That day has now arrived. Alberta’s long-awaited independence referendum is happening on Monday, and if the polls are right, roughly 650,000 of Russell’s fellow Albertans intend to vote the same way as him. The province’s independence movement is not about language or culture, as separatism in Quebec has been for 60 years. Instead, as talking with the protesters on the Edmonton bridge reveals, it’s almost exclusively about populist outrage; a quixotic belief in cultural homogeneity; and naive-if-understandable economic hope.

For Russell, the inflection point came in early 2020, the first days of the Covid pandemic. That was when he lost his job as an industrial plumber in Edmonton, Alberta’s sub-Arctic, truck-clogged capital city of 1.2 million people. “We heard they canceled St Patrick’s Day in Ireland,” he recalls, “and then obviously the layoffs happened”. Having started his job just five weeks before, he says he was “first on the chopping block”. From that moment, Russell tells me his confidence in being able to make ends meet was shaken — as was his hope. Over the past six years, he has moved his family several times to find work; a business he launched ground to a halt; and his son was forced to be vaccinated against his wishes. As for Russell himself, he was called a Nazi for his anti-vaccination beliefs.

Yet if Russell’s is a personal tragedy, he feels his province has been wronged too — by the Canadian state. “The rug,” as he puts it, “has been pulled out from under us.” He’s far from alone. Freed from federal laws, indigenous land treaties, environmental reviews, and other barriers they feel Canada’s liberal-minded power brokers back East put up to thwart them, separatists believe their land of prairies and mountains might soon resemble petro-states like Qatar or the UAE.

Suggested Reading

What nationalists could learn from Quebec

By Michael Cuenco

If they get their way, Canada could be broken in two. The referendum is not binding, just like the 2016 Brexit referendum, but it’s still the first direct vote on Canadian unity in 30 years. And, just like Brexit, the aftermath of Alberta’s vote is likely to be protracted and damaging. If they don’t succeed, and polls suggest they won’t, separatists will feel hope has been snatched away from them — and that could somehow be worse than the chaos of secession. It’s the same challenge faced by countries right across the Western world: how do pluralist, liberal societies create hope that’s louder than the grudge, before the grudge breaks everything?

Alberta is Canada’s original grudgeland. There’s history you must know to make sense of that fact — though it doesn’t perfectly explain what’s happening now. Anthony Sayers, a political scientist at the University of Calgary who traces the history of party politics in Canada, explains Alberta was cut out of the country’s North-West Territories in 1905 to create a province “in the Roman sense” of the term. In other words: it existed to be extracted, while the local government wasn’t given control over its natural resources or tax base. For the politicians in Ottawa, Alberta was first there to be a cash-cow — its bounties exported to eager consumers in Europe.

The first resource Canada extracted was grain. But even before Alberta was formed, federal surveyors and prospectors believed it held vast reserves of oil. This was quickly proven, though industrialization in practice took decades (and it was actually Americans, not other Canadians, who first brought money and technology to help — another source of grudge). Today, Alberta has more than 160 billion barrels of proven reserves still left. That translates to the fourth largest stockpile in the world, and encompasses practically all of Canada’s share.

This created the grudgeland. For though Canada handed control of Alberta’s natural resources to the province in the Thirties, separatist discussions have rumbled for more than a century. Especially after 1979, the Iran revolution and resulting oil crisis, a Canadian policy to sell Alberta oil domestically at below-market prices spurred white-hot anger. Western Canada Concept, the province’s first separatist party, was born. “Let the Eastern Bastards Freeze In The Dark!” as one popular Albertan bumper sticker from the period put it.

Separatism’s newest wave doesn’t fit neatly into this history. The standard grudges remain, but they’re joined by more conspiratorial beliefs. Russell tells me he’s a separatist because Alberta’s wealth goes to Canada in the form of taxes, and Canada then sends these dollars to other less-wealthy provinces — the much-hated “equalization” policy. That’s mostly accurate, albeit with huge caveats. But what certainly isn’t accurate is Russell’s next claim. “For this fiscal year, we have budgeted, as Canadians, C$86 billion to send to King Charles for the administration of our country,” he tells me, with that figure coming out to about £45.5 billion. “Look that up. Don’t take my word for it.”

Mitch Sylvestre shares that fixation with the British Crown, and even told one reporter he believes King Charles wants him murdered. When I meet Sylvestre, leader of the pro-independence Stay Free Alberta organization, he describes the utopia that could unfold if his province became a country. Sylvestre is tall, athletically built, and has a blazing intensity that belies his 71 years. “Let’s get real here,” he tells me. “If we have a C$27 billion-to-C$50 billion fiscal surplus every year, multiply that by 20, that’s a trillion dollars,” or about £530 billion. Just the interest on that windfall, Sylvestre continues, will pay every cost in Alberta. “No income tax, no property tax, no federal tax, no debt. Does that appeal to anybody?”

Clearly it does. Given Alberta’s royalties from oil extraction, valued at C$19.3 billion in 2025 alone, you might see a glittering windfall to be split among the province’s 5.1 million residents. Still, economists at the University of Alberta have questioned Sylvestre’s sums. The academics warned that creating an entirely new government structure, from courts to the army, as well as paying a portion of Canada’s national debt, would prove costly — especially at first. Their most optimistic scenario suggests a 2% hit to Alberta’s overall GDP, while their pessimistic scenario suggests GDP could drop by 10% over five years, and by more than 15% over 20. While some counter that an independent Alberta would be able to sell more oil to compensate, it would still be landlocked, and dependent on its current main customer, the United States, for moving or buying its black gold. And the US, to put it mildly, has lately been indifferent to economic fairness.

For Jared Wesley, a political scientist who works on finding shared ground among Alberta’s polarized citizens, these economic dreams point to real pain for the working class. The fact is jobs in the much-feted oil and gas sector aren’t growing, peaking with 170,000 jobs in 2014 before falling through a mixture of automation and frozen investment. Another source of anxiety has been immigration, which the province cannot control. Nearly 150,000 non-permanent residents have moved to Alberta over the past decade, and this has been seized upon by separatists, including the currently provincial Premier Danielle Smith. When voters come to vote next week, after all, Smith has included nine other questions in their ballot papers, five of which are about the access to public services immigrants should have.

Culture matters here too. To be sure, Alberta doesn’t have a particularly unique identity within Canada — aside from perhaps a love of cosplaying as cowboys while actually living in the suburbs. The oft-cited culture of Albertans being “hard-working people”, who just want big government to leave them alone, is also present in rural parts of Ontario, where I’m originally from. Still, compared to other parts of the country, Alberta did see a strikingly large inflow of settlers from the American Midwest in its early days. These settlers brought with them a deep current of libertarianism, populism, and Christian conservatism. As far back as the Thirties, Albertans elected William Aberhart, a radio preacher, as their premier, with “Bible Bill” famous for taking on the Ottawa establishment. In the century since, business ties with the US have only deepened.

This blend of history, economics and frontier culture explains the referendum’s immediate political context. Former Alberta Premier Jason Kenney created the United Conservative Party (UCP) in 2017, patching up the province’s fragmented Right wing. Kenney won the 2019 election handily, heading a party he’d engineered with populist conservative ideals: including giving rank-and-file party members the ability to hold binding leadership reviews. As premier, Kenney then passed the Citizens Initiatives Act, allowing Albertans to gather enough signatures to push through policy changes and even constitutional referendums.

Both were key to what happened next. Kenney railed against the Canadian state, trading in outrage and even mild conspiratorialism. A 2019 public inquiry, which hoped to find evidence of foreign money being used to strangle Albertan oil and gas, spent millions and found little. Still, it was all part of Kenney’s broader theory of “ventilation”: of keeping separatists under control by throwing them hints that he shared their outrage.

Suggested Reading

The madness of Trump’s Canada trade war

By Michael Lind

But back in 2021, as Justin Trudeau, the antichrist for most Albertan conservatives because of his performative wokeness and policies that many Albertans believe shut in their resources, looked ready to win yet another federal election, separatist sympathizers pushed Kenney to consider a split. He refused. This is when Sylvestre evolved into one of Alberta’s most unelected people. He helped force Kenney out as leader (Sylvestre is also a constituency president in the party); helped replace him with Smith; and then, in 2026, organized the petition that, under Kenney’s law, gathered 220,000 signatures, passing the threshold for a province-wide vote.

Smith is far more comfortable with the idea of secession. As for Sylvestre, he has visited the US to chat with officials about what might happen if Alberta left Canada. Among other things, that might potentially include a half-billion dollar loan, with the funds provided by Washington.

Sylvestre has also vowed that separatism won’t go away, whatever happens with the vote. If they lose, some secessionists have already threatened to oust Smith from within, one path to continued unrest. There are many others. For instance, over half of Alberta’s doctors say they’ll leave if the province separates. Rank-and-file separatists, people like Scott Russell, will be at risk of seeing the hope they’ve clung to evaporate. Where would they turn then? Based on the progress of other populist movements, from Britain to the Netherlands to Germany, the answer is likely to be messy.

Another parallel with populists elsewhere is that people like Russell arguably have the wrong target. Many of the problems he and others rightly flag are ultimately the responsibility of their own provincial administration — from healthcare to the royalties owed by oil giants. The federal Canadian government, under new Prime Minister Mark Carney, has actually declared a new pipeline to the Pacific Ocean in the national interest, thereby avoiding the many loopholes that stymied similar proposals in the past. But in Alberta’s political culture, the historical frame of reference is to blame outside forces, not those from within.

Little wonder Wesley is worried for the future. In the US, he notes, some on the populist Right have already turned to violence. “I just hope that that’s not going to be the overwhelming response here.” Separatists and their leaders are peaceful. But in 2022, far-Right activists mounted a border blockade in southern Alberta to oppose federal vaccine mandates. One man openly talked of preparing for what he saw as a war against tyranny, calling for federal leaders to be hanged. He had weapons, including a pipe bomb, and is now in prison.

Russell is hardly in that mold, but his words could make you think otherwise. “Canada — like the country, the land, the people — I love it.” he says. “But like the federal government and the system? You are darn right that I hate the guys who hate me and who literally want me dead, and have said so.”

This couldn’t be further from the truth. Granted, opinion polls in Scotland show that voters there could favour independence in a referendum as early as autumn next year. However, Northern Ireland — geographically the furthest away of the UK’s wayward offspring — is likely to emerge from Britain’s ongoing political upheavals as the unloved child that clings with grim determination to its detached motherland.

Who, then, is to blame for this misleading narrative? Mary Lou McDonald, the leader of Sinn Féin, has called repeatedly for a border poll on the issue of a united Ireland. Tipped to be Ireland’s next Taoiseach, her success in the Republic of Ireland’s 2020 general election — in which her party won the popular vote — has brought the question of a referendum to the forefront of Irish politics.

Even so, a vote would be difficult to justify. Under the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, a plebiscite can be called at the discretion of the Secretary of State when he or she believes that “a majority of those voting would express a wish that Northern Ireland should cease to be part of the United Kingdom and form part of a united Ireland”. That day is unlikely to come soon: an overwhelming majority of opinion polls in Northern Ireland suggest that a referendum proposing a united Ireland today would be decisively defeated.

That there are now more Catholics than Protestants in the region won’t tip the balance. The old sectarian assumption that all Catholics would vote to end the border was discredited long ago: many Catholics are prospering in Northern Ireland and, for now, wish to retain the status quo. They may hold traditional, even tribal, views on the border, but the peace dividend — the improved economy — has benefited them.

McDonald senses hesitation from nationalists on both sides of the border, and has toned down her rhetoric as a result. After the 2020 election, she called for an urgent referendum from the British government. But her demands have since become more nuanced. At Sinn Féin’s recent Ard Fheis (annual conference) in Dublin earlier this month, she more modestly requested a “Citizens’ Assembly on Unity”. Now is the time, she bellowed, “to plan for constitutional change”. It was hardly a radical message: Citizens’ Assemblies are a handy way to delay decisions on politically-explosive issues. Her plan for the time being is to kick the holy grail down the road.

Suggested reading

What would a united Ireland mean?

By Richard Bourke

Not only is McDonald dampening republican ambitions, but her conference speech had none of the inflammatory language of the past. Speaking to an audience that included many IRA veterans, including her predecessor Gerry Adams, she was remarkably restrained. For the first time in recent history, she failed to invoke the names of republican war heroes like Adams himself or the late IRA chief-of-staff Martin McGuinness, a time-honoured device guaranteed to set the all-Ireland crowd alight. The IRA rallying cry, “Tiocfaidh ár lá” — (Our Day will come) was noticeably absent.

McDonald knows that her electoral successes, in both North and South, are not due to her championing the cause of a border poll. The border issue, while firing up true believers, spooks many citizens in both jurisdictions: no advocate has ever convincingly explained how the economy or the health service will benefit from a united Ireland. Instead, McDonald’s live televised speech at conference, pitched to the people of Ireland, emphasised the chronic housing needs of Ireland’s youth, the cost-of-living crisis, and the continued health crisis. Similarly, in May’s Northern Ireland election, there was a shift away from the republican battle cries about the border towards identical bread-and-butter topics.

This suits McDonald just fine. Today, she wants conversation, not conflict: which a border poll would inevitably bring. Her plan is to keep the issue on the boil, but not to force it to a premature finale; to persuade Sinn Féin’s republican base that they are marching on the road to paradise, but not enough to scare off potential supporters with other priorities. The border poll is political titillation with consummation postponed.

McDonald’s greatest achievement has been to rid Sinn Féin of its pariah status and bring it into the political mainstream. Her tireless populism has almost eliminated rival opposition parties in the Republic, while sidelining the other nationalist flag bearer — the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) — in Northern Ireland. Although she never wore a balaclava, McDonald’s endless lip service to the “armed struggle” and “the patriot dead” reassured the IRA veterans during her charm offensive on the South. She has managed to persuade an initially-sceptical southern electorate that she is a modern constitutional reformer without paramilitary baggage — all the while maintaining the trust of Sinn Féin’s northern hardliners, who see her as their best hope for a united Ireland.

Suggested reading

Ireland's Troubles will not return

By Andrew Doyle

McDonald is poised to gain power in both parts of Ireland; becoming Taoiseach is now almost a fait accompli. The next step is harder. She has understandably courted popularity by haranguing and harassing unionists and the British government, by skilfully painting them as intransigent villains of the piece. She picks her enemies carefully: convenient targets to unite her cocktail of followers.

However, McDonald, the master of the polemic, will soon be forced to adopt the politics of persuasion. Her victory in establishing Sinn Féin as the most powerful party on the entire island will be seen as an existential threat by those whom she has vilified. It will be hard for her suddenly to play the role of unifier: she is unlikely to be seen as a healing force.

With that in mind, expect the border poll to be mentioned frequently, but in a more muted voice. It will remain on the agenda: a useful symbol to dangle, a declaration of intent. But the reality is that few politicians holding significant political positions in Westminster or Leinster House want a border poll. It is a phantom political battleground. Far from providing a democratic decision, a referendum on the sectarian issue that has divided Northern Ireland since its foundation could mark the return of the old antagonists to the streets of Belfast and Derry; and to restore ebbing enmities in South Armagh and other border areas. No one wants that.

This is partly why, just a few months ago, the ARM issued a celebratory statement titled “Australians reject King Charles”. According to the ABC survey the ARM was referring to, 53% of Australians did not want Charles to become king, while only 35% were in support. Today, then, despite the fact that the government’s flags are flying at half-mast and Parliament has been suspended for two weeks, the republican cause in Australia seems in strong shape. Indeed, the newly elected Labor Party government is the first to appoint a Minister for the Republic, Matt Thistlethwaite, whose job is to prepare the grounds for a future referendum on Australia becoming a republic.

Such a vote will be necessary, as any change to Australia’s system of government requires a constitutional amendment, which can only be done via referendum. Yet the government is currently preoccupied with its proposed referendum on enshrining an indigenous voice to parliament. Senior ministers have therefore suggested that the republic referendum would likely have to wait until the government’s second term, which will be in 2025 if the ALP is re-elected.

Despite this delay, republicanism is clearly back on the political agenda and is enjoying substantial support at the highest echelons of government. An unpopular King now sits on the throne in Britain. What could possibly go wrong?

While the circumstances are certainly propitious, if the ARM believes that a favourable result would simply fall in its lap, they could end up bitterly disappointed. Let’s not forget: we have been here before. In the Nineties, when Australia was gearing up for its first referendum on the republic, a majority of Australians supported the change. Successive polls showed the margin in favour of a republic was roughly two-to-one. Yet in the 1999 referendum, the republican cause lost by 45% to 55%.

Of course, the circumstances today are not entirely similar. Whereas the current Labor government and its leader, Anthony Albanese, is in favour of a republic, John Howard, who was Prime Minister at the time, was a staunch monarchist who put forward an unpopular model, in which the Head of State would be elected by parliament, not by voters. Malcolm Turnbull, a future Liberal prime minister, who was leader of the “yes” vote, later told Howard that he had broken “the nation’s heart” by manipulating the referendum to get the result he wanted. This was largely true, though the republican defeat was also enabled by a split within the movement over the preferred model for electing an Australian Head of State.

Suggested reading

America can't understand monarchy

By Andrew Sullivan

Still, the Nineties would turn out to be the highest point of support for the republic. Recent polling has shown that more Australians do not support a republic than those who do. At 34%, support for the republican cause is at its lowest ebb since 1979. Perhaps surprisingly, only 26% of voters aged 18-24 said they would support a republic, the lowest of any age group. A large share, over a quarter of all respondents, said they were uncertain how they would vote. If many of those decided to vote “yes” the republic vote could still win, but they would need to be won over to the cause. The biggest challenge facing the ARM, then, appears to be a debilitating one: public apathy. The republic just does not seem to excite Australians anymore.

This in itself is surprising, given the way the monarchy and its unelected representative in Australia, the Governor-General, have significantly intervened in Australian politics. Only this year, newly released documents showed how Governor-General John Kerr corresponded with the Queen’s Secretary throughout the dismissal of the ALP Whitlam government in 1975. The letters revealed how Kerr railed against the Whitlam government, attacking its policy decisions, and even asked whether the monarchy would consider using its powers to dissolve it. And more recently, it was uncovered that Australia’s current Governor-General, David Hurley, secretly swore in former prime minister Scott Morrison to several ministerial roles during the pandemic. These appointments, which could have had a monumental impact on government operations, were not recorded anywhere on Hurley’s publicly available schedule, again raising questions about the powers vested in the Governor-General’s office.

And yet so many Australians, including younger citizens, just don’t seem to care about introducing a republic. In part, this reflects the ARM’s firmly middle-class characteristics. The Movement was established by prominent journalists, academics, lawyers, corporate figures, and some politicians in 1991. The same professions dominate today. Although these individuals undoubtedly bring a wealth of relevant expertise and knowledge, one negative consequence is the ARM’s heavy emphasis on the symbolism of becoming a republic and on designing the perfect selection process for an Australian Head of State, while paying relatively little attention to articulating precisely how a republic would benefit ordinary Australians.

More from this author

Australian Labor's hollow victory

By Shahar Hameiri

This is the most important issue because the fate of the republic will not be decided in meeting rooms. For the constitutional amendment to take place, Australians need to vote “yes” in a referendum. And symbolism and identity, seen as self-evidently important to the ARM, don’t appear to be vote-winners. Absent a stronger positive case, many Australians might just vote to keep what they know.

To make matters worse for the ARM, the debate for a republic is now happening in a context of serious decline in Australians’ trust in their public institutions and democracy. A spike in trust in democracy during the early stages of the pandemic swiftly fizzled out, and was followed by the second biggest recorded decline in 2022. This explains Queen Elizabeth’s remarkable and enduring popularity. Many viewed the Queen as dutiful and publicly minded, a source of continuity and stability in contrast to their feckless politicians and globally oriented elites. Irrespective of King Charles’s personal standing with Australians, their declining faith in democracy makes this a difficult moment in which to argue for the inherent benefit of elected office.

Queen Elizabeth’s death should therefore be a moment of collective reflection and debate for Australia. The end of her 70-year reign represents a major fork in the road — a time to assess where we came from and, perhaps more importantly, where we would like to go. Tragically, there seems to be little appetite for this: republicans seem to expect the transition to happen almost by itself, while monarchists are also counting on inertia to keep things as they are.

Neither side seems capable of, or interested in, mounting a compelling, positive case for their cause. And given the void left by the Queen’s passing, the monarchists’ job appears to be the easier one.

When their small boat left the continent last week, the weather was relatively calm. But half way across the channel the wind picked up and the crossing was terrifying, waves crashing over the side of the boat. I doubt their young daughter — seven perhaps — will ever forget it.

I’m not interested in arguing the toss about the rights and wrong of taking a young girl on so perilous a journey. Those of us who have safe and comfortable lives over here should listen more and talk less. The parents who turned up at my church were clearly fighting for their daughter’s future in the way they thought best, and that is a parent’s job. Stuff your politics if you disagree. Humanitarianism trumps politics.

Save The Children estimates that over 200,000 unaccompanied children have sought refuge in Europe over the last five years. Seven hundred of them perished at sea. These statistics are just so unspeakably appalling that I think we block out the full horror of them, unable or unwilling to comprehend. While I cuddle up to my children in bed at night, other people’s children are on their own in the dark, frightened, in a boat bobbing about on the Med. Some of them die that way. It’s hard to think about it for long. But we must.

Many of those who survive the trip go missing. Lost in Europe, a collective of journalists, estimate that between 2018 and 2020 over 18,000 unaccompanied refugee children have disappeared from state care in Europe. They came here, on their own, seeking a better life, escaping horrors back home. And thousands of them have now vanished from official records.

The picture painted by various NGO’s working in the field is horrendous. There are now more than 72,000 refugees and migrants stranded in Greece, Cyprus and the Balkans, including more than 22,500 children, according to Unicef. “They are unable to move forward, unwilling to go back to their home countries and struggling to fit into their host communities.” These children, they say, are increasingly showing signs of deep psychological trauma. Those who are not herded into camps, sleep in doorways or under bridges. Some are taken in by people they hardly know — to God knows what fate.

At the same time, reports continue to emerge of the callousness and brutality being used by EU member states to deter refugees from seeking a new life in Europe. The Border Violence Monitoring Network’s annual report makes for horrendous reading. Stories of the use of un-muzzled attack dogs being used on migrants. Of migrants being stripped, their clothes set on fire, then being pushed back across the border, naked. Of people being detained in freezer trucks. The report describes “forms of violence and abuse that we assert amounts to torture or inhuman treatment”.

Suggested reading

Europe's guilty conscience

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

And the risks for those travelling to Europe by boats are worsening. Frontext — the EU’s increasingly expensive border force — has recently taken out a E100m contract with an Israeli military company for the purchase of drones to monitor migrants in European waters. Some see this as a clever way of keeping tabs on migrants without having the responsibility to save them from danger. Ships monitoring migrants have to rescue those who are at risk of drowning. Drones, conveniently, have no such ability — thus no responsibility.

Since the 2016 referendum, so much of the migration debate has been forced through the narrow weir of Brexit. And this has distorted things in at least two ways. First, it encourages Remainers not to hear a bad word about the EU, and its increasingly bad behaviour. And on the other side, it encourages the idea that leaving the EU has answered the migration issue, when it patently hasn’t. Our collective moral responsibility to these people is more properly basic than our membership, or otherwise, of some European political bloc.

Over the last few years, I’ve been involved in a crazily ambitious theatre project called The Walk. It involves a 3.5m puppet of a refugee girl, Little Amal, walking 8,000km  from the Turkish/Syrian border, over to Greece, up through Europe, and eventually ending up in Manchester. It is planned that Little Amal will land in Europe in August, on the Greek island of Chios. Where, according to The Walk website “she hears a group of women singing to her. Music that meets her across the sea…as she takes her first steps in Europe, she is invited to take part in a momentous concert created by the local orchestra.”

The reality of Chios is very different. It is a place where, earlier this month, a young Somali man died alone in his tent and was then partially consumed by rats. Dr Apostolos Veizis, executive director in Greece of the international humanitarian organisation Intersos has described it as being “like a scene out of the middle ages” He went on: “Greek island camps are synonymous with overcrowding and inhuman conditions. People are exposed on a daily basis to rats, rubbish and violence. In clinics across the islands children are often admitted with signs of rat bites. You have to wonder if treating them like this is a deliberate policy choice of the European Union so that more don’t come.”

Perhaps it sounds a little grotesque, a puppet being feted with song whilst real people are being eaten by rats. But that is precisely its point. It exposes the vast distance between how we would like to treat people, and how we actually do. And we should all be shamed by it.

This is what Twitter tells me every day. But as I pointed out the other week, while Johnson is routinely portrayed as a textbook case of failure, the key groups of voters that will decide his fate hold a very different view. Since becoming Prime Minister, Boris Johnson’s ‘net favourability’ score among all voters has increased by five points. Among Leavers it is up by 16-points. Among Conservatives it is up by 21-points.

Twitter tells me @BorisJohnson has been a disaster

The data tells me that since entering Number 10 his ratings are:

-UP among all voters by 5 points

-UP among Leavers by 16 points

–UP among Conservatives by 21 points

Always. Challenge. Groupthink.https://t.co/glkO9RkCLb

— Matt Goodwin (@GoodwinMJ) September 17, 2019

Notwithstanding the general hysteria and catastrophism that has followed every twist and turn of the Johnson premiership, YouGov notes that “the ongoing Brexit chaos hasn’t adversely affected the PM’s favourability figures — which are, in fact, slightly higher now than they were when he first moved into Downing Street”.

In fact, despite the furore over Johnson’s suspension of parliament, the dismissal of special advisors, the expulsion of 21 moderate Conservative MPs and the PM’s allegedly dictatorial tendencies, support for the Conservative Party has increased.

The week before Johnson became Prime Minister, his party averaged 24% The week after he entered Downing Street it jumped to 29%. Today, it is 33%. Groupthink tells us that Johnson is making his party unelectable. The data tells us that Labour has only been ahead in one of the last 40 opinion polls.

There is, of course, a lot that could still go wrong for Johnson. With the SNP still dominant in Scotland, Britain’s electoral map is more constrained. Volatility is high and so it is much harder for either of the two main parties to win a majority.

Suggested reading

How politics makes us irrational

By Tom Chivers

But if Johnson’s strategy is to mobilise Brexit Britain while exploiting a divided Remain camp, then, so far, it seems to be working. All he needs to do now is capture between one-third and a half of what remains of Nigel Farage’s vote. If he does that,  then he will almost certainly cruise to a comfortable majority and his stay in No 10 will be longer than many of his critics think.

But all of this speaks to a deeper point. It underlines why — with a fresh election on the horizon — we should be far more critical of herd thinking than we currently are.

Think for a moment about all of the shocks that have rocked British politics. The triumph of UKIP at the European elections in 2014. David Cameron’s surprise majority in 2015. The rise of the SNP in Scotland. Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour Party leader. The Leave victory in 2016. The Trump victory a few months later. The hung parliament in 2017. And the strong result for Corbyn’s Labour.

Most of the political Twitterati herd did not see these shocks coming. The experts didn’t help much either.

In 2015, hundreds of academics, journalists and pollsters were asked in a survey to predict the outcome of the general election. This was based on the popular idea that there is “wisdom in crowds”. These crowds predicted a hung parliament in which Ed Miliband and the Labour Party commanded the largest number of seats while the Liberal Democrats and SNP held the balance of power. The reality was the first Conservative majority since 1992.

Suggested reading

What the populists get right

By Matthew Goodwin

More complex election forecasts didn’t offer us much insight either. In fact, few, if any, successfully forecast the result. The most generous prediction gave the Conservatives 296 seats while the polling ‘guru’ Nate Silver was also way off, predicting 278. In the end, Cameron won 330 seats. Political scientists were left to reflect on what one described as their “substantial over-confidence in predictions of the election outcome”.

More recently, experts would tweet out Jeremy Corbyn’s dismal leadership ratings like clockwork every month: “Look how terrible he is!” But then Labour presided over the highest share of the vote since Tony Blair’s second landslide. The experts went quiet. As one academic rightly argued, the response to Corbyn reflected a wider problem: a tendency among experts to prioritise not objective analysis but their own normative positions and a desire to conform to the established ideological orthodoxy.

Much the same could be said about Brexit.

When the referendum arrived in 2016, another survey of nearly 600 experts delivered a remarkably clear view. Nearly 90% expected Remain to win. Just 5% felt that Brexit was the most likely outcome. Journalists were noticeably worse: 97% predicted Remain and just 3% Brexit. And most expected Remain to win by at least 10-points. There were simply too few people willing to question and challenge the herd thinking.

And then came the 2017 general election. This time around “[t]he prevailing view [of another expert survey]…was that the Conservatives will secure a large majority, with an implied probability of 65% that they will win a majority of more than one hundred seats”.

Once again this view was bolstered by even more technical election forecasts, all but one of which confidently predicted a solid Conservative majority (take a look for yourself). The largest majority of 124 seats was forecast by Ian Warren, an expert on the Labour vote.

It is easy to bash election predictions and take this argument too far, of course. We should remember that the forecasters had a better election in 2010 (although Nate Silver was still wide of the mark as he was, again, in 2016). And while, last week, Ipsos-MORI revealed that only 23% of people think that pollsters are trustworthy, the polls have actually got more right than people think.

Suggested reading

How it could all go wrong for Boris

By Matthew Goodwin

The problem is that some of the things that they have called correctly — some online studies showed a swing to Leave, there were some state-level polls in the US that pointed to a Trump victory, or the MRP model that predicted a hung parliament in 2017 — were simply never accepted by the herd. Too many people only saw what they wanted to see.

Like the much-derided economists who failed to see the financial crisis coming, it seems only fair to ask why so many political analysts have failed to diagnose a succession of shocks. Often, it has been those who are closest to the world of politics who have been consistently outflanked by political change.

I suspect that several factors are at play.

The sharp liberal Left slant that runs through the Twitter and university communities ensures that few people have strong links to the values and voters that run against the dominant ideological orthodoxy. Ideological cocoons prevent experts from seeing, and engaging with, the wider world.

Rather than challenge our priors, it is much easier to let motivated reasoning — a bias toward an outcome or decision that confirms with what we already know — win the day. As a result, anything or anybody that deviates from the consensus and the herd is challenged, undermined or simply ignored.

Furthermore, and as Philip Tetlock, author of Superforecasting argues, experts tend to suffer from a potent interplay of over-confidence, binary thinking, a herding instinct and, to be blunt, hubris. All of this undermines their ability to gauge the public mood in an increasingly volatile political environment. This seems especially likely when most of the movements that are challenging the status quo are anchored in communities that most highly-educated and privileged experts simply do not understand.

Suggested reading

Could you predict Brexit?

By Tom Chivers

To this we can add the dominance of the polls in shaping much of our media commentary, which is deeply problematic. Inaccurate polls feed inaccurate forecasts while many journalists, understandably, lack the time and skills to question the methodological choices being pursued. Equally, it’s easy to disregard those polls that simply don’t fit your requirements.

All of this underlines why — with a fresh election on the horizon — we all need to be far more sceptical of what we are told and more willing to challenge the consensus.

Tetlock suggested that the art and science of prediction is a skill that can be improved with practice. The jury is still out on that one. For the rest of us, one might suggest that another lesson can be taken from recent history: always challenge the herd.

In 2006, Francis Elliott of The Times and I wrote a biography of David Cameron. We spoke to more than 300 people, on and off the record, about the man who was to transform his party’s fortunes. We updated the book twice, and were gratified to be told weren’t a million miles from painting an accurate picture. But by and large, that was when the going was good.

Since 2016, Cameron has said little. The nation built a picture of a lonely, slightly bored figure grimly tapping away at the keyboard in his shepherd’s hut, emerging occasionally to cross the globe and collect a hefty cheque from a speaking engagement. But even then he was at the mercy of events. He didn’t want to be unhelpful to his successors and, as Brexit was delayed, so too was his version. But now the book is upon us.

And the biggest interest will be in that shattering referendum result. He had called the 2016 vote on Britain’s continued membership of the EU in the expectation that the Remain side would win. It was an expectation shared by most of the London media bubble. The story went that the “sensible”, centrist voters would do what they did in the 1975 referendum, namely take their cue on a hugely complicated issue from the sensible centrist MPs and support the status quo.

Suggested reading

What if Remain had won?

By James Kirkup

But Cameron, and many others, didn’t realise how few people outside London had a stake in the status quo. They felt omitted and disenfranchised. Migrants were taking people’s jobs, or so they felt. English wasn’t being spoken on the bus. Brussels was doing Westminster’s job. Why should they do what the Establishment wanted?

For Cameron, of course, the result was cataclysmic. Even someone of his extraordinary buoyancy and optimism would struggle. He had been in No 10 for six years, had made the Conservative Party electable again, and given it an aura of competence once more. He was within reach of being able to say he had won two elections, three referendums and that he had left office at a time of his own choosing. No Prime Minister for 40 years had been able to claim the last of those, let alone all three.

And I believe that that – leaving office soon after a referendum win – was his intention. Not only would Europe cease to be an issue for the Tories, but he was exhausted. Contrary to popular belief, he worked extremely hard. In our biography, we quoted a colleague as saying that he was brilliant at “chillaxing”. The term was intended in admiration of Cameron’s ability, no matter how grave the decisions he was having to make, to zone out, to switch off and give himself to his family. Yet it was seen as a mark of idleness.

Suggested reading

Can the Tories accommodate populism?

By David Goodhart

But, that said, being Prime Minister takes an enormous toll. “Dave is knackered,” I remember one of his friends telling me, “and I do worry for him.” In short, Cameron was running out of steam, and with that glowing legacy in prospect, why hang around and keep his friend and neighbour George Osborne waiting for the top job? He had young children and no desire for them to spend any more time than necessary in Downing Street’s gilded cage.

And, perhaps most importantly, his wife had had enough. She never enjoyed the accoutrements of power, and had put her career on hold for him. Already in 2015 she was designing clothes for the fashion line she planned to launch. The writing was on the wall. Those who accuse Cameron of cutting and running after losing the referendum will find further ammunition here – he was planning to go all along – but I think that is only because he believed, having won, there would be no shame in leaving. On the contrary. Besides, the attacks on him for “walking away” look wide of the mark, given how hard “the mess” has been to clear up. Would his critics really want him to still be there?

His feelings about that defeat will make riveting reading. He takes public service seriously, and the UK was leaving the EU by accident. Unsurprisingly, friends talk of him being “devastated” and of feeling a great sense of guilt. Those who accuse him of wantonly committing to holding the referendum without considering the consequences will claim vindication. That argument will go on for ever. As one close friend puts it: “It was not a reckless gamble, it was a calculated one: the trouble was, he got the calculation wrong.”

Suggested reading

Where would the Left be without Brexit?

By James Bloodworth

His critics will say that when the stakes are that high, you shouldn’t take any risks at all. And that would have meant not promising a referendum and probably losing the 2015 election. Was it worth it, for a man who says he loves his country more than his party? Would Ed Miliband really have been worse than what we have now? How thoroughly he answers that question will be a test of the book’s candour.

Cameron insists he does not regret calling the referendum, only its outcome. He believes the referendum was a necessity, rather than the hubristic punt that his opponents claim. In the interests of securing re-election in 2015, he wanted to buy off those tempted to vote Ukip. In that respect, he was more successful than he expected, winning an overall majority. (His book should answer Donald Tusk’s claim that he planned to rat on that pledge under pressure from his expected coalition partners, the Lib Dems.) It is generally forgotten, though, that – knowing what damage splits on Europe had done to successive Tory governments – he had first mooted a referendum on the EU as early as 2013.

Cameron’s view is echoed in a forthcoming book by Martin Westlake, which shows that not only was an In-Out vote being taken seriously in senior Tory circles nearly 20 years earlier, largely for reasons of party management, but that Cameron felt the referendum was a necessity for the country. In 2013, Cameron cited the main spur as neither migration nor sovereignty but problems in the eurozone, which were “driving fundamental change in Europe”. “Democratic consent for the EU in Britain is now wafer thin,” he said, and needed strengthening.

Suggested reading

The secrets of the ruling class

By Alex Renton

Cameron has said that populism cost him his job. He also knew that the Remain campaign had been a shambles. The brilliance and cynicism of the Leave campaign left Cameron’s team horribly outgunned. He would be justified in crying foul, but is too knowing a  politician not to accept responsibility. His chief regret, surely, will be the failure over many years to advertise the merits of Europe. For a politician who benefitted so much from avoiding policy definition, in a divided Tory Party that would have been asking a lot. Maybe there’s a lesson there.

Just as Cameron’s record has been overshadowed by Brexit, his book will be too. But he takes politics seriously, and there will be plenty for the think tanks, constitutionalists and historians to chew on. There will doubtless be a good deal of explanation and self-justification – on austerity, the coalition, the failure to clean up party funding, the unseating of Gaddafi, the non-intervention in Syria, his frustrations with the Whitehall machine, the non-resolution of press regulation – and I hope he will say something about the 24-hour pressure placed on a PM, the resistance of his party to change and the burdens he placed on himself. For example, he felt he owed it to the victims and to the country to watch in full the videos of jihadist beheadings, at considerable personal discomfort and distress.

The saltier material will be about the personalities. A schoolfriend talks of his sweetness of nature – which essentially he has retained, despite everything – but clearly a number of former colleagues now lie several miles outside his affability zone.

Suggested reading

Is the Conservative Party brain dead?

By Peter Franklin

His former friend Steve Hilton is one. The brilliantly creative salesman of compassionate Conservatism let it be known he thought his former boss was too cautious in office. Don’t be surprised to read of Hilton’s increasingly unworldly schemes, high-handedness with colleagues and “eccentric” behaviour.

Lord Ashcroft, a Tory donor to whom William Hague was close, is another who caused Cameron headaches, and who ended up writing a critical biography, with Isabel Oakeshott, of the then PM. The former PM told friends he would have preferred not to mention Ashcroft at all, because almost anything he wrote might cause trouble. But of one thing we can be sure. There will be no admission of Ashcroft’s claim that at a university party Cameron had placed his penis in the mouth of a dead pig (a claim that caused Cameron’s mother to call him at Downing Street – “just checking, David”). The source of the tale has never been revealed. But we can live in hope.

Cameron has delayed publication of this book because he didn’t want to make Theresa May’s job any harder. He knows how difficult the job is, which is why, when she was at the Home Office, he didn’t think she was up to it. But she did replace him, prompting him to say to one friend: “At least it is not Boris.”

Suggested reading

Britain's first Brexit was the hardest

By Tom Holland

Oh dear, and now it is. The Johnson campaign was keen to present its candidate as the One Nation Tory, as the natural home for those who had supported Cameron. In a number of cases it succeeded, but few real Cameroons took the bait. On the other hand, the disdain that for a long time prevented Cameron endorsing Johnson for the London mayoralty has lessened. The two former rivals could now be useful to one another, so don’t expect this book to tell you the whole truth about Cameron’s opinion of Boris.

More likely to receive both barrels is Michael Gove, whose surprise decision to back Leave in the referendum was taken extraordinarily badly by Cameron, who, despite his removal of Gove from the Department of Education, had seen him as a last-ditch ally. The hostility is intensified by the former exceptional closeness between the men’s wives. Cameron is good at magnanimity and disdains small-mindedness, but he may think such generosity of spirit would be wasted on his former ally. He may think damning with little or no praise does the trick.

The people I would like to read most about, though, are Rupert Murdoch, Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson. You will remember that it was Rebekah Brooks who persuaded her boss Murdoch to switch sides and support Cameron’s Tories in the 2010 election. She also persuaded George Osborne and Cameron that her clandestine lover, Coulson, though recently unseated (and later sent to prison) from the editorship of the scandal-hit News of the World, would be a suitable person to run Cameron’s communications.

Suggested reading

Do leaders bluff their way to the top?

By Peter Franklin

She would say that, wouldn’t she, you might think. But surely Cameron and his people were  savvy enough to do the due diligence? Not due enough, seemingly. In all Cameron’s six years in office, by far his most uncomfortable time in public was his session in front of the Leveson Inquiry, when a pink-faced Prime Minister protested to Sir Brian that he remembered very clearly how important it was to secure an assurance from Coulson. But of what? That he hadn’t known about the hacking, or that it was unlikely to resurface and cause embarrassment?

It would be good to have a fuller and franker account than Cameron has so far offered. Coulson – the tabloid counterweight employed to tell the posh boys what real people think – helped get Cameron into Downing Street. Does Cameron truly regret hiring him, or merely the bad publicity when he was finally exposed? How does Cameron regard Coulson now? And Rebekah Brooks? Are they in touch? She made Cameron look very good and then very stupid. He must have feelings about that.

We are unlikely to read about that, though. Because after slow bidding for the rights to Cameron’s memoirs, the deal was reportedly sealed with a hefty £800,000 offer from HarperCollins, owned by News Corp, whose UK division is News UK. Its chief executive, need I remind you, is Rebekah Brooks.

A version of this article appears in The Gentleman’s Journal. For the Record, by David Cameron, is published by William Collins on 19 September

It proposes to withhold payments to the EU, slash overseas aid and scrap HS2 high-speed rail in order to deliver £200 billion of investment to regions outside London, improve transport links and broadband across the country and scrap business rates for new firms outside the capital. It is casting itself, as Freddie Sayers noted, “as the party of the regions, pitted against an over-dominant capital”.

Suggested reading

Farage has found Boris's weak spot

By Freddie Sayers

The Brexit Party’s tilt towards regional grievances is the latest example in Western democracies of how a sharpening divide between what the French geographer Christophe Guilluy calls the “metropole and the periphery” is rapidly being politicised.

It’s a familiar enough refrain now. On one side are those who can afford to live in the big cities; they are strongly liberal and have little interest in rebalancing the settlement. On the other, are those who are stuck in the periphery and outer regions – or who choose to live there – who have seen life sucked out of their once thriving communities. Left behind and left out, these voters know that our ‘open’ cities are actually among the most ‘closed’ places on earth.

The problem for the main parties is that this narrative resonates. Whisper it quietly: the Brexit Party’s offer is not a bad reply to the referendum result. The Leave vote was always anchored as much in regional inequalities as conservative Euroscepticism.

Such policies are also not a million miles away from proposals that have been put forward by think-tanks such as IPPR North, the Social Mobility Commission and former prime minister, Gordon Brown, who rightly suggested that we should have a royal commission to think more seriously about those regional divides. So why is it the populists and not the main parties who have translated this discussion into concrete proposals?

Suggested reading

Where's our ambition for the North?

By Phillip Blond

The pivot suggests that Farage and the Brexit Party have realised that their future lies not in affluent southern Tory seats but in blue-collar, left-behind Britain. “There are many seats in the country”, Farage told his supporters last week, “especially Labour-held seats, where we are the main challenger”. The Brexit Party will contest every seat at the next election and it looks like those Labour redoubts scattered along coastal England, in the Midlands, the struggling north and Wales will be key targets as a result.

The seats most conducive to the Brexit Party can be identified by using data that I compiled with Caitlin Milazzo for a book on UKIP, which turned out to be an extremely good predictor of how Farage’s party performed in 2015. We have subsequently demonstrated how there is a strong relationship between support for the two, and so the data paints a pretty reliable picture of where the Brexit Party will strike a chord.

The picture highlights peripheral, unheard Britain – towns, communities and neighbourhoods which have been neglected and ignored for decades. There are typically larger numbers of working-class residents, pensioners, white voters and people with few or no formal qualifications. Most have been sidelined by the economic transformation of Britain over the past 30 years and battered by the winds of globalisation. There has been very little inward investment.

They include coastal communities such as Clacton, Great Yarmouth, and Boston and Skegness, and then pass through struggling communities in Wales like Blaenau Gwent and Merthyr Tydfil, up to Ashfield in Eastern England and into Blackpool and Sunderland in the North. Spend one-hour in these seats and the question of why so many people turned away from the main parties to vote for UKIP, and then Brexit, is not a hard one to answer. These are the areas that are suffering from a ‘double whammy’: few people with skills and qualifications but also few local opportunities.

Suggested reading

The town that should shame our politicians

By Paul Embery

Many of the Brexit Party’s most favourable seats are currently in Labour hands. Of the 20 most favourable, no fewer than 16 were won by Labour in 2017; of the 50 most favourable, 36 are held by Labour. They include seats such as Yvette Cooper’s seat of Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford and other northern Labour seats such as Stoke-on-Trent North, Wentworth and Dearne, and Easington. In many of these places, Labour’s MPs have large majorities, which have been built up over many years. But this is not the case in all of them.

There are also seats where the margins are closer and where a strong Brexit Party vote could easily make life far more complicated for both Labour and the Conservatives. There are, for example, northern and more marginal seats that should normally be in Conservative sights, such as Ashfield, Great Grimsby, Scunthorpe and Dudley North. Even if the Brexit Party were to only poll around the 10% mark this would seriously complicate the Tory task of capturing these Labour seats.

Nor is Farage starting from scratch. He is already well-known in these areas. Only four years ago, at the 2015 general election, UKIP won only one seat (in Clacton) but finished second in 120 constituencies, 44 of which went to Labour. UKIP easily surpassed 20% of the vote in lots of Labour seats without really trying or targeting them, seats such Barnsley East, Don Valley, Doncaster Central, and Houghton and Sunderland South.

Farage’s relationship with these places was rekindled when, at the European elections this year, many of them put the Brexit Party well ahead of Labour. His party humiliated Labour in its oldest heartlands – Ashfield, Redcar, Merthyr Tydfil, Bolsover and Hartlepool. It won all but a few of the 39 districts in England’s northwest, every district in the northeast and more than doubled Labour’s share of the vote in Wales.

Suggested reading

How long will the Brexit Party last?

By Peter Franklin

This is not to say that the Brexit Party is about to capture dozens of Labour seats – but the challenge to Labour from Farage at the next election will be stronger than the challenge presented in 2015

The problem for the Tories is that they also need to make inroads into these Leave-voting areas if they are to offset their likely losses to Labour and the Liberal Democrats in Remainia. Yet Brexit Party insiders argue that this will simply never happen because of long established political traditions: voters in these areas will never turn out in large numbers for ‘the Tories’. “If you vote Tory,” Farage declared, “you will get Corbyn and you should stand aside for the Brexit Party who can beat them in those constituencies.”

The claim is not without evidence. In 2017, Theresa May and the Conservatives appealed directly to Brexit voters, hoping to offset losses in Remainia by capturing pro-Brexit seats in Labour’s heartlands. In the end, however, the former happened while the latter never really materialised. The Tories captured just five seats from Labour in places where a majority of people had voted to Leave the EU.

While a handful of Conservative candidates suddenly found themselves representing the good people of Walsall North, Stoke South, Mansfield, Middlesbrough South and Copeland this was simply not enough when set alongside Conservative losses in Remain voting areas.

Suggested reading

The reason people peddle lies about Farage

By Douglas Murray

This time around, a Prime Minister Johnson or Hunt will need to find a far better way of appealing to these areas, otherwise they risk serious losses in both Remainia and Leave Land. This means grappling with the fact that many voters in these seats are ‘cross-pressured’. In their hearts, they agree with the Tories on the cultural issues of Brexit and immigration, and also crime. But in their heads, they agree with Corbyn’s economic radicalism and his promise to do more to redistribute an economy which many feel is rigged against them. Talking only about Brexit is not enough; voters also want to know how this moment will be used to make our society fairer.

Theresa May is familiar with this problem. Many voters liked her on culture but were deeply sceptical when it came to economics. So, while the Conservative vote increased a bit, so too did Labour’s, which was a disappointment to May and her advisors.

So, in short, the next Tory leader needs to go much further on economics than they are probably prepared to. In a world where the vast majority of Brexit Party voters earn less than £40,000 per year, tax cuts for people on £50-80k are not going to cut it.

Farage may have set out his stall, but there has been remarkably little during the Conservative leadership campaign to suggest that either candidate, or the Tory Party as a whole, truly grasps what is needed to appeal to Brexit Party Britain – that place where voters share a profound sense of economic insecurity and pessimism. These voters are looking for a far more radical domestic policy agenda and one that is chiefly focused on economic fairness, not on how to build a Singapore-on-Thames.

More from this author

The coming Conservative catastrophe

By Matthew Goodwin

With an election looming, the Tories need to come up with a counter offer for Brexit Britain and one that goes further than ‘we will deliver Brexit’. And do it fast. If they fail to do so, then even a mediocre Brexit Party vote could cause major problems for incumbent Conservative MPs who are sitting on small majorities – like Johnny Mercer in Plymouth Moor View, Lucy Allan in Telford, Amber Rudd in Hastings and Rye or Simon Clarke in Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland.

Other Tory seats that were gained in 2017, have wafer-thin majorities and are favourable to the Brexit Party like Thurrock, Southport, Aberconwy and Southampton Itchen could fall in the same way. The Tories will need to find a new way of appealing to these areas, not just by delivering Brexit but also going further on the economic axis.

Meanwhile, unless Labour retains its relationship with its traditional working-class voters then it could find that its majorities in pro-Leave seats are further whittled down as Opposition voters coalesce around the Brexit Party.

In short, as British politics continues to fragment, the future of the main parties depends on how they seek to renew their relationship with the Britain that they left behind.

Carlisle could stand as proud as any in an audition for the privilege of being the nation’s capital. It played a vital role in the health and wealth of the nation long before some of our more illustrious counterparts were any more than a glint in the Industrial Revolution’s eye. An ancient settlement that later became the largest Roman camp on the Wall, my home city is no stranger to prominence in the socio-political drama of these islands.

Indeed, Carlisle has due heritage: Parliament has been held here before, on at least two occasions. The Great Seal of state was held at Lanercost Priory while Edward I journeyed north to pick a fight with the Scots; alas he could not finish the job, perishing on the windy marshes to the west of Carlisle, giving the city the honour of hosting the coronation of Edward II.

Of course, Edward was here for the same reason as generations before him, and generations after: Carlisle played a key strategic role in the affairs of the entire North. William Rufus seized the city in 1092 to finally extend his father’s Conquest to the north-North. He built a castle on the ancient Roman fort, which was later to become the residence of King David I of the Scots (“Prince of the Cumbrians”), who chose Carlisle as his favoured residence, passing away in the private chapel of the Keep in 1153.

Suggested reading

Why we need a more British capital

By Peter Hitchens

Of course, if you’re Cumbrian, then you’re Cumbrian, and thus slightly different from just English, or Scottish, or even Welsh, but containing hearty dollops of all three (and Irish too – but more of that later). Geographically and historically, Carlisle was part of a Celtic kingdom locked in a tug of war between later Scottish and English overlords. Carlisle’s two dragons on its coat of arms references its Brythonic roots, and wander the Cumbrian countryside map in hand and you’ll soon find more than just the odd clue to its Welsh heritage in its place names and dialect.

Throw in William Wallace (‘wylisc’), a Strathclyder (so Welsh really), and the buried bones of Robert de Brus, father of… yes, you guessed it, and finish off with the centuries old tug of war over Carlisle – at one moment part of Scotland, at another part of England – and Carlisle begins to show itself as a particularly lively theatre of British cosmopolitanism.

It doesn’t stop there. We’re also claiming St Patrick, Old King Cole (Coel Hen – enriching childhoods with memorable ditties from time immemorial), as well as the setting to any firm history that does exist around King Arthur (this is not even controversial), all of whom if not directly from Carlisle are certainly from its hinterland. St Cuthbert visited Carlisle regularly – it had been granted to the diocese of Lindisfarne by Ecgfrith – and St Ninian set out from Carlisle to convert the Picts, while St Mungo – whose legend still shapes the arms of the city of Glasgow – was a Stratchclyder who more than left his mark on field and marsh around Carlisle.

Indeed, one might even make a case that the first steps of the inexorable journey toward a unified Isles took place not far from Carlisle, as Athelstan sought to bring to heel the Northumbrians, the Welsh, the Scots and the Vikings in a little village of henge and earthwork, called Eamont, just outside Penrith.

Carlisle has earned its place at the top table in the gathering places of these lands. Of course, the historical may not convince everyone, so for the doubters let us turn to the practical. Geographically, Carlisle sits at the very nexus of the Isles – it is more or less equidistant between our northernmost reaches and the south coast, a gateway city straddling the old roads north to Glasgow, north-east to Edinburgh, the Wall road east to Newcastle, West to the coalfields and old ports (and nuclear plant) of Maryport and Workington and Whitehaven, and of course south down the ancient A6 to what we might call Down There.

Suggested reading

What's the point of central government?

By Peter Franklin

And remember that Carlisle is the biggest city in England – though admittedly 98% of its land use is rural (most certainly an upgrade from the cramped living of central London). Add to that Carlisle’s long and historic status as a nationally important hub for rail and freight – at one point with a seven rail companies serving its station, second only to London – as well as its long established cultural and historical links with Ireland through constant waves of immigration and trade (Cleator Moor, on the west coast of the county, is affectionately known as “Little Ireland”), and you come to realise that Cumbria has been a lynchpin of UK culture and cohesion for centuries.

Ah, I hear you cry, but could you accommodate the refined tastes of the metropolitan classes that would no doubt descend on Carlisle should we be raised to just prominence? Well, we had the first ever pillar box, we are the home of McVities and make more custard creams than you thought imaginable (that’s the meetings sorted).

Carlisle is also the home of Linton Tweeds, suppliers to Chanel, thus satiating the sartorital demands of the sophisticariat, while we also have the two oldest prizes in horse racing, dating to the 16th century, horses being a key export and cultural signifier of these lands for nigh on 2,000 years. Walter Scott was married here while William Paley – scourge of every A-level philosophy student, and Richard Dawkins – was archdeacon and is buried here, at our cathedral.

One struggles to imagine what more any soul could need.

Suggested reading

Where's our ambition for the North?

By Phillip Blond

There is a serious point to be made too. If there is any case to be made for moving the capital, however temporarily, then it is to break the monopolistic dominance of London on the political and cultural capital of the UK, to renew the democratic covenant with those beyond the M25. Illustrious rivals – Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool – might all have a strong claim for a relocated Parliament, though the politically disruptive pulses flowing through society now are more parochial than that. It is the steely cries of our neglected towns, our isolated regions, our down-at-heel coastal areas, our struggling countryside that is ripping up the status quo. Decamping to another metropolis, particularly a place with a broadly similar sociocultural outlook, would do little more than replicate the problem.

In this sense, Cumbria provides a unique microcosm for those who would seek it out – the post-industrial decline, the struggling coastal areas, the decimation of rural services, the creaking infrastructure. What better place to stand as proxy for a debate we really need to have?

There will be significant downsides of course, and it would take great sacrifice on our part, though I’m sure we would be willing to do so, for the national interest. The increased traffic, the extra noise, the pollution, the jump in house prices, the gentrification, the hipster cereal shops…

On second thoughts, maybe Jon Elledge had a point. Maybe keep it down south after all. Why not try Manchester instead?