Tuesday 14 February 2023

The latest political polling from Omnisis has been published, based on survey work done on the 9th and 10th of February. The online poll used 1284 respondents and has once again found the majority think Brexit in hindsight was a mistake by 58% to 42%. This is more or less the same as every other poll carried out by Omnisis, People Polling and YouGov going back to December. The public seems to have made up their mind about Brexit and the Tory party. Labour has a 17-point lead, 38% to 21%. However, delving into the figures shows some interesting stuff.

First, when asked how they would vote if there was a referendum tomorrow, the results are the same. By 58% to 42%, they would vote to rejoin the European Union. 

Omnisis then asked if having to adopt the Euro would affect the decision to rejoin, and 59% (of those who would vote to rejoin) said it would not. About a third said they would want to keep Sterling. I think given there has been little or no publicity this is a surprisingly high figure and quite encouraging.

And since we don’t know who is funding these polls, it’s surprising that they ask this question only of those who said in a general election they intended to vote for The Reform Party.

Q. If there was no Reform UK candidate in your constituency who would you vote for?

I assume this means the funder wanted to know which party would be most impacted by Richard Tice deciding not to run candidates in all constituencies. The result is 25% would switch to Labour and only 12% to the Tories. In other words, Labour is damaged more by Reform Party candidates than the Conservatives. This is quite a surprise to me.

Following that, they also asked about a return of the death penalty in the UK. This presumably was prompted by the outburst from Lee Anderson, the Tory MP for Ashfield. I know Ashfield - it has an otherworldly feel - and his opinion, shocking though it is, is pretty typical of working-class voters in that area.

However, the Ominisis poll shows 58% of the entire country believes "death is an appropriate punishment for some crimes?" Anderson is actually far more representative than you might think of mainstream opinion in this country, which is disappointing, to say the least.

Ditchley Park

On the Ditchley Park ‘summit’ reported at the weekend, a spokesman for No 10 claims Sunak didn’t know Michael Gove attended it. A lot of commentators are expressing some scepticism about that. It seems amazing a cabinet minister could do this without civil servants being aware of where he was and what he was doing. If they knew, the cabinet secretary would know and surely he would brief Sunak? 

Frost has already attacked the summit in the pages of The Daily Mail.

The man who negotiated the deal said: “Brexit doesn’t need ‘fixing’. It needs this Conservative government, elected with a huge mandate on a Brexit programme, to fully and enthusiastically embrace its advantages instead of leaving the field to those who never wanted it in the first place.

“I and millions of others want the government to get on with that instead of raising taxes, deterring investment and pushing public spending to its highest level for 70 years.”

The splits are becoming more evident with one anonymous senior Conservative party source who attended the summit dismissing Frost’s portrayal of the conference as a “secret plot” to “unravel” Brexit as “rather pathetic”.

Also, the whole thing fits perfectly with what Bloomberg reported on Saturday, that Sunak was looking to draft plans to "rebuild Britain's ties with the EU." It would be a surprise if Gove was not doing the PM's bidding.

The denial is almost certainly for party management purposes, but it shows what a difficult position Sunak is in. The NIP needs resolving, otherwise, Biden won’t come in April and there will be no Stormont executive in place. The PM can’t admit that Britain doesn’t have the leverage with the EU to act unilaterally.

We simply can’t afford a trade war and we don’t hold any cards at all now if we ever held any in the first place. Sunak’s problem is that the ERG and Brexit Ultras think we do.  Any hint of weakness and he will be under real pressure to step down.

The European Court of Human Rights

Perhaps as a counterweight to help Sunak manage the ERG, there’s been speculation that he is considering quitting the ECHR to make it easier to send asylum seekers to Rwanda and elsewhere. Nick Timothy, May’s senior adviser, has an article in The Telegraph saying we can’t control our borders whilst inside the convention. The most perceptive comment comes from Dmitry Grozoubinski who tweeted this:

How true that is, unless we change our attitude sooner or later we will be asking to quit the UN. It is entirely what you would expect. If you can't cooperate with your closest neighbours what makes us think we can do so with countries thousands of miles away?

Bananas

Finally, The Telegraph (where else?) has an article today about bananas: Bananas apparently could cost more in Northern Ireland than the rest of the UK after the  Protocol deal.

The Government is considering “slashing” UK tariffs on bananas from Peru, Colombia and Ecuador next year, which will make them cheaper.

But, The Telegraph says, “Brussels could insist that bananas sent to Northern Ireland from Great Britain pay a higher EU tariff if it deems them at risk of crossing into the Republic.”

This is because the UK is set to review tariffs Brexiteers want Rishi Sunak to “dramatically reduce or remove the tariffs and deliver a Brexit dividend they say would be impossible if the UK was still a member of the EU.”

I read this wondering what the EU tariff was and helpfully, they give the actual figure in the piece. It’s £62 per tonne or 6.2p per kilo. Quite how you ‘slash’ this level of tariff ‘dramatically’ is a puzzle isn’t it?  

The average price per tonne of bananas internationally is $1100 or about £900. So the reduction is around 7%. Average banana consumption in the UK in 2019 was 14 kg per person. To save a maximum of 86.8p per year, per head, assuming ALL the tariff is removed and ALL the saving is passed on to the consumer, we are deliberately manufacturing a row with the EU.

Forget all that stuff about food being cheaper, any reduction in tariffs will be designed to create maximum irritation in Brussels, nothing else.

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