Above: Prime Minister Johnson drives a Brexit-supporting JCB digger through a Pink Floyd-like wall with the scoop emblazoned with Cummings favourite earworm.
“It’s Christ-maaaaaaaaas!”
With the stretched vocal chords of Slade’s Noddy Holder ringing in our ears, the three not-so-wise men at the helm of the Small Data Forum gathered for our post-GE2019, Christmas special, end-of-year, end-of-decade podcast.
And as usual for our Christmas specials, Neville, Thomas, and Sam made sure we’d tucked into some of the festive spirit before we started recording episode 31. Our tolerably noisy base was the members’ bar of the Picture House Cinema in Piccadilly Circus in Soho’s fashionable London.
Classic Dom
With the ballot papers from the U.K. election still warm and not yet five days spent, we muse and wonder what it was that won a veritable landslide for Prime Minister Cummings (and his deputy Biros Johnson) and ignominy for Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn.
Was it smart use of data and microtargeting of Facebook ads or more a combination of old media and prejudice? Our consensus was that it was surprisingly little to do with data and rather more to do with old-fashion campaigning and finely-wrought three-word slogans.
A very relevant student poster, snapped en route to our Christmas lunch venue, in Southwark College
“Get Brexit Done” was the defining earworm of the campaign, rammed home robot-like by every Tory candidate, most particularly the PM. To be fair, whenever it was parroted, it was batted away by interviewers (“Yes, we’ve heard that before!”, “Please tell us something new!”, “Is there any substance behind that?”) and laughed at – hyena-like – by audiences in the leaders’ debates.
But as with “Yes to Europe, no to the Euro”, “£350m a week to the NHS”, and “Take back control” – all of them earlier, successful Cummings creations – “Get Brexit Done” are without doubt the three words that will forever characterise the first December election in the U.K. for almost a century.
How very different the experience on the echo chamber of social media. Sam shares a Twitter poll posted (and screen-grabbed below) but eight minutes before the physical polls closed, showing – apparently – that but 20% had voted Conservative, a whopping 64% Labour, and 6% Liberal Democrat.
An echo chamber screen grab from Twitter on election night
Contrast those numbers with the actual percentages: 43.6% for the Conservatives, 32.2% for Labour, and 11.5% for the Liberal democrats. Social media was clearly very far out of whack with reality.
Given the pivotal role played by social and digital media in the two Obama U.S. presidential elections in 2008 and 2012 and the Trump romp of 2016, we muse whether the U.K. is the poor relation – the country bumpkin 51st state – that would rather rely on wooden scissors than bits and bytes.
Truth, lies, and statistics
We’ve observed before the wisdom of the eighteenth century English satirist Jonathan Swift – he of Gulliver’s Travels fame – who observed so sagely that:
“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: like a man, who hath thought of a good repartee when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.”
Neville concludes that truth was an early casualty in #GE2019, with the different, independent fact-checking services routinely revealing all major parties to be mendacious at worst, economical with the verité if you’re being really generous.
But it turns out that one party’s bullshit was more tolerable than the other’s, a conclusion writ large in a major (and majorly-rapid) retrospective in The Atlantic. That, and the fact that Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has revealed himself as the perennial opposition who never wanted to actually be Prime Minister.
Why else – we note – would he have tolerated anti-Semitism in his party?
Why else would he have sat on the fence on the most divisive issue in recent political history (Brexit in case you were wondering), having a totally fudged position appealing to neither Leavers nor Remainers?
Corbyn’s constituency is Islington, North London, the home of Arsenal football club, beloved of Thomas. Sam teases Thomas and suggests there’s surely enough pain being experienced at the club, and that Corbyn rendering Labour unelectable for several elections to come is just rubbing salt into the wounds.
The immediate line of the Labour Party after its worst electoral performance since 1935 was that the defeat was “all down to Brexit”, revealing that the party’s leadership – and the hard-left faction Momentum that now dominates its “strategy” – have been suffering from three, interconnected psychological phenomena.
- Denial
- Groupthink
- The Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE), under which we attribute our agency to everything good that happens and external circumstances to everything bad.
Before Corbyn and his deputy John McDonnell, the past master of the FAE was football manager Jose Mourinho, particularly in his recent half-hearted spell mismanaging fallen giants Manchester United. It’s an evolutionary survival mechanism – promoting positive self-esteem and avoiding excessive hair-shirtedness. But since Jose became new Jose in his role leading Arsenal’s North London nemeses, Tottenham Hotspur – he’s become strangely human, empathetic, and realistic; plus he’s winning …
Since that moment back in November, the Corbynistas have snatched the FAE crown from the gutter and rammed it on with pride. Ironic, given that low self-esteem and hair-shirtedness are exactly what Labour needs now, not blaming external forces.
Ipsos MORI’s staggering accurate exit poll, released across all media the second the polling booths closed. The moment at which Labour’s self-destructive faction Momentum should have raised their hands, said: “It’s a fair cop, guv, and no mistake” and shuffled off into history.
Radical change from hidden hands
Our recording of this episode – full of Christmas spirit and rather too many off-mic puns, particularly from Sam – was made but five short days after the election. In that time, Prime Minister Cummings has already made clear his desire to trim the U.K. civil service by a third, cut the same wastage from the Ministry of Defence, and privatise the BBC, removing at a stroke its £200m-plus state funding from the archaic anomaly that is the licence fee.
Traditional Tory voters – not to mention those in the midlands and North of the country who voted blue for the first time – ain’t seen nothing yet.
Thomas believes that one of the hidden hands of the victory was Isaac Levido, the bearded, 36-year-old Australian protégé of Lynton Crosby, the man who masterminded Johnson’s election victories as London mayor and Brexit Creator In General David Cameron’s at the 2010 and 2015 General Elections.
Throughout Corbyn’s time as Labour leader – a stint that’s due to end in the Spring – he was greeted by younger supporters with his name sung to the tune of the White Stripes’ foot-stomper Seven Nation Army. The moment the exit poll appeared on screens in Tory party HQ, party apparatchiks used the same melody to laud their new hero; “Ooooh Isaac Lev-ee-do! Ooooh Isaac Lev-ee-do!”
Levido’s appointment was – like so much in this administration – a Cummings appointment. As were the social media team of Topham Guerin, run by the whip-smart duo of founding partners Sean Topham and Ben Guerin.
We wonder whether within them they have the potential to become the new Cambridge Analytica. Time will tell, but their homepage strapline certainly has a familiar feel about it, proudly proclaiming: “We are a bold creative and digital agency that works with the most ambitious people, organisations and brands around the world to achieve outstanding results.” If Dom, Biros, and Levido were marking their own homework, that’s undoubtedly how they’d describe themselves as clients.
Despite the role of Topham Guerin, both Neville and Sam propose – and Thomas agrees – it was not social media “wot won it”, particularly given the remarkably high turnout of older (55-75+) voters, returning to the Tory party from Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, and least likely of any demograph to be exposed to Facebook ads and all.
We also concur that, despite winning no seats and seeing his party’s share of the poll collapse, Farage is the most successful politician of the age, having manoeuvred Johnson to deliver Brexit with his “oven ready”, chlorinated chicken-rich deal by next January 31. There’s more on Farage as the midwife of Johnson’s victory in this excellent blog from the Harvard politics lecturer Pippa Norris over there on the LSE blog.
As well as all but disappearing from the spotlight and standing down candidates in seats held by Conservatives, the Brexit Party also adopted some very old media tactics.
When Sam was in Nottingham the day before the election, he was taken back to the 1970s by a clapped out old banger (rusty car), driving up and down the city’s high street with a loud-hailer gaffer-taped to the roof, barking the urgent exhortation “Vote Brexit Party for positive change”. The last time he’d seen that was at the 1975 election, when Conservative (and now some-time LibDem) Michael Hestletine scared the bejesus out of him from the back of open-backed Mini Clubman.
Predictive analytics
Talking of hair-shirtedness, we spend a little time picking over the entrails of the predictions we made for the election in episode 30.
All three of us believed – using the information we had before us at the time – another hung parliament was the most likely outcome, with no party in overall control. We all envisaged the same stasis and paralysis that led Johnson to call the election in the first place.
Those predictions one more time:
Thomas: Labour and the SNP forming a minority government leading to a second referendum
Neville: Tory-dominated hung parliament, little different from 2015-2019
Sam: hung parliament, right-wing Tory dominated.
Not stung by our failure to read the runes, we indulge in a little more foresight.
Neville: sees the civil war going on inside the Labour party for years, but now intensifying after electoral calamity. He also sees John McDonnell as king (or queen) maker. But his preference would be for a caretaker leader, perm any one from three of some of the last remaining Blairites to be found inside Old new Labour: Margaret Hodge, Margaret Beckett, or Harriet Harman.
Thomas and Sam: both predict Momentum darling Rebecca Long-Bailey as new Labour leader, with Angela Rayner – far to the right of Long-Bailey standing aside in a sisterly act, as her deputy. As a result, Labour will likely secure no more than 150-160 seats in 2024.
Thomas goes on to wonder how strong the Momentum leadership is and asks “How much cognitive dissonance do you need to vote for another hard-left leader?” His long-term aspiration – go on, let’s call it a prediction – would be for Jess Phillips to take over.
Things then take a slightly silly turn, two days away from the release of Star Wars Episode IX, with candidates to replace Corbyn including a reanimated Alec Guinness as sage guide Obi Wan Kenobi – there’s a definitely similarity and continuity there – but also the evergreen Luke Skywalker, Hugh Grant, and Gary Lineker. Likely as not (#NoSpoilers) we’ll get another dose of good old Emperor Palpatine.
Two days before @POTUS45 became the third president in U.S. history to be formally impeached, we also consider (and predict) who might win the 2020 presidential election.
For Neville and Sam, it’s Trump by a margin … unless he decides he’s had enough of the whole circus. With his penchant for strong women, Thomas imagines a different direction for the Special Relationship, with Elizabeth Warren doing business with Jess Phillips in the mid-2020s, a “vision of glorious eutopia” (or should that be outopia?).
Final prediction: EU-UK trade deal by the end of 2020, as promised by Johnson.
Sam: not a cat in hell’s chance, triggering a no-deal exit.
Neville: a good chance of “a” deal, but not all bells whistling.
Thomas – with the Picturehouse’s “Dennis Hopper” IPA really starting to kick in – goes a little surreal and argues that none of this matters, fair is foul, squaring the circle, it’s all a PR stunt. “Oh, and Scotland will go!” When Neville says he has three Scottish friends who all tell him it won’t, Thomas snaps out of his reverie and accuses his co-podcaster of judging macro issues with micro-data, and that an “n” of 3 is insufficient. It’s a fair cop, agrees Neville.
Our three books of the year, each
Sam: not one of his own (none published this year), so: Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now; the Swedish family Rosling, Factfulness; and Elton John, with his autobiography Me.
Neville – any of the many dystopian novels he’s been reading all year; “You can learn a lot from this about planets dying and escaping to other planets – great lessons in leadership, empathy, that sort of thing” The Reckoning by John Grisham (technically published in 2018). And he’s about to start reading the much-anticipated Because Internet: Understanding how Language is Changing by Gretchen McCulloch.
Thomas’s books of the year are: Shoshana Zuboff’s Age of Surveillance Capitalism (showing off his strong wrists for holding up his signed copy, though he’s also been reading it on Kindle); David Wallace Wells’ very well research, deeply concerning The Uninhabitable Earth; and, motivational economist Guy Standing’s Plunder of the Commons: A Manifesto for Sharing Public Wealth. If we’d allowed Thomas to have a fourth book, he’d have nominated Tim Wu’s The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age. But he wasn’t, so he couldn’t.
When we’d drained our pints and the clock approached the hour, we decided it was time to pack up the Small Data Forum for the year and the decade, and go into our short Winterval hibernation. We’ll be back after 31 January 2020 by which time – according to our joint and several Prime Ministers – Brexit will be done. We’ll see.
Thanks for listening, thanks for reading, and thanks for your consideration.
Listen to Episode 31:
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