kensington – or any of the 68 seats south of Birmingham that Labour held or gained

Blue for Tory holds, red for Labour, white for the Speaker, mustard for Tim Farron (remember him? he used to be the leader of the Liberal Democrats (remember them?)). Orange for Labour (re-)gains, shades of purple and grey for Tory gains: deep purple = a big win of a solid Labour seat, mauve = a narrow win of a solid Labour seat, lilac = a marginal, grey = a seat whose sitting MP helped things along by deserting the Labour Party.

It’s bad, no question about it; those were very bad results, with far too many seats lost. But what kind of seats? Look at the purple seats and then compare them with the red ones, the seats where a plurality of voters stayed with Labour. Are we really saying that the semi-rural sprawl of Sedgefield and Bishop Auckland is Labour’s heartland, and small, densely-populated seats like South Shields and Jarrow aren’t? Are we saying that the Birmingham seats Labour held are somehow less “Labour” than the seats they lost in Wolverhampton and Dudley? Are we saying that Stoke-on-Trent was a Labour stronghold (although its MPs are now all Conservatives) and Hull wasn’t (although its MPs are all Labour)?

Let’s look, one more time, at the seats lost in the supposed “Red Wall”.

NEXT: we look, one more time, at the seats lost in the supposed “Red Wall”.

In search of the Red Wall (5)

In the next few posts I’m going to ask five questions about the “Red Wall”:

1. which English seats did Labour lose in 2019?
2. why did we lose them?
3. which long-held English seats did Labour lose badly?
4. and why did that happen?

The third and fourth questions are about “Red Wall” seats – now entrenched in political discourse as northern, working-class, socially-conservative, Brexit-supporting Labour strongholds, that were held by Labour for generations but tumbled like polystyrene bricks before the Tories’ 2019 campaign bulldozer.

There is a grain of truth in this cliché, but only a grain. The key fact about the “Red Wall” – the one thing everyone who refers to the Red Wall ought to realise – is that those seats are only a subset of Labour’s losses in 2019; plenty of other Labour constituencies also elected a Tory. Hence the fifth question, which is:

• are the “Red Wall” seats typical of the seats Labour needs to win, and the seats we need to retain?

This last question is crucial. If the answer is Yes, happy days – if we can identify what turned a sizeable number of Red Wall voters off Labour and reverse it, we can win the next election. If the answer is No, things are more difficult; it could be that we need to look elsewhere to reverse the majority of our losses and retain the seats we hold. Come to that, it could be that adopting positions that do play well with the missing Red Wall voters would cost us votes and seats elsewhere, either directly or by demobilising the activists who power Labour’s ground game.

So let’s look at Labour’s losses more broadly. Labour lost 48 seats in England (along with six each in Scotland and Wales), and here they are. 38 were in Derbyshire and points north:

The other ten were further south. (Look closely and you can even see Kensington – our only loss in the capital.)

In line with the previous maps, I’ve divided these lost seats into three groups:

1. big wins (Labour continuously since 1979, decisive win in 2019)
2. narrow wins (Labour continuously since 1979, but not a decisive win in 2019)
3. marginals (had changed hands at least twice since 1979)

There aren’t any dark grey constituencies on this map; why dwell unnecessarily on the treachery of the renegades Austin, Lewis, Mann, Woodcock, Smith and Williamson? Those six constituencies have been treated as Labour seats and allocated to one of the three groups. (Penistone and Stocksbridge – the seat Angela Smith held under five different party labels before abandoning it in the vain hope of finding somewhere safer – doesn’t strictly belong on the list, as it was created in 2010; however, its main predecessor constituency, Barnsley West and Penistone, had been Labour since 1979.) As before, a “big win” is defined as one where the Labour vote in 2019 fell 10% or more relative to 2017 and was lower than at any time since (and including) 2001, and where the eventual Tory majority was 5% or more; narrow wins are those that qualify on fewer than three of these criteria.

If we look at these three groups collectively, this (if you’ll pardon the expression) is what we find:

	1	2	3
Lowest Labour vote %, 2019	24.4	39.3	36.9
Highest Labour vote %, 2019	39.8	44.5	46
Average Labour vote %, 2019	34.8	41.7	41.1
Biggest Tory majority in %, 2019	31.4	12.6	15.7
Biggest drop in Labour vote %, 2017-19	24.9	15.7	18.1

Group 2 and group 3 look remarkably similar. What’s more, losses along these lines don’t seem wildly surprising. An aggressive Tory campaign, with a Brexit Party assist, pushes the Labour vote down to the low 40%s or slightly below, enabling them to squeeze out a 5% or even 10% majority in a former Labour seat: it’s bad, but it seems like the kind of thing that could happen in any bad election campaign. And – returning to question 2, above – 2019 was a really bad election campaign. The party’s support had been softened up beforehand by sustained attacks on the leadership from the centre and centre-left, relieved only by a brief truce in 2017 (after it turned out that what they were offering was in fact quite popular). In 2019 Parliamentary stalemate over Brexit was parallelled by internal conflict over Labour’s position on the EU; meanwhile, exaggerated and politicised charges of antisemitism on the left of the party ran riot, to the point where a grotesque and libellous falsehood – the allegation that Corbyn was personally prejudiced against Jews – became common currency, a comedy punchline. The delegitimation of Corbyn and his party culminated in the New Statesman‘s sage eve-of-election advice that readers should do nothing that might risk putting Corbyn into Downing Street, but should instead vote “tactically” to deprive the Tories of a majority (Luciana Berger! Sarah Wollaston!). The mentality is a kind of cargo-cult imitation of tactical voting – you don’t vote tactically for a third party because it’s a credible challenger, you proclaim your vote for a third party is tactical and thereby make it credible. There was a lot of this about in 2019; the combined vote for the Lib Dems and Greens was 50% higher than 2017 (4.5 million from 3 million), for a grand total of one fewer MP. It’s hard to imagine that anyone genuinely, rationally thought it would work. Revisiting the NS article now, I see that it concludes by outlining an alternative “political dispensation”, then concedes that “[t]he election will not open the way for this alternative settlement”. Which is probably the closest thing to a mea culpa we’re ever going to get.

Tactical non-co-operation from centre parties also ensured that the Labour Party’s great achievement of 2017 – depriving Theresa May of her majority – led to deadlock in Parliament rather than any constructive result; binding votes on an alternative to a hard Brexit were lost for the want of votes from the SNP and (absurdly) Change UK. This in turn played into an equally successful pre-election softening-up campaign from the Right, to the effect that Labour politicians were timewasting obstructionists, doing nothing for their MPs’ salaries but block the will of the people. (I heard this more than once when I was canvassing, in constituencies Labour went on to lose.)

Pushing Labour’s vote down a few points and the Tories’ vote up by a similar amount was all that was needed to take quite a few constituencies. (And, please, let’s not forget that very little has actually changed when a constituency goes from a 48/45 Labour/Tory split to 44/45 – and not very much has changed when a constituency goes from 50/40 to 42/45.) The attacks I’ve described – peeling off a few % of furious Brexit believers on one side, a few % of earnest centre-leftists on the other – were quite enough to do all of that, particularly when combined with the absurdly permissive media environment in which the Tories were working. And groups 2 and 3 add up to 31 seats, which would have been enough to give the Tories a majority of 40 even if the whole of group 1 had stayed Labour.

So, is there anything here to explain? Are there any lessons to draw on how to fight the next election? Apart, that is, from the ones we really ought to have drawn already:

• Lesson for Labour Party representatives: Don’t systematically undermine the leader under whom you’re going to be fighting the next election (even if you think you might do well out of it longer-term). (Also, do question the motives of anyone outside the party who seems to want to help you undermine your leader. This rarely ends well.)
• Lesson for the Left: Don’t entrust your political legitimacy to some of your most entrenched and unscrupulous enemies. Also, don’t duck difficult questions, and (relatedly) don’t respond to smears with platitudinous reminders that you are, after all, good people who believe in good things (which must mean that the people saying these nasty things are mistaken). Been tried. Doesn’t work.
• Lesson for the centre-left: Don’t screw your eyes up tight and tell yourself that if you stick to your principles that’s all that matters – and you couldn’t live with yourself if you compromised – and besides it’s not impossible that Labour might lose and the Tories might lose as well (“very, very unlikely” isn’t the same as “impossible”, is it?) Get a grip. How do you think the Left has felt about voting Labour all this time?

But the time for the second and third of these has probably gone, sadly. Which – on the positive side – should mean that the future is bright: we can stick to pretty much the same policy platform we had before, perhaps slimmed down and reorganised a bit, and – without a constant barrage of attacks from the centre-left, without a relentlessly hostile media environment, and without an unresolved Brexit hanging over us – the next election should be a breeze. Shouldn’t it?

Ah, but. What about group 1?

Next: yes, what about the Red Wall?

Marginal notes – 2

The story so far:

I looked at the size of Labour’s majority over the Conservatives – or vice versa – in the most marginal Labour/Conservative battleground seats, in general elections over the last twenty-odd years, i.e. going back to 1997 and New Labour. … Labour’s offensive battleground seems to be very much the same terrain as the area it needs to defend. In both cases, we’re looking at former safe Labour seats where a substantial majority was allowed to trickle away over successive elections – between 2001 and 2005, 2005 and 2010, 2010 and 2015; and in both cases, in 2017 two-thirds of these seats saw either a Labour gain or a substantial cut in the Tory majority.

All but two of the 40 marginals I looked at in that post were held by Labour in 1997; 28 went to the Tories between 2005 and 2015, of which 13 were regained in 2017. Moreover, in all but three of the 40 the Labour relative vote share fell in both 2005 and 2010; in 21 of them it fell in 2005, 2010 and 2015, then rose in 2017.

If these results generalise beyond the marginals, then we can conclude that

1. Labour has had some bad elections – some elections that really cried out for a thorough rethink of the party’s goals, branding, resources and personnel.
2. 2010 was definitely one of them, and you wouldn’t call 2005 or 2015 examples of best practice. (“He won three elections!” Yes, about that third one…)
3. 2017, on the other hand, definitely wasn’t one of them. If you forget about the internal party politics and look at the results through an entirely pragmatic, vote-maximising lens – or view them from Mars, through a telescope which registers party names and vote numbers but nothing else – what leaps out is that 2017 was an astonishingly good result by the standards of the previous three elections; a result so good, you could say that the party of the 2005-15 elections didn’t really deserve it. (But then, it wasn’t the party of the 2005-15 elections that did it.)

But I’m getting ahead of myself. We can draw those conclusions, if these results apply generally. Do they?

A bit of methodology. First, I got hold of constituency-level election results for UK general elections from 1997 to 2017. What I’m interested in is the Labour/Conservative relative vote shares, so I limited my scope to England. Then I eliminated all seats which – across that 20-year period – had ever been held by a third or fourth party, or an independent: goodbye to the Speaker, to Richard Taylor and George Galloway, to Caroline Lucas and to the Liberal Democrats.

So far so straightforward. The next step was more of a leap in the dark: matching constituencies between the 2015 and 2017 results or between 2001 and 2005 was easy enough, but what to do about the 2008 boundary review? In the end I took the quick-and-dirty approach (political scientists, look away now) of treating every constituency with the same name as the same constituency. (Although when I say ‘the same name’… The 2008 reviewers had an infuriating habit of switching names around to make them more logical – main piece of information first – so goodbye West Loamshire, hello Loamshire West! That made for a fun evening’s work.) In addition to name-matching, I matched manually in a few cases where a post-2008 constituency was identified with a pre-2008 one by (I did say to look away) the Wikipedia entry on the Boundary Commission. This isn’t ideal; I’m sure there are constituencies out there with the same name pre- and post-2008 and vastly different boundaries, just as I’m sure that I’ve missed some renamed seats with more or less the same boundaries. If I were doing this for anything more enduring (or rewarding) than a blog post, I would do it properly and assess each of the 500+ constituencies individually. But I’m not, so I haven’t.

I ended up with 421 constituencies – English constituencies in contention between Labour and the Conservatives – which can be categorised as follows:

• 142 were held by the Conservatives at every election from 1997 to 2017
• 157 were held by Labour at every election from 1997 to 2017
• 119 were held by Labour in 1997 but lost to the Conservatives at one of the next five elections
  • of these, 29 were then regained by Labour (one in 2010, eight in 2015, 20 in 2017)
• 2 (Canterbury and Kensington) were held by the Conservatives from 1997 to 2015 but lost to Labour in 2017
• one (South Dorset) was won from the Conservatives in 2001 and lost again in 2010

Discarding the last two oddball categories gives us three similar-sized groups to analyse, across a series of six elections.

One final methodological note: the measure being used here is relative vote share, a phrase which here means “Labour vote % minus Conservative vote %”. Since my dataset excludes Lib Dem and minor-party seats, this is usually the same figure as the majority expressed as a percentage (or the majority multiplied by -1 for a Conservative seat). Usually, but not invariably: although none of these seats has ever gone to a third party, a number of them have had either the Lib Dems or UKIP in second place at some of these elections. If I was doing a professional job, I could have addressed this complication by adding a new dimension to the analysis, cutting down the dataset or a combination of both. As I’m not, I turned a blind eye and simply measured the Labour-Conservative difference in all cases.

Now for some charts. First, here are those 119 Labour losses, and when they were lost. In this chart – and most of the others – I’m adopting the convention of treating Labour gains from the Tories as positive numbers and Tory gains from Labour as negatives. A bit partisan, perhaps, but I am specifically looking at gains and losses as between those two parties, and this makes it easier to see what’s happening.

Every time I see this chart I think I’ve accidentally deleted the label on the 2010 ‘loss’ bar. Scroll down… oh, there it is. Basically 2001 saw a bit of slippage compared to 1997, and 2005 was a bad result – but 2010 was an appalling result. There was a bit of fightback in 2015 and a lot of fightback in 2017, but we’re still a long way short of where we were, thanks largely to those losses in 2005 and 2010 – substantial losses and huge losses, respectively.

The next series of charts shows loss and gain in relative vote share. The bars represent the numbers of seats in which Labour’s vote share relative to the Conservatives went up or down (by any amount) at each election. Since the total number of seats doesn’t change from one election to the next, the bars in each chart stay the same overall length, but with larger or smaller portions above the origin line.

All seats:

Just look at those first three blue bars. Up and down the country, Labour threw away vote share in 2001; then we did it again even more widely in 2005, and then again in 2010 – with the (cumulative) results we’ve just seen. Again, 2010 stands out as a disaster, with near-universal vote share losses and almost no increases, even after the reductions in vote share over the previous two elections. (Curiously, while there were 31 seats showing an increased vote share in each of the 2005 and 2010 elections, there’s only one where vote share increased in both 2005 and 2010 – and it’s a safe Tory seat where Labour was in third place both times.) But then things look up in 2015 (with 92 more seats with increased vote share than decreased), and even more so in 2017 (222 more)

Here’s the same data for the “Labour losses” group of seats – the 119 seats featured in the first chart, including those that were retaken by Labour.

There isn’t much to say here, except “here’s that trend again” – and perhaps “no wonder they were former Labour seats”. The 2015 recovery is (proportionately) weaker here, but the 2017 rally is just as strong.

Here are the safe Conservative seats.

This is quite interesting. Naively, I wouldn’t have expected very much variation in the Labour vote in safe Tory seats, what with them being… well, safe Tory seats. Far from it: there were quite a few seats where Labour saw losses in vote share between 2001 and 2010, and many more where Labour’s vote share increased in 2015; as for 2017, in that year there were Labour increases in getting on for 90% of Tory seats. These are all seats that were Tory in 1997 and have been Tory ever since, so I wouldn’t want to read too much into this, but it is a strong trend; it suggests that there may be a substantial suppressed Labour vote out there, released by Corbyn’s – and, to be fair, Ed Miliband’s – new direction(s) for the party. (Perhaps the trouble with trying to poach Conservative votes by moving Right is that you end up giving Conservative voters no particular reason to switch.) One, two, many Canterburys!

To complete the set, here are the safe Labour seats, where the trends are a bit different.

Oddly, 2010 isn’t the nadir now, but represents a bit of an improvement on 2005 in terms of the numbers of seats showing vote share gains and losses. Nor is 2017 the peak fightback year; that would be 2015. I don’t know if the post-Iraq tactical voting campaign – or the Lib Dems’ anti-war positioning – had a huge effect on the 2005 vote, but if they did these are the kind of seats where you’d expect to see it. As for 2015 and 2017, from this chart we can already see that there were 30-something safe Labour seats where vote share went up in 2015 – Ed Miliband, hurrah! – and went down in 2017 – Jeremy Corbyn, ugh! As with 2005, these are perhaps the kind of seats where issues and debates within Labour are most likely to make themselves felt (albeit without any immediate effect on the results).

To look at those trends in a bit more detail, here are a couple of charts which need a bit more of an introduction. As we’ve seen there’s an overall tendency for the Labour vote share to drop between 1997 and 2001, then again in 2005 and (mostly) in 2010, before going up in 2015 and (mostly) in 2017. But how many seats actually follow this pattern – down, down, down, up, up – and how many are exceptions? If there are exceptions, what pattern do they follow? Can we distinguish between Tory, Labour and ex-Labour seats, or do the same trends apply generally?

Following a qualitative comparative analysis approach, I translated vote share change into a letter – D for (Labour relative vote share) down, U for up – giving a string of Ds and Us for each seat based on that seat’s successive changes in relative vote share. Since there are six elections overall, each seat has five letters, corresponding to the vote share changes in 2001, 2005, 2010, 2015 and 2017: DDDDD, DDDDU, DDDUD and so on. An ordered series of characters each of which can only take two values is just asking to be translated into binary digits, so that was the next step: DDDDD=0, DDDDU=1, DDDUD=2, and so on up to UUUUU=31. This meant that I could easily calculate frequency tables for the dataset and for each of the three main groups of seats, which in turn made it possible to visualise different patterns and their frequency.

And that’s what you see here, albeit in slightly cut-down form; for simplicity I left the 1997-2001 period out of these charts. The four letters you see here thus correspond to up/down vote share changes in 2005, 2010, 2015 and 2017.

I’ve singled out five patterns – DDDD, DDDU, DDUD, DDUU and DUUU – for the sole reason that these were the only ones which occurred in the data in significant numbers. You’ll notice the prevalence of Ds in the first two positions (loss of vote share in 2005 and 2010) and Us in the fourth (increased vote share in 2017). The way that this first chart is arranged, the first four blocks reading up from the origin – from dark red up to mid-blue – represent all the seats in which the Labour relative vote share went down in both 2005 and 2010. That is, 84% of them: five out of six.

Here’s the same data ordered differently:

In this version the first five blocks reading up from the bottom – i.e. the red blocks – represent all the seats in which Labour’s relative vote share went up in 2017. Which is to say, 72% of them – nearly three quarters. The first two red blocks represent the DDxU pattern, i.e. “down in 2005 and 2010, up in 2017”: 65% of the total, 69% of former Labour seats and 81% of Tory seats. The exception – and the reason why that total isn’t higher than 65% – is the “safe Labour” group, where this pattern only applies to 48% of seats.

The message of the data is pretty clear. While there is some variation between different seats – and regional variation can’t be ruled out (see below) – across England there are some fairly consistent trends. Where 2017 is concerned, the only realistic conclusion is “we’ve had a terrible election, but this wasn’t it” (apologies to Groucho Marx). 2017 was better than 2015 – and 2015 was better than 2010, in much the same sense that vitamin C is better for you than cyanide. We on the Left have a great deal to be proud of and nothing to apologise for – except, perhaps, letting the culprits for the 2010 disaster off the hook, and not moving against them harder and more decisively. (This isn’t sectarianism; this isn’t a quest for ideological purity. We want a party that can win back vote share and gain seats, like the party did in 2017 – not one that loses vote share everywhere and loses seats by the dozen, like the party did in 2005 and 2010.)

Some generalisations about the different categories of seats are also possible – and about Labour seats in particular. Reading from the bottom of the chart:

• In the Tory and Ex-Labour groups around 40% of seats fit the DDDU pattern, compared to less than 5% of the Labour group
• In the Tory and Labour groups around 40% of seats fit the DDUU pattern, compared to around 25% of the ex-Labour group
• In the Labour group around 15% of seats fit the DUUU pattern, compared to less than 5% of the Tory and Ex-Labour groups
• In the Labour group around 20% of seats fit the DDUD pattern, compared to around 5% of the Tory and Ex-Labour groups
• In the ex-Labour group around 20% of seats fit the DDDD pattern, compared to around 5% of the Tory and Labour groups

Translated into English, Labour relative vote share in has gone up at some point in 95% of Tory and Labour safe seats in England, and 80% of ex-Labour seats. Around 40% of Labour and Tory seats, and 25% of ex-Labour seats, showed an increased Labour vote share in 2015 and 2017 (only); around 40% of Tory and ex-Labour seats showed an increased vote share in 2017 (only). Among the Labour seats, smaller groups of seats showed increases either in 2015 alone or in 2010 as well as 2015 and 2017.

In short, if we compare Labour seats to all other seats, as well as a lot of commonality there are some significant differences: there is

• a sizeable group of Labour seats (and very few others) where 2015 was the only recent election with an increased Labour vote share
• a very small number of Labour seats (but sizeable numbers of others) where 2017 was the only election with an increased vote share
• a sizeable group of Labour seats (and very few others) where 2010, as well as 2015 and 2017, saw increased vote share

This tends to suggest that – while most of them are living in the same world as the rest of us – non-negligible numbers of Labour MPs are living in a world where Corbyn and the 2017 campaign didn’t deliver the goods; or a world where Miliband and the 2015 campaign did; or a world where the disastrous result of 2010 wasn’t actually all that bad. The effect that these perceptions are likely to have had on their view of the Corbyn leadership – and their retrospective view of life before Corbyn – doesn’t need to be spelt out. These MPs can – and often do – speak eloquently about their own experiences and the threat that Labour faces in their locality, but they are not reliable sources on Labour’s situation nationally.

There’s also a sizeable number of ex-Labour seats – and not very many others – where Labour’s relative vote share has gone down at every one of the last four elections; this suggests that the loss of the seat to the Tories was part of a long-term trend in those areas, and one which hasn’t yet been reversed. To be precise, this pattern applies to 6 seats held by the Tories throughout the period, 8 held by Labour and 24 which went Tory at some point between 2001 and 2017. This would be worth investigating. A quick scan of the 24 seats and their former MPs on Wikipedia gives few pointers, other than to remind me that the 1997 wave swept some truly awful placemen and -women into the Commons: some are noted only for their loyalty (to Tony Blair); others made headlines in the local press during the expenses scandal; one became head of a local NHS trust on leaving Parliament, having continued to practice as a GP throughout. (I guess time weighs heavy when your only responsibility is being an MP.)

Geographically, it may be worth noting that the 32 1997-Labour seats in this group include

• 4 in the North East
• 5 in east Yorkshire
• 7 in the east Midlands, and
• 6 in Staffordshire

All of which are, perhaps, areas where Labour MPs had grown accustomed to weighing the vote rather than counting it; where weak local parties made for soft targets for incoming Blairites; and where, after five or ten years of New Labour, there just didn’t seem to be that much of a reason to keep up the old habit of voting for the red rosette, whoever wore it. That’s speculation; all I can say is that if I were one of the MPs for the eight seats in this group where Labour hung on in 2017 – Ronnie Campbell, John Woodcock(!), Helen Goodman (seat inherited from Derek Foster), Paul Farrelly (heir to Llin and before her John Golding), Ian Lavery (heir to Denis Murphy), Catherine McKinnell (heir to Doug Henderson), Ruth Smeeth (heir to Joan Walley) or Gareth Snell (heir to Tristram Hunt and before him Mark Fisher) – I wouldn’t be placing the blame for my 2017 performance on things that have changed since 2015. There’s a downward trend in those constituencies which was clearly established long before that – and the great majority of Labour seats, along with the great majority of English constituencies generally, broke that trend in 2017, if they hadn’t already broken it in 2015. It’s not him, it’s you.

Swings and… swings

We’re not still going on about the European elections and what happened to the Labour vote, are we. That’s a statement, not a question, and actually I’m quite disappointed that we aren’t; as soon as minor-party voting intentions dropped below 20%, and the shouting about ‘four-party politics’ subsided, people seem to have lost interest in what happened. But, while we are clearly back in the world of two ‘main’ parties, the Brexit Party and the Lib Dems do seem to have put quite a large dent in both the Tory and the Labour vote; it would be worth knowing whether this is likely to fade between now and, oh, say for example the end of October.

Fortunately, the Euro elections have been run before (who knew?) and – as I said in an earlier post – voters have shown a tendency to use the Euros to “send a message” before now. But what does this mean in practice? If we compared the Euro election vote with the previous General Election, we could establish that the Labour vote had dropped from 40% of a 69% turnout in 2017 to 14% of a 37% turnout in 2019, but what did that actually mean – particularly when Labour’s vote at the previous European election had been 24% of a 36% turnout, which was down from 35% of a 65% turnout in the previous General Election, which in turn was up from 15% of a 35% turnout at the Euro election before that? (Labour on 15% of the vote, eh? Dreadful! To be fair, Wikipedia says that Gordon Brown “faced calls for him to resign” after this result – but the linked news story shows that what he faced was calls to resign as Prime Minister, from the Leader of the Opposition. There doesn’t seem to have been any internal opposition to Brown – or if there was they kept their traps shut.)

Anyway, I tried for some time to work out the significance of 24% of 36% vs 40% of 69% vs 14% of 37% – or, failing that, to work out a way of representing the relevant figures in a readable chart so that I could see the significant bits – before it hit me that the only way to do it was to ditch the percentages and go back to the raw numbers. Which gives us these two little beauties. (Complete with titles. I’m spoiling you, I really am.)

Top Tip #1: look at the X axis – and in particular look at the origin. The Y axis is not centred at zero – for reasons which will be obvious when you look at the Y axis. Everything above zero is an increase in votes – or rather in millions of votes – as compared to the previous relevant election; everything below the line is a decrease, in millions of votes. The first big thing to take away from these charts is just how asymmetrical they both are. At all but one General Election from 1997 to 2017, around 15 million more people turned out to vote than had done at the previous European election; the exception is 2005, and even then the rise in turnout was over 10 million as compared to the previous year’s Euros. The negative difference between General Election turnout and turnout in the next European election varies more widely, but again mostly ranges between 10 and 15 million; the exception is the 1999 European election, where turnout was down 20 million on the General Election of 1997. (There’s a story there – or a sub-plot – about voters getting swept up in high-enthusiasm, high-turnout elections, and coming down to earth when they’re asked to vote again a couple of years later. (“What, another?”)) The main point here is that the story of the difference between a Euro election – any Euro election – and the previous General Election is not a story of swings and voter movements; it’s primarily a story of voters staying at home, or rather of who stays at home. Who stays at home, and who goes out muttering “voting? damn right I’m voting, this‘ll show ’em…”.

Top Tip #2: trend first, anomaly second. Is there a trend? We can’t understand what people are doing now without having some idea of what they were doing previously. Were voters behaving in a particular way for the run of Euro elections before 2019, and/or the run of General Elections before 2017? Fortunately in this case the trend is pretty clear; look at the columns for 2004, 2009 and 2014 in the first chart, and those for the General Elections in the following year – 2005, 2010 and 2015 – in the second chart. What do you see? In 2004, 2009 and 2014, between thirteen and seventeen million people who had voted for one of the three major parties in the previous General Election – four to seven million ex-Tory and ex-Labour voters and two to six million ex-Liberal Democrat voters – didn’t; while about four million people who hadn’t voted for the Greens or UKIP at the previous General Election, did (in a ratio of a million Greens to three million Kippers). Some people stayed loyal; a lot of people stayed at home; a minority of people cast a protest vote – and that minority was made significant by the low turnout. The chances are that most of the Euro Kippers had voted Tory rather than Labour or Lib Dem at the previous General Election – and that the opposite is true of the Euro Greens – but this is less important than the scale of these numbers: the main thing that happened at all those elections was abstention. Relative to the previous General Elections, the Tory vote fell by between half and two-thirds, Labour’s by between half and three-quarters and the Lib Dems’ by between half and five-sixths. For the most part this wasn’t a swing to anyone; the total combined Green and British nationalist vote at each of those European elections was, at most, half of the Tories’ vote at the previous General Election.

Now look at the second chart. Relative to the previous years’ Euro elections, in 2005, 2010 and 2015 the major parties are up thirteen to seventeen million votes. (Labour: up five to six million; Tories: up four to six million, and seven million in 2015; Lib Dems: up three to five million, and one million in 2015. That coalition was powerful stuff.) The Greens and British nationalists, on the other hand, are down a total of three and a half million in 2005 and 2010, and one million in 2015. Again, we can assume that these voters went back to their ‘home’ parties – and we can assume that the British nationalists probably went back to the Tories and the Greens probably didn’t – but, again, this is much less important than the change in turnout, which in each case was up by 10-15 million as compared with the previous European election. The swing away from UKIP and the Greens was far less important in determining those results than the swing away from the sofa.

So those are the trends. What about the last couple of elections? 2017, as you may remember, saw an unusual election campaign and an unusually high degree of polarisation between the two main parties. Relative to the 2014 European election, the Labour vote was up by nearly nine million and the Tories’ by nearly ten million, three or four million more than the increase in 2015. The Lib Dems, by contrast, only put on a million relative to 2014 – and, since I’ve measured both elections relative to 2014, this was effectively the same million that they’d put on in 2015 (in other words, the party’s vote was almost completely unchanged from the previous General Election; in fact it was down a bit). The Green and British nationalist votes fell by a total of five million relative to 2014 – but, again, the main swing was the swing away from not voting at all: overall turnout was up by nearly sixteen million. These were familiar changes, in other words, but on a larger scale than usual: compared to the 2014-15 vote changes, the rise in turnout, the rise in Tory and Labour votes and the decline in British nationalist votes were, respectively, 1.5 million greater (+11%), 2.3 million greater (+30%), 3.6 million greater (+67%) and 3.3 million greater (+330%). Presumably some Euro-election Kippers swung to Labour in 2017, but the numbers won’t have been huge. The main effects were turnout effects, as usual, but on a larger scale: the Tories were better than usual at getting out the vote, while Labour were a lot better than usual. Also, thanks to the EU Referendum seeming (temporarily) like old news, both parties did better than they had done in 2015 at calling roving Kippers home.

What happened in 2019? Those bars look pretty big, but I wonder if there’s less there than meets the eye. Over and over again, we’ve seen what are at first blush fairly huge movements of voters, between General Election and the following European election, followed at the subsequent General Election by an equally huge movement in the opposite direction; the burden of proof is surely on anyone maintaining that this time is different. So, this time, Labour and Tory vote shares – having gone up by 8.9 million and 9.8 million between 2014 and 2017 – are right back down again, dropping by 10.6 million and 12.1 million respectively; so too the British nationalist vote share, having gone down by 4.3 million between 2014 and 2017 – is up again, by 5.2 million. There’s a story, perhaps, in the ‘extra’ four million votes that the big parties lost, and the extra 0.9 million British nationalist votes; polarisation is increasing, even if it’s only at the margins. But it is at the margins – once again, there are some relatively small voter movements which have been made to look much bigger by the one big movement, the (usual) slump in turnout. (The Brexit Party topped the polls with 5.2 million votes; a party gaining that many votes would have been in a narrow third place at the General Elections of 1997 and 2001, and a firm fourth place in every other General  Election from 1983 to 2010.) There’s also a story in the results for the Lib Dems, who – for the first time ever – appear to have been seen as one of the ‘alternative’, ‘insurgent’ parties, and actually increased their vote as against the General Election; they put on a million votes as compared to 2017. But, just as the crash in votes for Labour and the Tories needs to be set against the unusually high votes for those two parties in 2017, the Lib Dems’ result needs to be set against their own crash in 2015 and their non-recovery in 2017: their total of 3.4 million votes, although higher than the party’s vote in those two General Elections, is lower than any other General Election that the party has ever contested. To find a General Election vote lower than 2017’s 2.4 million you need to go back to 1970, and even that represented a higher proportion of the (then) electorate than the 2017 result (5.4% vs 5.1%); in those terms Farron plumbed depths that the Liberals hadn’t seen since the 1950s and Jo Grimond’s leadership. All credit to the Lib Dems for their outstandingly clear – if opportunistic and misleading – positioning in the Euros; arguably they’ve reaped a deserved reward. But it’s also arguable that there’s only so low that the Lib Dem vote can go – Farron’s 2.4 million was lower than the party’s vote in four of the previous eight European elections. Really, after 2017 the only way was up – just as, for both the Tories and Labour, the only way was down.

What of the narratives? What of Theresa May’s Brexit strategy hitting the rocks and Farage moving in to pick up the survivors? What of Labour’s Brexit fence-sitting and the Lib Dems’ positioning as the party of Remain – what of the potential Remain Alliance, the Lib Dems and Greens piling up the votes while Labour’s vote plummeted? I think you’ll find it’s a bit less exciting than that. The 2019 results showed both Labour and the Tories doing a bit worse than might have been expected, the Brexit Party doing a bit better (at the expense of the Tories) and the Lib Dems doing substantially better (at the expense of both Labour and the Tories). But they’re not wildly out of line with earlier trends. Perhaps polarisation is increasing, but only at the margins: the main trend at this European election was abstention, just like it always is. Vote flows are a pain to model, but arithmetic is a limiting factor. The Labour and Tory votes were down (relative to 2017) by ten and twelve million respectively; the total votes for the Lib Dems plus the Greens, on one hand, and BXP plus UKIP and all the minor British nationalist parties, on the other, were 5.4 million and 5.8 million respectively.

What that means is that, in and of themselves, these figures don’t give any reason to believe that voters won’t be returning en masse to Labour and the Tories at the next high-turnout election – just as they did in 2005, 2010 and 2015, as well as 2017. In particular, if the next election follows the pattern of 2017, with a highly polarised campaign and a focus on getting out the vote – and why wouldn’t it? – we could easily see a similar bulge in the Labour vote. And if that’s followed by yet another slump – complete with the obligatory prophecies of doom and calls for Corbyn’s resignation – at the European elections in 2024, that’s a price I’d be prepared to pay.

For he is good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly

My cat lies to me. I find this interesting.

My cat – our cat, rather – generally eats tinned food, but occasionally we give him cat biscuits. Not very often, and certainly not often enough as far as he’s concerned. He knows where they’re kept; when hungry will often sit in front of the biscuit cupboard giving it meaningful looks, even if he’s got a bowl full of food.

That’s not the interesting thing, though. What’s interesting is that, on several occasions, he’s sat by the back door and mewed to be let out, only to turn back and head for the biscuit cupboard when I open the door for him. The thinking is fairly straightforward, if you think of it as thinking – it goes roughly like this:

This‘ll get his attention!

But there’s an awful lot going on under the surface, particularly when you think that we’re dealing with a cat. How do you get to that thought? Or, if ascribing thoughts to a cat is a step too far, how do you get to that action? It seems to me that any creature capable of doing the back-door feint would have to go through something like this series of steps:

1. Move (instinctively, or at any rate unreflectively) towards the back door when wanting to go out
2. Move (unreflectively) towards the biscuit cupboard when fancying a biscuit or two
3. Observe that move 1 is usually successful
4. Observe that move 2 is usually unsuccessful
5. Analyse events involved in successful outcomes to strategies 1 and 2
6. Identify common factor, viz. getting a human’s attention
7. Reflect on goals of move 1 and move 2
8. Identify common intermediate goal of getting human’s attention
9. Redefine move 1 as move which achieves intermediate goal
10. Plan to make move 2 more effective by preceding it with move 1, thus getting human’s attention before expressing interest in biscuit cupboard

I don’t know about you, but that strikes me as pretty sophisticated thinking, particularly if we assume (as I think we must) that none of these thought processes are conscious.

Cats: they’re brighter than they look. Or rather, they really are as bright as they look.

Come write me down

There’s a particular form of serendipity that comes from learning something in one area which resolves a puzzle, or fills a gap in your thinking, in another area entirely. It’s all the more serendipitous – and pleasant – if you didn’t realise the gap was there.

This line of thought was prompted by this piece on the excellent FactCheck blog, which made me realise that I’d always been a bit dubious about the notion of “policy-based evidence”. OK, it’s a neat reversal – and all too often people who say they’re making evidence-based policy are doing nothing of the sort – but is the alternative really policy-based evidence? Doesn’t that amount to accusing them of just making it up?

Thanks to Cathy Newman at FactCheck, I realise now that I was looking at this question the wrong way. Actually “policy-based evidence” means something quite specific, and it hasn’t (necessarily) got anything to do with outright fraud. Watch closely:

Iain Duncan Smith has been celebrating the government’s benefits cap. Part of the welfare reform bill, state handouts will be capped at £26,000 a year so that “no family on benefits will earn more than the average salary of a working family,” i.e. £35,000 a year before tax.
…
Today, the work and pensions secretary was delighted to cite figures released by his department which he said were evidence that the policy is already driving people back into work. Of 58,000 claimants sent a letter saying their benefits were to be capped, 1,700 subsequently moved into work. Another 5,000 said they wanted support to get back into work, according to the figures.

OK, this is fairly simplistic thinking – We did a new thing! Something happened! Our thing worked! – but it’s something like a legitimate way to analyse what’s going on, surely. It may need more sophisticated handling, but the evidence is there, isn’t it?

Well, no, it isn’t.

In order to know how effective the policy had been, we would need to know the rate at which people on benefits worth more than £26,000 went into work before the letter announcing the changes was sent, and compare it to after the letter was received. But those figures aren’t available.
…
“[These figures do] not reveal the effect of the policy,” Robert Joyce, senior researcher at the Institute for Fiscal Studies told us. Mr Joyce went on: “Indeed, this number is consistent with the policy having had no effect at all. Over any period, some fraction of an unemployed group will probably move into work, regardless of whether a benefits cap is about to be implemented. The number of people who moved into work as a result of the policy is 1,700 minus the number of people who would have moved into work anyway. We do not know the latter number, so we do not know the effect of the policy.”

The number of people, in a given group of claimants, who signed off over a given period is data. Collecting data is the easy part: take five minutes and you can do it now if you like. (Number of objects on your desk: data. Number of stationary cars visible from your window: data. Number of heartbeats in five minutes: data.) It’s only when the data’s been analysed – it’s only when we’ve compared the data with other conditions, compared variations in the data with variations in those conditions and eliminated chance fluctuations – that data turns into evidence. The number of people who moved into work as a result of the policy is 1,700 minus the number of people who would have moved into work anyway: that number would be evidence, if we had it (or had reliable means of estimating it). The figure of 1,700 is data.

One final quote:

A spokesman for the Department for Work and Pensions said: “The Secretary of State believes that the benefits cap is having an effect.”

Et voilà: policy-based evidence.

Let memory fade

It’s a small enough thing, but this is profoundly depressing.

Of 360 posts to be cut, 120 are from Future Media & Technology, up to 90 from BBC Vision, up to 39 from Audio & Music, 17 from Children’s, 24 from Sport and 70 in journalism from national news and non-news posts on regional news sites.

Outlining its plans today, the BBC said it will meet with commercial rivals twice a year to clarify its online plans, increase links to external sites to generate 22m referrals within three years and will halve the number of top level domains it operates.

The corporation also outlined five editorial priorities for BBC Online and clarified its remit. The BBC aims to meet all these objectives, and make 360 posts redundant, by 2013. The restructured BBC Online department will consist of 10 products including News, iPlayer, CBeebies and Search. Editorial will be refined, with fewer News blogs, and local sites will be stripped of non-news content. Blast, Switch and h2g2 are among the sites to be ditched. Other closures will include the standalone websites for the BBC Radio 5 Live 606 phone-in show and 1Xtra, 5 Live Sports Extra, 6 Music and Radio 7 digital stations.

In all, the BBC is pledging to close half of its 400 top level domains – with 180 to be gone ahead of schedule later this year.

(That’s top level directories, people – the word that goes after “bbc.co.uk/”. The top level domain is “.uk”.)

The BBC’s Web presence is vast, sprawling and a bit anarchic – a quality it has in the past shared with the groups of people responsible for it. (Back in 2002 I made a concerted effort to get some writing work from the technology bit of BBC Online, a task made more difficult by the impossibility of finding any personal contact information on the site. Sustained and ingenious googling eventually rewarded me with a name and a phone number(!). I rang it and spoke to the right person, only to be told that he’d moved to BBC History and was about to move on again. On the other hand, before he left he did commission me to write an 12,000-word timeline of English history from the Romans to Victoria, so it wasn’t as if no good came of it.) There is an awful lot of good stuff there, much of it user-generated, and lots of little online communities that have grown up to support it. And yes, the bits that the corporation pay for are ultimately paid for out of the licence fee, meaning that they don’t have to make money and hence have an advantage over commercial rivals which do. This is a good thing: there are lots of worthwhile things that can be done very easily with a small subsidy, but can only be done with great difficulty, if at all, on a profit-making basis. There is no earthly reason why a corporation which doesn’t have to make money – and can afford to chuck a few grand around here or there – should behave as if it did and couldn’t. No reason, apart from political reasons. So now BBC Online are going to have a “clarified remit”, and they’re going to show their plans to commercial rivals (!) twice a year (!!), and 360 creative people are going to walk.

What really gives this announcement the smell of wanton vandalism – wilful and ignorant destruction – is the part about all the sites that are going to close. Not the fact that they keep getting the terminology wrong – that’s a minor niggle – but the fact that all these sites aren’t going to be kept up as static pages; they’re not even going to be archived. Like all those old Doctor Whos and Not Only… But Alsos, they’re just going to disappear. (All except H2G2, which is going to be sold – news which leaves me feeling relieved but slightly baffled.) Two cheers for the Graun, which put up the whole list but couldn’t resist playing it for laughs – “Ooh look, there’s a site for Bonekickers – that was rubbish, wasn’t it? Let’s see, have they got Howard’s Way?” There isn’t a Howard’s Way site. There is, however, Voices, Nation on Film, the inexhaustible Cult and a curious online mind-mapping thing called Pinball. Check them out while you can. And do take a look at WW2 People’s War, a truly extraordinary work of amateur oral history, which contains… well, here it is in its own words:

The BBC’s WW2 People’s War project ran from June 2003 to January 2006. The aim of the project was to collect the memories of people who had lived and fought during World War Two on a website; these would form the basis of a digital archive which would provide a learning resource for future generations.

The target audience, people who could remember the war, was at least 60 years old. Anyone who had served in the armed forces during the war was, at the start of the project, at least 75. Most of them had no experience of the internet. Yet over the course of the project, over 47,000 stories and 14,000 images were gathered. A national story gathering campaign was launched, where ‘associate centres’ such as libraries, museums and learning centres, ran events to helped gather stories. Many hundereds of volunteers, many attached to local BBC radio stations, assisted in this.

The resulting archive houses all of these memories. These stories don’t give a precise overview of the war, or an accurate list of dates and events; they are a record of how a generation remembered the war, 60 years of more after the events, and remain in the Archive as they were contributed. The Archive is not a historical record of events, a collection of government or BBC information, recordings or documents relating to the war.

47,000 stories! I’ll declare an interest here: the site also contains “historical fact files on 144 key events”, about 40 of which I wrote. (I found the other day that 16 of them have also migrated to the main WWII page, where I guess they will hang on after the cull.) I hate seeing my work go offline, but that’s not the main thing. The main thing is that I know how much work and care went into each of my pieces; the thought of multiplying that by a factor of, well, 47,000, boggles me. And then to snuff all of that out for the sake of saving a few gigabytes of disk space – or, more realistically, for the sake of making the BBC look as if it’s not competing unfairly with its commercial rivals – beggars belief.

Perish the thought that something hugely worthwhile and massively popular, which ITV and Sky can’t do and don’t want to do, should get done for no other reason than that the BBC can do it and do it well. Perish the thought that public money should be spent on capturing irreplaceable memories and assembling them into “a digital archive which would provide a learning resource for future generations”. Perish the thought that a public service media organisation should actually provide a public service. Utter, wanton vandalism.

Later on we’ll conspire

Answer me this: after receiving gifts on Christmas Day, what is it that children proverbially do with them within 24 hours? Do they (a) break them or (b) give them away?

Fairly straightforward, I think you’ll agree. Now let me put to you a second and superficially unrelated question. When a man loves a woman, as we know, he can’t think of nothing else; he will, indeed, trade the world for the good thing he’s found. But if he should happen to entrust his heart, metaphorically, to someone undeserving of his affections, what is the uncaring female proverbially said to do with it? Does she (a) break his heart or (b) give his heart away to someone else (this could perhaps take the form of fixing him up with a friend)?

I think it’s clear that option (a) is appropriate in both cases. So if one were to write a Christmas song likening these two situations, it would be sheer perversity to write anything other than

Last Christmas, I gave you my heart
And the very next day you broke it

See? See? It makes sense now! Honestly, if they’d got that right in the first place it could have been a big hit.

Update It has been brought to my notice that there are strong reasons to object, even in theory, to the notion of a daily round of Christmas-themed celebration. The obvious objection to a daily Christmas is that this would rapidly have adverse effects in terms of exhaustion, obesity, alcohol poisoning and so forth. However, these effects could easily be mitigated, or even eliminated, by simply varying one’s level of indulgence in Christmas cheer and jollity, over the weeks and months of perpetual Yule. A less tractable problem is presented by the irreducible necessity of preparation. When, under the daily-Christmas regime, would any of us have time to buy food, presents, cards, bottles of winter ale, bags of Bombay mix and other such essential accoutrements of the season? I feel that this objection has considerable force, and would therefore propose that any future songwriter working in this thematic area should write something along the lines of

I wish it could be Christmas every other day

Once again, I think you’ll agree that this would represent a considerable improvement.

Ho ho ho.

Writing frightening verse

The papers have been all over Will Reader‘s presentation at the British Association Festival of Science; the Guardian alone has run two separate stories by James Randerson, headed “Social networking sites don’t deepen friendships” and, more bluntly, “Warning: you can’t make real friends online”.

I’ve been socialising online for over ten years now, and I’m pretty sure I’ve made (and lost) some real friends in that time, so I think that second headline is a bit silly. More to the point, I think presenting the story that way risks creating controversy rather than debate: I know that I’ve made friends online, you know that they can’t have been real friends, we shout at each other in comments boxes for a few days and entertainment results. (Possibly. Traffic results, anyway.)

What Reader is reporting is more nuanced and more tentative than that. From the Graun‘s story (the one with the ‘warning’ headline):

The team asked more than 200 people to fill in questionnaires about their online networking, asking for example how many online friends they had, how many of these were close friends and how many they had met face to face. The team found that although the sites allowed contact with hundreds of acquaintances, as with conventional friendship networks, people tend to have around five close friends.

Ninety per cent of contacts whom the subjects regarded as close friends were people they had met face to face. “People see face to face contact as being absolutely imperative in forming close friendships,” added Dr Reader. He told the British Association Festival of Science in York that social networking sites allow people to broaden their list of nodding acquaintances because staying in touch online is easy. “What social network sites can do is decrease the cost of maintaining and forming these social networks because we can post information to multiple people,” he said.

But to develop a real friendship we need to see that the other person is trustworthy, said Dr Reader. “What we need is to be absolutely sure that a person is really going to invest in us, is really going to be there for us when we need them … It’s very easy to be deceptive on the internet.”

The results are interesting – although ‘more than 200’ sounds like a pretty small sample – and Reader’s interpretation seems pretty reasonable. But I part company with him in the last couple of sentences quoted here: the major problem with online sociality is not the lack of identity verification. I’ve been on a couple of mailing lists for several years; there are fifty or sixty people I’ve known, online, for longer than I’ve known many of my real-world friends. We use our real names on those lists; we talk about work, family and relationships; we occasionally arrange meetings.

All in all, the scope for deliberate deception is very limited. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t call every one of those fifty or sixty people a close friend. The point isn’t that online relationships are a fraudulent imitation of emotionally real relationships, which are demanding and require commitment; the point is that online relationships have their own emotional reality, which is relatively uncommitted and relatively undemanding. There’s a broader truth to Clay Shirky’s pessimistic comments about the Howard Dean campaign, which I wrote about back here:

the pleasures of life online are precisely the way they provide a respite from the vagaries of the real world. … the difference between “would you” and “will you” is enormous — when “would you use this product?” changes to “will you use it?”, user behaviour frequently changes dramatically. “Would you vote for Howard Dean?” and “Will you vote for Howard Dean?” are two different questions, and it may be that a lot of people who “would” vote for Dean, in some hypothetical world where you could vote in the same way you can make a political donation on Amazon, didn’t actually vote for him when it meant skipping dinner with friends to drive downtown in the freezing cold and venture into some church basement with people who might prefer some other candidate to Dean.

Similarly, with the best will in the world there’s a difference between Would you put yourself out for a friend? and Will you put yourself out for a friend? – particularly when you’ve never actually met the friend in question. In other words, the point is precisely not that we can’t be absolutely sure that a person is really going to invest in us [and] is really going to be there for us when we need them: the point is that we can’t assume that those two things go together. This disjuncture between emotional investment and binding, push-comes-to-shove mutual obligation isn’t entirely new – think of penfriends or AA groups – but I think it’s fair to say that the spread of online sociality has made it a much more widespread experience.

What’s going on – or rather, what’s specifically not going on – is summed up by the phenomenologist Alfred Schutz, quoted here by Ulises Mejias:

In order to observe a lived experience of my own, I must attend to it reflectively. By no means, however, need I attend reflectively to my lived experience of your lived experience. On the contrary, by merely “looking” I can grasp even those of your lived experiences which you have not yet noticed and which are for you still prephenomenal and undifferentiated. This means that, whereas I can observe my own lived experiences only after they are over and done with, I can observe yours as they actually take place. This in turn implies that you and I are in a specific sense “simultaneous,” that we “coexist,” that our respective stream of consciousness intersect

Simultaneity, the ability to experience our consciousness in parallel, is a defining feature of face-to-face interactions. The outcome of this inter-subjectivity is not that we are able to “read” the other person’s mind. It is simply a realization that ‘I am experiencing a fellow human being.’

I suspect that this experience of continuous mutual presence – what Schutz called the ‘We-relationship’ – is the distinguishing feature of close friendships. It’s a relatively rare experience – and social networking software doesn’t make it any less so.

One final thought. What would a collective We-relationship – the experience of the consciousness of time passing, of an event unfolding, shared and reflected within a group of people – look like and feel like? Something like a really good meeting? (Physical presence, again, is hard to do without. I’ve attended multi-site Access Grid meetings; it’s great being able to see people’s faces, but it’s impossible to meet anybody’s eye.) Or something like this?

Modern religions demand ‘belief’, an act of the imagination; traditional ritual didn’t need to demand any such thing as it offered direct experience of ‘god’, ie, of society, of social solidarity.

But you don’t know me

I don’t know Tilda Swinton. At all.

There are, of course, many people I don’t know; the list could be extended more or less indefinitely, potentially forming the basis for a rather unchallenging game (“Yeah? Well, I don’t know Charles Kennedy, Jason Orange or Hufty from the Word…”) The point about Tilda Swinton in particular is that, if you stopped me in the street and asked me if I knew her, I’ve got a horrible feeling I’d say Yes. (At least, I used to… Well, when I say ‘know’, I met… actually no, I never actually met… sorry, what was the question?)

Obviously, the image of anyone you’ve seen a lot on the screen can get painted on the back of your mind, to the point where they seem as familiar as a friend or neighbour (“In the street people come up to Rita/It’s Barbara Knox really but they’re still glad to meet her” – Kevin Seisay). I suppose something similar’s going on here, assisted in this case by the fact that I was at the same university as Tilda Swinton for at least one year; I even saw her in a college theatre production once, playing opposite a friend of a friend of mine. (I think. It may have been someone else.)

I’ve never even had any contact with Tilda Swinton, if it comes to that. I did once try to get in touch with her, for a series of brief interviews we were running in Red Pepper at the time. A friend gave me the number of a friend, who she thought had known her and might be able to put me in touch. I duly phoned the friend’s friend, who was a bit taken aback and suggested that if I wanted to speak to Tilda Swinton I should probably go through Tilda Swinton’s management. Nothing ever came of it.

In short, whatever fantasies I may half-consciously harbour, the real world is unanimous on this one: I don’t know Tilda Swinton, at all. I’ve got a friend who’s got a friend who may once have known her, and I had a friend at college who had a friend who may once have acted with her, but none of that adds up to anything.

Or it didn’t, until LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is a social networking site for people who want to make their social network work; it’s designed to enable members to exploit “the professional relationships you already have”. You join LinkedIn by writing a ‘profile’ (a c.v., more or less). You then ‘build your network’ by exchanging emails with existing members of LinkedIn who you already know; the software helpfully provides lists of LinkedIn members who are, or were, at your workplace, former workplace or university. When your emailed invitation has been accepted, the user you invited becomes one of your ‘connections’, while you become one of theirs. Ultimately you end up with a network “consist[ing] of your connections, your connections’ connections, and the people they know, linking you to thousands of qualified professionals”. ‘Thousands’ is no exaggeration: after a month’s membership I’ve got 41 ‘trusted friends and colleagues’, and many LinkedIn users have five or ten times as many. It adds up, or rather multiplies out: if you count “[my] connections’ connections, and the people they know”, I’m connected to over 200,000 people. Woohoo.

There are two main ways to make money out of social software – adding advertising or charging a fee for a premium service – and I’m generally in favour of the latter. This is the route LinkedIn have chosen. Annoyingly, the result in this case is not simply that fee-paying users benefit but that free riders are penalised. The profiles of users outside your network are only shown in full if you’ve got a paid-for account, which can be frustrating. Worse, the highest echelons of power-networking users can opt out of receiving common-or-garden email invitations, so that they can only be contacted using the network’s ‘InMail’ facility – which is, of course, only available on paid-for accounts. There’s being linked in, and then there’s being linked in. I suppose this says something about the nature of the service they’re providing: a professional social network is one with lots of people excluded from it.

The bigger question is what LinkedIn actually provides (apart from the warm glow of knowing that somebody else has been excluded). I wrote last year that tagging, for me, is more an elaborate way of building a mind-map than anything to do with bookmarking pages and finding them again; I’m interested to see that Philipp has reached a similar conclusion (“Let’s put it straight: Using tags to find my bookmarks later just doesn’t work. I give up.”) Similarly, I suspect that one of the main benefits of LinkedIn – at least for us non-power-networkers – is the capacity it gives you to contemplate the scale and plenitude of your own network: all those people I know, sort of! I mean, I know someone who knows them, or else there’s a friend of a friend who knows them… So I sort of know them, really, don’t I, just a bit?

But Tilda Swinton’s not on LinkedIn. So I don’t know her at all.

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One last column, from right back in 1998. I had actually worked in IT until a couple of years before; I think my sympathies are clear.

BUSINESS MANAGERS are never short of advice these days. Any large bookshop has several yards of books devoted to Self Help for Managers: Feel the Stress and Do it Anyway; Meditations for Women who Manage Too Much; Men Are From Mars, the One-Minute Manager is from Venus… However, managers haven’t had any advice from the best source of all: the IT department. Not, that is, until now. I will shortly be bringing out a compendium of tricky real-life management problems with IT-friendly solutions, Just Don’t, All Right? Here’s a selection.

PROBLEM: You are the national sales manager for a major distributor of synthetic insoles. You wish to rationalise the structure of the sales force by cutting out a level of management. There are four levels; the top level consists of two meaningless jobs with grand-sounding titles, created specially for the previous MD’s wastrel half-brother and his friend Simon. However, Simon’s wife is currently expecting their third child; moreover, she is an old friend of the receptionist at the office next door, who often lets you use their car park when your space gets taken. What do you do?

SOLUTION: Remove a level in the reporting structure? Are you mad? Have you any idea how many systems that will affect? Dedicated IT professionals worked long hours to design systems around the current management structure, with all the job titles and reporting relationships carefully hard-coded. Are you going to throw that work back in their faces? Besides, redeveloping all those systems would take approximately… let’s see… eighteen months, and that’s with everyone working flat out… factor in development work, allow for holidays and you’re talking three years easily. Maybe four. And by that time you’d probably want the old structure back, so it’s actually quicker this way.

PROBLEM: Your company has merged with Acme Insoles, previously your biggest rival. Acme management wants the new company to standardise on the Acme IT system, which offers a thin-client VR interface to a Web-enabled object-based next-generation system running on a wide-area network-centric protocol-independent massively-parallel cluster array. Your operations people argue strongly against this, on the grounds that your own system is ‘loads better’. Acme management took you out to lunch the other day, which was nice. On the other hand, they did insist on going to that posh Italian restaurant, and you missed out on a session down the pub with the ops. Who should you believe?

SOLUTION: The ops, every time. They should know, it’s their job. Besides, all that wide-object massively-independent stuff is all very well, but who’s going to get out of bed when it falls over at 2 a.m. on a Sunday? The ops, that’s who. Antagonise them at your peril.

PROBLEM: The year 2000 is fifteen months away. When you asked your IT director, he told you that all your systems were millennium-compliant; however, immediately afterwards he took early retirement and opened a greengrocer’s. When you went past the other day there was a sign in the window saying

All ‘Fruit’ Is ‘Guaranteed’ Millenium-Bug ‘Free’!

Should you be worried?

SOLUTION: The use of bad English on a greengrocer’s sign is not in itself worrying, or indeed surprising. You may even be able to turn it to your advantage: is there a gap in the market for an scrupulously literate greengrocer? If on the other hand you are not expecting a sizeable lump sum from your current employer, you may wish to consider bar work. (Note: avoid pubs with computerised tills).

PROBLEM: You are having trouble motivating your IT staff. You have tried departmental meetings, informal group chats, fun events after work, lunchtime quizzes, motivational posters, Dress Down days, Dress Up days, Tidy Desk days and Work Normally days. Nothing works. What should you do?

SOLUTION: Try money. Or holidays. Or, no, wait, money and holidays. And shorter hours. Let’s see… more money, more holidays, shorter hours and paid overtime. And free beer. That ought to do it.

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Another from 1999, this time from Ned Ludd’s column in NTexplorer. Bill Gates’s book Business @ the speed of thought had just come out. (No, I don’t remember anything about it either.)

SINCE THE SUCCESS of my first book, the Superhighway Less Travelled, rumours of a sequel have been rife. I’m happy to say that ‘Ludd 2.0’ is finally available. It’s called Thinking at the speed of business, and your local bookstore may still have some signed copies. (They certainly had a few left when I went.)

It’s a 300-page book, so I can’t do justice to the full complexity of the ideas I presented in it here – not unless I had a double page at least. (No chance – Ed.) Here, by way of a taster, are some of the key concepts from the book they’re already calling a paradigm-busting block-shifter.

Digital nervous system. Not everyone realises this, but the information which is held on computers is actually encoded in the form of digits – that’s numbers to you and me. One and zero are the numbers most commonly used, but that’s just down to programming tradition. Many people are unhappy about computers having all that information, and so they try and beat the system – they spell their names different ways, they leave the ‘optional information’ boxes blank, sometimes they don’t even register their software! What I say is, computers already have so much information about you, what does it hurt to give them a bit more? Besides, the computers don’t care about your information – to them it’s just ones and zeroes, remember? There really is no need to get nervous about the digital system.

Working Web-style. Go into any large company, ask twenty different knowledge workers what they’ve found on the Web recently, and you’ll probably get thrown out by Security. Not only that, but you’ll have wasted the best part of a morning. And they’d all lie to you anyway, so what would be the point? Give people Web access, and you’ll find that from then on they’re working in a different way – a more secretive way, very often. Take their Web access away, on the other hand, and they’ll leave. The Web, in today’s business world, is a chaotic strange attractor; in other words, it’s a quantum leap which will transform the working environment for generations yet unborn, probably. I expect it’ll work out all right.

Information on your fingers. From the teletype to the keyboard; from the keyboard to the mouse; from the mouse to those funny-shaped mice with the little wheely thing in the middle – a whole series of quantum-busting paradigm-leaps, and every one of them has depended on the human finger. Several fingers, in fact. Developments in VR technology which are already being written about will take this process a revolutionary step further, with the advent of a tactile user interface or TUI. Imagine being able to reach out and use your hand to smooth the curve of a graph, align a heading, massage the data. No, I can’t imagine it either, but it’s certainly worth thinking about.

The speed of business. Go into any large company – you shouldn’t have so many problems with Security this time round – and see how quickly things are getting done. That’s right: not very quickly at all. Most office workers spend significant amounts of time doing what time and motion experts classify as ‘chatting’. Approaches to chatting differ, but the overall chat quotient (OCQ) is thought to be remarkably constant as between the three main sociological categories of office worker: the Infuriatingly Calm Slacker (ICS), the Crisis-Driven Maniac (CDM), and the Manager (BOF). The moral is clear. The true speed of business is a leisurely speed, and there’s really no call to speed it up – I mean, who wants to work around the clock anyway? Let the computers sort it out – we’ve got homes to go to.

Thought-provoking stuff, I think you’ll agree. In all modesty, I think this book could get me recognised as the most influential business author since Tom Peters, or possibly Napoleon. Already I’m hotly tipped for this year’s award for the business writer who makes the most use of scientific terms without knowing what they mean. That’s what I call a paradigm shift!

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After all those columns from 1999, here’s one from last month. (And then I’ll get back to proper blogging, probably.) They say you should write about what you know; what I knew, that particular weekend, was beer. ‘Dave Bitzer’ doesn’t represent anyone in particular. Years ago I invented a consultancy called Gargle Bitzer Helipad, and I’ve used various Gargles and Bitzers ever since then to stand in for different talking heads and company spokespeople. Usually I make them talk rubbish, for obvious reasons, but in this one I think Dave talks a lot of sense.

I RAN INTO my old friend and commenting partner Dave Bitzer the other day at local beer tasting event Pale And Bitter (And Slightly Sour). I’d worked my way through the milds by this point and started on the fruit beers. In retrospect I think the second blackcurrant flavoured porter may have been a mistake.

“Dave!” I put it to him. “How’s it going! How is it going? How’s life in the… well, you know.”

I could see that my incisive style of questioning had caught Dave unprepared. For a moment, in fact, he got so confused that he said “Hello” and then turned his back on me – very much as if he had said “Goodbye”! Pausing only to sample the ginger-flavoured pale ale, I hastened to set his mind at rest.

“Dave,” I put it to him, placing a friendly arm around his shoulders. “David, David, Davey Davey Dave. It’s like this. I mean, is it like this? That’s the thing, you see – is it like this or not? I mean, if you spend your time reading about Web 2.0 on blogs and podcasts… and, and blogcasts…”

Dave said that people who did that should probably get out more, although in my case he’d make an exception. I thought that was a very good point.

“That’s a very good point,” I put it to him. “Thing is, if you read the Webby, Web things, lots of stuff. Lots of stuff happening. Reminds me of the dot boom. Is this another dot boom boom, Dave? Wait a minute, that’s not right. Is this… another… dot dot boom, de-boom boom boom. That’s what I say.”

Dave gave a heavy sigh, clearly impressed with the cogency of my argument. OK, he said, look at it this way. He tore the top layer of paper from a beermat and drew a cross on the exposed surface. So here’s your basic quadrant, he said. You can call this one –

“I’ll call it Henry,” I put it to him.

Dave sighed again, obviously deeply impressed. OK, he said, here’s Henry the Quadrant. Left to right we’ve got usefulness – is an application idea actually useful or not? Top to bottom, marketability, or whether or not you can get people worked up about it. We can rule out a couple of combinations straight away. ‘Dull but useful’ is an uphill battle for any company (apart from companies that have a large installed base they can sell to), and ‘dull and useless’ is best avoided. Clearly, ‘useful and exciting’ is what most developers are aiming for. But here’s the problem. How can developers actually come up with something that’s both exciting and useful? Look at the way we live already – we wear clothes, we drive cars, we synchronise calendars, we download MP3s, we shop around to get the best price for DVDs and don’t worry too much about the Hong Kong customs stamp when they arrive. It all works, basically. So people end up going for “exciting but useless”, and you get applications like Twitter – sounds great, if you like the idea of reading other people’s diaries in real time, but it’s not much use if you’ve actually got a life. Speaking of which, he added cryptically, then turned to look around the room, avoiding my gaze completely. I was touched by this mark of respect and put my arm round his shoulders again.

“So… So, so, so, Dave,” I put it to him. “Tell me, Dave. Is this another dot boom boom?”

Dave made a strange respectful growling noise. Not really, he said, because… oh, never mind. Look, it’s as if a brewery had to keep coming up with something new, and after a while they found they’d done every kind of beer that was actually drinkable, but they just kept going anyway and turned out, I don’t know, ginger-flavoured pale ale or blackcurrant-flavoured porter. There’s just not a lot going on, and the stuff that gets the hype isn’t really worth it. That’s why I’m here, actually.

“What, to check out the brewing… trendy… trendy trends?” I put it to him.

No, Dave said – to get drunk. What do you recommend?

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More from the last century. This one had a wider audience than many of my columns, as it appeared in Computing. I wrote five of these columns for the paper in the first half of 1999, working on a rota with four or five other writers, after which they had a big reorganisation and dropped the column. It’s nice to feel one’s made a difference.

This column’s dated surprisingly well, although the obvious anachronisms are now harder to spot. The only bits that have a really odd ring are the bit about ‘free Internet services’ and, ironically, the reference to dialup access ‘costing you money the whole time’. The economics are different these days.

THE CURRENT explosion in free Internet services is sure to create a whole new generation of users: keen, enthusiastic, ignorant. With these lucky people in mind, I’ve put together a brief Guide to the Net.

What is the Internet?

The World Wide Internet (or ‘Web’ for short) was originally set up as a means for American military commanders to communicate with one another following a nuclear holocaust. It was thought vital to national security to assure the continuing availability of chat rooms, games of noughts and crosses and, of course, ‘adult’ material. Although the Cold War ended some time ago in a no-score draw, by some oversight the authorities failed to dismantle the International Net (or ‘w.w.w.’ for short). Many new technologies have sprung up to threaten the continuing viability of the ‘Web’ – the Sega Megadrive, Rabbit phones, the Microsoft Network – but it continues to hold its own. Indeed, some experts believe that it has grown within the last three to five years – and that this upward trend may continue!

Why is it so popular?

The popularity of the ‘Net’ is undoubtedly due to the unparallelled range of information and services which it can offer: the latest news from Kosovo, hardware specifications for everything from a Furby to a Happy Fun Ball, and, of course, material for ‘adult’ eyes. And that’s without mentioning the vast communications possibilities opened up by the electronic ‘news’ and ‘mail’ services which form an integral part of the ‘Interweb’, although it’s a different part from the part that we’ve been talking about up to now. Mail (or ‘email’ for short) quite literally shrinks the world – when you first got an email address, who would have thought you’d soon be getting business propositions from people in Taiwan? Not you, I’ll bet. As for ‘news’, don’t get hung up on that stale old idea of new information presented in an unbiased manner – most of the ‘news groups’ are full of ancient gossip and incomprehensible insults. And they’re all the better for it!

What about the…

Many news groups are entirely dedicated to the provision of material designed for an ‘adult’ audience.

Just checking. So, what are the drawbacks of ‘Net life’?

Net life is a lot like real life: you meet people, you talk about things, you make friends, you fall out, you insult them in public, they refuse to speak to you, you realise you’ve gone too far and try to apologise, it’s too late, nobody ever writes to you again except people in Taiwan with business propositions. The main difference is that when you’re on the Net it’s costing you money the whole time. On the other hand, how many people do you know from Taiwan?

What about the dangers of addiction?

Net addiction – or ‘Web addiction’ for short – is a real danger for today’s ‘knowledge workers’ (people who really have to work at it to acquire knowledge). Sufferers become distracted and irritable when they’ve been ‘off the line’ for too bloody long – often they can’t even complete a simple English, oh, what’s the point anyway? Look, I’ll just check my mail, all right? I won’t be on for long.

Does the Net interfere with users’ social lives?

What was that? Sorry, I wasn’t listening.

What are the major growth areas in Web use?

The Web is international – hence the name! This means that the only laws which apply on the Web are laws which apply all over the world. This is good news for casinos, which have expanded far beyond their original base in the North of England, as well as for providers of material intended for customers who can be described as ‘adults’. Another recent growth area, also taking advantage of the Net’s ‘offshore’ existence in ‘cyberspace’, has been drug trafficking (or ‘e-commerce’).

What is the significance of encryption?

Nfx n fvyyl dhrfgvba…

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As a sort of companion-piece to the last one, here’s a column from September 1999.

THIS MONTH this page is given over to an interview with a pioneering futurologist: Michel de Nostredame. De Nostredame – more widely known as ‘Nostradamus’ – has had a huge influence on the very course of life on this planet itself, and on the development of the computer industry. I was particularly curious to hear Nostradamus’ interpretation of recent events, which have damaged his reputation in some quarters.

So we’re still here, then.

Can I make one thing very clear right at the outset? When soldiers cross the burning river, only a young Pope can hold the jam.

Do you think you could make that even clearer?

Sorry – force of habit. What I meant to say was, I never actually said the world was going to end on the fourth of July 1999.

What about “a creature with two heads will be born the day the eagle celebrates his festival”?

Well, there you go – that could mean just about anything. The Yanks aren’t the only people who make a fuss about eagles, are they? Besides, I didn’t specify a year. I didn’t specify a century, for that matter.

Elsewhere you did refer to July 1999, though. ‘Year 1999, seven months, from the sky will come a great king of terror to revive the king of the Mongols.’

For a start, it’s not the king of the Mongols: it’s the king of Angoulême, which is a region in France. People keep assuming I wrote in anagrams – as if my verses weren’t incomprehensible enough to start with! If I’d meant ‘Mongols’ I would have written ‘Mongols’, I can assure you.

But Angoulême doesn’t have a king.

That’s easy for you to say. I was writing four hundred years ago, remember? Anything could have happened in that time. Then there’s this ‘great king of terror’. What I actually wrote was deffraieur, which means someone who pays the bill – the kind of person who’ll get the drinks in and pick up the tab.

So it should be translated as ‘a great entertaining King’?

Uh-huh.

That gives us: ‘Year 1999, seven months, from the sky will come a great entertaining king to revive the king of Angoulême’. It’s not a great improvement in terms of accuracy, is it?

You realise that the seventh month of the astrological calendar only starts in mid-September? No, you’re right, it’s not very likely. Chalk it up to experience.

What influence do you believe your work has had on the computer industry?

It’s had a huge influence. Bill Gates himself is known to have studied my writing extensively. He even used one of my verses as justification for one of his major campaigns. As it happens that verse was a fake – it was planted by the British government, which had learnt about his superstitions following the defection of Rudolf Hess – but it shows how seriously he took my writing.

I think you’re thinking of Adolf Hitler.

You may be right – these twentieth-century leaders all look alike to me.

How do you think your writing will fare in the next millennium?

I’m optimistic. That reference to 1999 was the last specific date I used – I wish I hadn’t bothered, it was asking for trouble. There are plenty of verses still left to interpret, and some of them are so weird that they’ll be almost impossible to prove or disprove. “They will come to deliver the prince of Denmark, a shameful ransom to the temple of Artemis” – what’s that about? People will be trying to make sense of my prophecies for a long time to come.

Can I quote you on that?

I’d rather you didn’t – you never know what might happen.

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This one’s from March 2000. I should say that I took Y2K very seriously indeed; we even stockpiled. (Well, we had a box.) I vividly remembered being a programmer in 1987, and having to argue long and hard before my project leader would allow me to use eight-digit dates. Multiply that out across the country, I thought, and who knew what would happen? Ironically, I was one of those posters to comp.software.year-2000 who were regarded as sunny optimists, on the grounds that we anticipated large-scale disruption but not actually the end of the world as we knew it, as such. At one stage I formulated a rough 5-point scale for measuring the severity of our predictions, and pegged myself at around 4 (where 5 was, well, TEOTWAWKI). There were plenty of no-nonsense 5s; somebody even extended the scale up to 10, to incorporate vaguely Nostradamus-like predictions of exactly how the WAWKI would E.

So I have every sympathy with people like Peter de Jager and Ed Yourdon, who did a great deal of what I still believe was good and worthwhile work in raising awareness of Y2K, and with Ed Yourdon’s afterthoughts in particular. Just thought I’d establish that.

I CAUGHT UP with my old friend Ed Gargle at his remote farmhouse recently. Ed was widely regarded as one of the leading authorities on the Millennium Bug in 1998 and 1999, although more recently he has been less in demand. I began by asking Ed the obvious question: what went right?

“What went right? Precious little, as far as I could see. Oh, there were a few failures – I believe the trains in Mali are still up the spout – but by and large Y2K was a bit of a washout..”

Remediation had been successful, in other words?

“Absolutely – and nobody’s happier about that than I am. Y2K could have been a major disaster. There was a real risk of an economic slowdown, caused by nothing more than the ever-mounting expense of last-minute fixes and the spiralling fees which would have been charged by Y2K consultants. We could have seen supply chain disruptions, leading to shortages in basic supplies; that would have caused untold hardship for everyone, except for those farsighted individuals who prepared by buying a year’s supply of rice, drinking water and toilet paper. (That’s a lot of toilet paper, incidentally – particularly if you got some extra for barter purposes.) At worst, we could have seen society decline into lawless, bloodstained chaos, in which civilisation itself would only be kept alive by a few hardy pioneers in isolated farmhouses. Instead, everything just went on working. I’m glad about that. Really very, very glad.”

I wondered how Ed would account for the success of remediation.

“Mali, for God’s sake. Talk about adding insult to injury. New Zealand: OK. Australia: OK. Japan: OK. China: OK. Russia: OK – Russia, would you believe! Europe: OK. The US: OK. Mali: problems on the railways. Oh, big deal. Who in their right mind is going to get on a train in Mali at the best of times, let alone on the day before the end of the world as we know it?”

Quite. However, I also wondered how Ed would account for the success of –

“People are blaming me now. Can you believe that? All I did was state how it looked to me – people have got to draw their own conclusions. So what if a world-renowned Y2K consultant says there’s a 79% probability of one or two major disruptions to essential services during the first quarter of 2000, each lasting between two and three weeks – it’s just one person’s opinion. People are even blaming me for the money they spent on preparing for the rollover. All I said was that I’d sold up, moved to the country and bought a year’s supply of rice, bottled water and toilet paper (which is a lot of toilet paper, incidentally) – I never said that anybody else should do the same. There wouldn’t be much point if everyone did it.”

Indeed. I wondered how Ed would account for –

“I’ve got no bookings, you know. My diary’s empty. Correction, I’ve got a few of these gigs in the first quarter – ‘Ed Gargle Explains Why He Got It Wrong’ – but after that, nada. I’m hoping I’ll be able to fall back on the stuff I was doing before Y2K. I don’t know, you tell me – is C++ still making headlines? Thought not. Still, look on the bright side – I won’t need to buy rice any time soon.”

Clearly. I wondered how –

“And then there’s all that toilet paper – it’s taking up space apart from anything else. I put a note in the last edition of my subscribers-only Y2K newsletter asking what I could do with 144 rolls of toilet paper, but I haven’t had any suggestions. Well, I haven’t had any practical suggestions.”

Ed sighed and poured us both another slug of ‘Sloe Poison’ (a locally-produced fruit brandy).

“As for why remediation succeeded, God only knows. Dedicated programmers, I suppose. Well-written applications. Stable, reliable, robust platforms, if there is such a thing. Still, mustn’t grumble – never know what’s going to happen at the end of this year.”

At the end of this year?

Ed smiled.

“Can I interest you in a seminar?”

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Finally (for now), here’s another one from a defunct print publication, in this case one that wasn’t even available on this side of the Atlantic. The magazine was called ePro and it was aimed at IBM users. IBM what users, you ask. That was the clever part – ePro was for users of IBM ‘eservers’, in other words any of IBM’s four (or thereabouts) server platforms. (That was ‘eserver’ with that squiggly at-sign ‘e’. You do remember the squiggly ‘e’, don’t you? Alex? Anyone?)

Anyway, I got the WebSphere-related commentary gig, which involved sounding knowledgeable once a month without making too many jokes. Most of the columns are pretty damn geeky, to be honest, as well as tending to slip into the corporate-breathless mode (I’m guessing here, but if IBM have successfully developed the philosopher’s stone – and that is a big if…) Some of the less technical ones still read pretty well, I think. For example, this one, from March 2003.

MONSTER MOVIES never give you a good view of the monster until halfway through. Representing Godzilla through one enormous footprint — or even one enormous foot — is a good way of building up suspense. It’s also realistic: if Godzilla came to town, one scaly foot would be all that most people ever saw.

Some things are so big they’re hard to see. Although e-business is making some huge changes to the way we live and work, we don’t often think about where it’s coming from and why. Asked to identify trends driving e-business, analysts tend to resort to general statements about business efficiency or customer empowerment. Alternatively, we get the circular argument which identifies e-business as a response to competitive pressures—pressures which are intensified by the growth of e-business.

The real trends driving the evolution of e-business are at once more specific and more far-reaching. Moreover, these trends affect everyone from the B2C customer at home to the IBM board of directors, taking in the hard-pressed WebSphere developer on the way.

The first trend is standardization. On the client side, there is now only one ‘standard’ browser. A friend of mine recently complained about a site which was not rendering properly (in Navigator 7.0). The Webmaster — presumably a person of some technical smarts — replied, “This is not a problem with our site, but your browser. I am running Windows 98 with IE 5.50 and everything displays perfectly.” At the back end, conversely, the tide of standards rolls on—from CORBA to XML to SOAP to ebXML. Interoperability between servers is too important for any company, even Microsoft, to stand in its way.

Whether standards are set by mutual agreement or by the local 800-pound gorilla is secondary; however it’s achieved, standardization has fostered the development of e-business, and continues to do so. The effect is to commoditize Web application servers and development tools; this in turn promotes the development of a single standard application platform, putting ‘non-standard’ platforms and environments under competitive pressure. From OS/400 to Windows 2000, platforms which diverge from the emerging Intel/Linux/Apache norm are increasingly being forced to justify themselves.

The second trend is automation. Since the dawn of business computing, payroll savings have been an ever-present yardstick in justifying IT projects. E business continues this trend with a vengeance. Whether you’re balancing your bank account or making a deal for office supplies in a trading exchange, you’re interacting with an IT system where once — only a few years ago — you would have had to deal with a human being. The word processor was the end of the line for shorthand typists; e-business is having a similar effect on growing numbers of skilled clerical employees. The next step, promised by Microsoft and IBM alike, is an applications development framework so comprehensive that business analysts and end users will be able to generate entire systems: even application development will be automated. (No, I don’t believe it either, but are you going to bet against IBM and Microsoft?)

The third trend is externalization of costs. Not long ago, if you asked a shop to deliver to your home, you could expect to see a van with the name of the shop on the side. Place an order online today, and your goods may well be delivered by a self-employed driver working with a delivery service contracted to an order fulfillment specialist. Talk of ‘disintermediation’ as a trend in e-business is wide of the mark. By offering more agile, flexible and transparent inter-business relationships, e business makes it possible for intermediaries to proliferate, each contracting out its costly or inconvenient functions. On the B2C front, meanwhile, operating costs are increasingly passed on to the customer: I sometimes spend far longer navigating a series of Web forms than it would take to give the same details to a skilled employee.

A drive for standardization, forcing all platforms into a single generic framework; automation for all, cutting jobs among bank tellers and programmers alike; businesses concentrating ruthlessly on core functions, passing on costs to partners and customers. These trends have had a huge impact on IT and society at large — and there’s more to come. In the e-business world, we’re all in Godzilla’s footprint.