Mikey Brown

Imagine devoting your entire career to selling the idea that the British public hates wokery and is clamouring for radical right wing populism, only to then be defeated in an actual election by the most left wing possible coalition of politicians and activists in the country.

It's got to hurt

No, they don't. There's something like a 32 per cent subsidy (the RAB charge) on the Plan 2 book. This is down from over 50 per cent in the 2020/21 forecast.

INDEPENDENT Playgrounds would become 'crack dens' if Greens were in power, policing minister says

I’m sorry, I know it’s a minor point, but crack dens are traditionally indoor establishments. What the scaremongering Labour minister is describing here is a crack paddock.

If Starmer 2.0 means nothing else, perhaps it can mean this…

I had measles as a kid. It's a nasty disease but preventable. Fortunately, I didn't get seriously ill, but I've only been more ill when I had the COVID that caused the PsA flare that left me disabled. If you choose not to vaccinate, you're dreadful mother however you spin it to make you feel better

I’m a London parent who hasn’t vaccinated my kids against measles, let me explain A new outbreak of measles is spreading across north London, and it’s a wake-up call to all mums like me who didn’t give the MMR vaccines to our children, says Charlotte Cripps

www.independent.co.uk/life-style/h... "I am a pain in the arse and have fucked up real bad and want it to be someone else's fault"

The under-16 social media (and VPN, and chatbot) ban is part of a broader policy problem IMV, which is that it is politically easier to talk about e.g. 'child poverty', and you can do a lot of good with that approach, but it has hard limits because ultimately you are also just talking about poverty.

The staircase safety rule costing the UK 90,000 new homes The need for a second staircase, brought in by the Conservatives after the Grenfell Tower disaster, have frustrated housebuilders, who claim it is unnecessary

Second staircases in buildings under 30m height will save one life every 6,153 years, but this requirement is reducing housebuilding, so 90,000 fewer homes built over 5 years.

Meanwhile 74 children have died from poor conditions temporary accommodation in 5 years.

www.thetimes.com/business/com...

I just how he can spout obvious garbage on the immigration side and have spurious ideas about what to do about small boats but beyond telling us people don't like feeling poor, he has precisely zero idea what the state ought to do about it. Not a single interviewer even bothers to probe him on it.

She's calling the Corbynite/Bennite/SCG left the "centre-left" in a counter-factional and ahistorical attempt to suggest it represented the mainstream of the Parliamentary Labour Party, when it is, and has always been (for good or ill) at its (left) fringe

Always a fringe group of the Parliamentary Party. The Socialist Campaign Group has never had more than 50 members. Even when Corbyn had the leadership you could scarcely describe his front bench as being majority Corbynite. In managing this PLP, they are just as irrelevant as they were under Blair

When?

The current fashion for leading a party or being talked about leading a party while vocally backing policies that are anathema to your voter base is truly bizarre.

Absolutely stonking column

More members of Liz Truss's cabinet are in Reform than in Badenoch's shadow cabinet...

I always thought Nigel was opposed to foreign politicians having a veto over the policy decided by British democratic institutions. I seem to remember there was a bit of a ruckus over it about time years ago.

CrazyRossStrat just put windmills on Greenland then he won't want it anymore

Mark Carney's speech is now only the second most acute analysis of where the world is at right now:

A good moderator should simply say "No thank you. I asked for questions. let's move on"

Well, original forecast were low 20%s of graduates who would repay the loan in full over the term. Threshold freezes mean the current thresholds are 32%. People feel bad about payment not making a dent, but for most people, paying for 30 years was how the system was designed.

Plan 2 loans rightly getting coverage for their flaws, but the obsession with the interest rates in the coverage hides the bigger issue - the freezing of the repayment threshold - makes the scheme much more expensive for borrowers and is fundamentally a bait and switch.

That's a threshold problem not an interest rate problem

Yeah so under weaknesses you’ve written “cares too much about solving crime if anything”

Spoiler: They used the money just as wisely as anyone else would, and it's so frustrating that this still isn't a common sense assumption to make.

We have so much good evidence for cash transfers but so many just refuse to accept that those in poverty can make good decisions.

And the reasons for that are not hard to find - Starmer’s unpopularity among left-liberals is the logical, arguably even intended consequence of 18 months of comms and policy which alienates and angers left-liberals while winning over no one on right. This is the cake his team have baked themselves.

16s for a bake pan? Was it gold plated?

At least when Keith Joseph didn't believe in the railways he had the excuse that we had had 40 years of decline under British Rail. That Rishi Sunak basically didn't believe in them because he was doing 1980s cosplay is comfortably the worst thing he did as prime minister.

How can you look at the period 2000-2010 and then 2010-2025 and conclude it's not that bad?That's real wages where they were FIFTEEN YEARS ago.

Labour’s shift away from “immigration is good but it needs to be managed” to “it is bad” is a gift to essentially everyone they compete with, because it means that they don’t have the right position to be able to attack *anyone*.