is it because i lied when i was seventeen?

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Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys has died at the age of 82, and so today's music is chosen in his honour. I'm quite fond of the Beach Boys, so I had plenty of songs to choose from, but I've always really liked "God Only Knows" from the classic 1966 album Pet Sounds. Like the album it came from, the song did considerably better in the UK than in its native US. Over here it made it all the way to number two, kept off the top only by the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine"/"Eleanor Rigby" double A-side. The video here is obviously much more recent, but it is an official one from the Beach Boys' own YouTube account, so I'm more than happy to embed it.

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Today's U-turn on Winter Fuel Allowance payments is arguably fairly reasonable in its intent, in that it means truly wealthy pensioners will not receive WFA but those on average incomes will. Put like that, it sounds fine, and in principle I can get behind it. The snag is... well, the several snags are:

1) The government has insisted, loudly, since last year that on no account would they do this, and that anyone suggesting they'd U-turn was not telling the truth. The "anyones" were telling the truth; the government wasn't.
2) Rachel Reeves has acquired a reputation as an extremely poor Chancellor who neither sticks by her commitments nor acknowledges U-turns. This will make that reputation even worse.
3) The new limit will be £35,000 a year, per person. But a couple on a combined income of £69,000 with no mortgage is much wealthier than the large majority of working people, especially those with children to support.
4) We're told that whether someone reaches the £35,000 mark will be decided via income tax returns. But most pensioners who have no other income don't do tax returns in the first place.
5) The change will cost £1.2 billion. Where's that coming from? Almost nobody believes Reeves' comment that the economy is suddenly doing sufficiently better to afford this.
6) There's already a strong sense that wealthier pensioners are uniquely shielded from cuts while everyone else suffers -- the triple lock is another example. This looks like strengthening that feeling.
7) If previously announced public spending, eg the extra money for public transport outside London, is cut again to pay for this then there will be absolute carnage in Labour's support in the regions.
8) The UK's demographics mean that the pensioner:worker ratio is becoming ever more tilted towards pensioners. If current trends continue, this change will become less affordable, not more.
9) One way of ameliorating this is by allowing more immigration -- but this is becoming politically toxic. England (specifically) is the most densely populated non-tiny country in Europe.
10) Nigel Farage, who pushed for this change, now has a clear win. Everyone knows that Reform's economics are far more fantastical than Labour's, but it doesn't seem to affect its polling.

Other than that, it's absolutely fine...

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127/365: Worcester Cathedral from Cathedral Square
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I was once again in Worcester to see friends today, but after I'd left that meetup I had a short time to do some shopping before my bus home. I took the opportunity for a photo, as you can see! This is Worcester Cathedral, taken from the first floor balcony in the Cathedral Square centre (a few restaurants and coffee shops, plus a hotel). I had several goes at getting a snap with all of the flags visible, but this was the closest I got! You can easily see the Ukrainian flag on the left, then the Union Flag. The third pole currently has a Pride flag, but that one refused to co-operate. On the top of the Cathedral tower is the English flag (St George's Cross). As you can probably tell from the sky, the weather was a tad iffy today, though fortunately the heavy rain held off until I was on the bus back!

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Wikipedia page including full result here. This by-election in the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse constituency was for the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh, and was caused by the death of the sitting SNP MSP Christina McKelvie in March. The by-election was held under the first past the post system used for Westminster elections, and the top four in the result were as follows:

Labour......... 8,559 (31.6%, -2.0 pts)
SNP............ 7,957 (29.4%, -16.8 pts)
Reform......... 7,088 (26.1%, new)
Conservative... 1,621 ( 6.0%, -11.5 pts)

The six other candidates were even more also-rans than the Tories, with none of them winning more than 2.6% of the vote. Turnout was 44.2%.

I wonder how many people saw this result coming? There'd even been a front-page interview in the Daily Record by the SNP's First Minister, John Swinney, which was predicated on the idea that this would be a straight SNP/Reform fight and "Labour can't win here". In the event, they could and they did. My own view, for what it's worth, was that the SNP would probably hang on with a reduced majority, with Reform and Labour in a close battle for second. I was wrong too.

From down here in England I'm obviously missing some context, such as how much of a personal vote McKelvie had, but a few things come to mind. First, the days of the SNP simply cruising to election victories are gone. They've been in power at Holyrood for a long time now, and Swinney just doesn't have the star power of Nicola Sturgeon. "It's all England's fault, vote for us and independence" is a rather unfair way of representing the SNP's pitch, but the heavy fall in the party's vote suggests they'll need a lot more than that. They may struggle to get close to a majority in Holyrood next year.

Labour will be delighted on the surface, and after all a win is a win. However, they lost vote share since last time (2021), and only won the seat because the SNP lost a lot more. Given that Labour is an opposition party in the Scottish Parliament, getting under a third of the vote is not some kind of overwhelming mandate. I suspect that a lot of anti-Reform and anti-SNP voters simply coalesced around Labour as the least worst option. In parts of this constituency unionism is still a strong factor, and Labour might have been seen as best placed there, too.

Reform has, inevitably, got the lion's share of media attention. This has been a bit silly in places -- as someone said elsewhere, the BBC in particular has been a bit "Labour won from the SNP, now let's talk to third-place winner Nigel Farage", which is something they do far too much. Nevertheless, going from zero to over a quarter of the vote isn't something anyone can ignore. I said a little while ago that Scottish (and Welsh) politicians should not be smug about Reform's victories in English local elections and imagine they were magically immune. This underlines that.

The Tories had a terrible night. I'm sure they expected that, but it was a fall from a respectable position four years ago. They clearly lost a lot of voters to Reform, but Reform didn't only win from the Conservatives. I suspect in fact they took some from Labour -- and even some from the SNP. Although the SNP is fairly unusual in modern Europe in being a liberal, left-wing nationalist party, not all its members are of that persuasion. It would be a mistake to assume that Reform's blend of social conservatism and left-wing economics didn't appeal to some SNP voters.

First Past the Post is a poor electoral system, but it's an even worse one now we have an extra major party in the mix. I suspect that in Westminster by-elections too, we will see more results like this in the coming years, with winners on barely (or even less than) 30% of the vote. The optimist in me hopes this will finally see us adopting a modern voting system, but the optimist in me has been repeatedly disappointed over the last decade or so.

I do have one final thought about Reform's popularity, both here and in Great Britain as a whole. These days, the main traditional parties go for an almost obsessively targeted, data-driven approach to canvassing, concentrating heavily on winnable floating voters or getting their base out. That means a lot of people never see a canvasser at election time. It's easy for those voters to feel the main parties don't care about their views. There's a clear space there for a party who'll "do things differently", and some evidence suggests many Reform voters usually don't vote at all. I think the traditional parties need to take some note of this. To a certain extent, their laser focus on a small subset of voters may be helping Reform...

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125/365: Dog Lane car park, Bewdley
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It was pretty wet at times today, especially but not only in the morning. I did pretty much nothing of actual interest, just worked on boring everyday stuff, did chores, got a small amount of shopping and so on. That also means I didn't get any interesting photos for the 365 -- so you get this one of a car park! Actually two, since the barriered space on the left is for staff at the medical centre, which is the building you see on the left. The public car park is the area to the right, which extends out of shot. The chemist (pharmacist) I use is just out of shot to the left, and the public library is the last building in the row, just visible in the distance.

All kinds of political stuff happening, and no I don't just mean tonight's US soap opera/horror show involving Trump and Musk. We've got quite enough to be going on with here. A Parliamentary by-election in Scotland, one of Reform's leaders resigning in a strop, the Russian ambassador partly blaming the UK for the Ukrainian drone attack... there's more, but I'm too tired to write about all this tonight.

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124/365: Cattle below Silverwoods Way, Kidderminster
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I've finally been starting to catch up with Doctor Who. For ages I'd only seen the first two episodes of the current series, of which I had mixed feelings about "The Robot Revolution" but really liked "Lux". I also really liked "The Well", which was full-on scary in a way Who doesn't often nail these days. Probably the best episode since "73 Yards" last year. I also watched "Lucky Day", which was so nearly another great. The twist was superbly executed -- I did not see that coming -- but although I heavily sympathised with the Doctor's monologue to Conrad it seemed to have the common-these-days RTD fault of being far too unsubtle.

Today's 365 photo is from Kidderminster. Yes, oh ye of little faith, I did indeed take this picture in Kidderminster! To be precise, I was looking down from Silverwoods Way in the south of the town. These cattle are not part of a normal beef or dairy herd; instead they are kept by the local authorities to make sure that the important wildlife habitat doesn't simply end up as endless scrub. They all seem to be lazing about a bit here, which is something I rather envied them for as I passed by! You can't go right down there yourself -- that rough path is used to take feed to them -- but it makes a change to see this in a very built-up area.