benshimshon.bsky.social

Maybe “locally avoided”?

Six weeks older, none the wiser: A voters’-eye-view of the election campaign In the run up to the General Election, PoliticsHome / The House in partnership with Thinks Insight & Strategy tracked the views and experiences of ...

www.politicshome.com/thehouse/art...

CST: 'we utterly reject his message of hate and division. His so-called support for our community is not welcome or helpful'

That was 2021. I hope + anticipate similar sentiments in 2025

My son recently found a swastika drawn on the pavement at... The Manchester attack didn't come as a shock. The only surprise is it hasn’t happened sooner

I wrote a short piece for the Observer on the attacks in Manchester.

observer.co.uk/news/opinion...

How Much Do Voters Care About Broken Election Promises? Manifesto promises matter and Labour will face fierce criticism if it breaks them. But our research suggests delivering a feeling of change is more...

@benshimshon.bsky.social and I did a bit of polling on this earlier in the year- quite interesting on who cares most about the broken promise
www.politicshome.com/news/article...

BREAKING: “It’s dark” - Dylan calls it.

This is excellent and urgent.

Petition: Invest in brain cancer and give rights – turn terminal into treatable Brain cancer is the biggest cancer killer of children and adults under 40, 87% with a high-grade brain tumour diagnosis die within 5 yrs, and yet it gets just 1% of the national spend on cancer.

I signed this today. petition.parliament.uk/petitions/73...

Roger Federer as Religious Experience (Published 2006)

www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/s...

Perhaps a kind of Crocodile Dundee version? This is not chaos. THIS is chaos… ?

The takeaway:

👉 Accommodating the radical right on immigration doesn’t win back voters.
👉 It alienates the progressive base.
👉 And it raises the salience of the very issue the radical right owns.
In short: it’s electoral self-harm.

Longer thread with detailed results here bsky.app/profile/turn...

This! Why is no one talking about the fact that a scrappy ❌ on a bit of white line paint isn’t ‘the flag’. It’s half arsed graffiti that makes our towns and villages look messy and run down.

We looked closely at this back in July. Really complex picture, but the anti-reform coalition is definitely there… cdn.prod.website-files.com/6578727b2437...

The Maitliss - Clegg interview is so horrible. combative, unproductive, unenlightening.

🙌

I wrote this in 2013 on the gap between political vision and voter vision. Main changes: twitter is now X; the energy price freeze would be a bigger deal today. archive.progressivebritain.org/2013/12/06/t...

Hello politics/psephology people. Is this still thought of as a good account of turnout dynamics? Do the findings around habit forming and whether you vote in the first three elections of your adult life still hold?

Another interesting read is Portrait of a Political Man - the biography of Joseph Fouche by Stefan Zweig… I knew nothing about Fouche (or Zweig) but am now fascinated by both.

I have that on my kindle but haven’t started it yet. Thanks for the nudge!

Politics wise, I still love McCain’s Promise by David Foster Wallace, if you haven’t read it…

Matthew Goodwin, Reform and the politics of resentment The ‘heterodox intellectual’ turned populist is a morbid symptom of the digital age

He's done Douglas Murray and now @jamesbloodworth.bsky.social takes down Britain's favourite rightwing grifter. I hope he does Bari Weiss next. www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/philos...

Been on hold 60 minutes now. Have moved from 12 to 5 in the queue. I am the sunk cost fallacy.

No-oh scru-ubs. 🎶

The Election Diaries: One Year On - July 2025 This webinar shares insight into how voters are feeling after Labour’s first year in office, what cut through and what went unnoticed. It also looks ahead and shares how voters are feeling about the g...

More here: www.thinksinsight.com/reports/the-...

Ultimately, though …