Rachel Cunliffe

It had one objectively brilliant song, the rest is just musically meh

Still reeling from a very realistic anxiety dream that my husband thought it would be a great idea for us to go on holiday to Iran. Apparently “there is an excellent river cruise”.

This is fascinating, and reminds me of Jilly Cooper's observation that British people specifically detest the class immediately above and below them (eg middle to upper and vice versa) but are fine with a bigger gab (working to upper).

As the class system get flattened, everyone hates everyone else

Jim, Charles and Roscoe, photographed just after the recording of their difficult third album.

... Chilling out with his bandmates.

Polling from More in Common shows that Greens and Reform win a higher share of voters who struggle to make ends meet, while Labour and the Conservatives win those who are most financially comfortable

Reform UK and the Greens are hoovering up financially insecure voters. My piece this week looks at the return of Britain's class politics (with a twist) www.economist.com/britain/2026...

I liked the idea to change it to a pajama day - because who doesnt love reading in their pajamas? Kids still get the heady excitement of a non-uniform day, but no costumes needed and the focus remains on the actual reading

Cool, and that’s totally your choice. Personally, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with someone drawing attention to their own work. If people don’t want to pay for it, that’s up to them. The outrage is weird.

And I’ve done lots of pro bono gigs too. But people on BlueSky are not charities

Genuinely didn’t realise the concept of paying for a service was so controversial to some people, or that they have apparently never seen journalists on social media post links to their articles (which, having taken the time to write them, might be paywalled) for discussion. Consider me enlightened

I’m curious, do you do your job for free? Do you expect other professions to provide services or products at no cost, or is it just journalists?

I didn’t tell anyone to read anything. I just pointed out the thing someone was annoyed about after reading a two-line post was covered in the link

Pretty timely ahead of the elections in May, I think!

Josh Babarinde: Lib Dems need to fight “for the soul of our country” The MP for Eastbourne and new Liberal Democrat president on how his party is taking on Reform

Oooh may I take this opportunity to point you in the direction of this interview I did with the new Liberal Democrat president Josh Babarinde all about the Lib Dems and their strategy and how they are using their 72 MPs? Feel it deserves more readers!

www.newstatesman.com/politics/pol...

Okay so you watched it, you saw the Davey question on energy bills, but you couldn't work out why energy might be relevant to the PMQs session you just watched? Got it.

As for the link, again, it was in the post. Which you commented on. Did you think it was there for decoration? Whaever, you do you

Sacrilege

I don't think it does? The link is right there? But okay, sure, it's my fault for not making it clear that the post was in relation to the link I had included in the same post.

Incidentally, if you'd watched PMQs you'd have known about Davey's question on energy bills even without clicking the link

No, but there is a link to the article I wrote, which the post is obviously flagging. That's what journalists do: we post our articles on social media with a short summary in the hope people might read them

It did, because Ed Davey asked Starmer if he would guarantee that energy bills wouldn't rise by £500 a year as is reportedly going to happen with no action, and Starmer didn't. Which, again, is talked about in the piece

??? In the piece I am very clear that Badenoch was a disaster today, and that Starmer was good.

But a strong PMQs performance doesn't take away from the fact that if energy prices soar, the government is in real trouble. Voters will expect action, like with Ukraine in 2022

Classic

What we learned PMQs: Keir Starmer is getting Brits out of the Middle East Kemi Badenoch displayed a total disregard for the evacuations – but the Starmer is haunted by the threat of soaring energy bills.

PMQs review: pretty astonishing for Kemi Badenoch to be quite so blatantly disinterested in evacuated British nationals stranded in the Middle East, but there we go

A strong performance from Starmer - but energy bills are coming for him

www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-...

Did you nearly get added to their pension scheme by mistake...?

Also very unpatriotic, all things considering

I guessed that was the one you meant! I was just trying to work out what Kipling would have rhymed with "nuclear weapons"

I don't rememeber that particular Kipling poem

YouTube video by Forbrukerrådet - Norwegian Consumer Council A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator

"Make people dependent enough, and then make it shitty"

Still giggling at this hilarious video from the Norwegian Consumer Council "A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator" which seems a perfect embodiment of Silicon Valley and tech generally these days

www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Up...

Exactly. The old internet was rubbish in lots of ways, but it was so vast, so many different pockets of information and communities, that you could find where you needed to be and the people you needed to be with. And, just as importantly, you could also leave.

Now it's just one huge cesspit

I can see where this is coming from, but there was in fact once an internet that wasn't just six monopoly companies herding you to shout at each other for clout. There was a time when google search took you to pages built by real people pursuing their real, personal interests. That happened.

The old internet is gone but we can still save the new one A love letter to the internet that once was

I started thinking about the consultation to ban social media for under-16s, and ended up thinking about what it was like to BE under 16 and left supervised on the internet, wild and untamed as it was back then.

And then I wrote a love letter to it

www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-...

Tracking our *negative* voting intention (who would Britons vote AGAINST):

➡️ Ref 38% (+9)
🌹Lab 34% (-4)
🌳 Con 7% (-1)
🌏 Green 7% (+4)
🐦‍ LD 3% (-)
changes w/ Nov 2025

As Reform has plateaued in the polls, the number of people saying they would also vote *against* Reform has grown

An extreme switch - but surprising how often you hear people saying they're deciding between Green and Reform, or Lib Dem and Reform. Sometimes people just want to kick the system

My guess is either to further right parties (Advance / Restore) as the electorate fractures, or - counter-intuitively - to the Greens. For a lot of voters it’s “a plague on both your houses” (Labour and Tory), casting around for something different that offers seemingly clear answers