Matthew Holehouse

Starmer versus the burrito taxi If Sir Keir Starmer means what he says about labour rules, Deliveroo is in trouble. Does he?

Follow the prime minister’s rhetoric about building a high-wage, high-security, low migration labour market to its logical conclusion, and Deliveroo as we know it would surely die. It probably won’t.

Starmer versus the burrito taxi
economist.com/britain/2025...

Of the 37 constituencies where the Greens won more than 15% of the vote last year, 32 are held by Labour. Only 5 of them have fewer than average students and young graduates www.economist.com/britain/2025...

Indeed - saw your exchange at the DBT committee with deliveroo! A lot hinging on the single status consultation on definitions of worker?

Starmer versus the burrito taxi If Sir Keir Starmer means what he says about labour rules, Deliveroo is in trouble. Does he?

Follow the prime minister’s rhetoric about building a high-wage, high-security, low migration labour market to its logical conclusion, and Deliveroo as we know it would surely die. It probably won’t.

Starmer versus the burrito taxi
economist.com/britain/2025...

crackers

lol ok

All very reminiscent of the satisfaction that team Corbyn felt at their so-radical broadband policy, while napping through the biggest labour v capital fight of the era...

Britain’s self-styled radicals are so so conservative. Subsidies for small land owners 🥱

Reform UK's latest defector. A CV more of the 2010s UKIP vintage than the new online Right; more Godfrey Bloom than Matt Goodwin.

Does Nigel Farage’s plan for halving crime in Britain add up? No. But that might not be the point

Wrote about Nigel Farage's Bukelian turn:
www.economist.com/britain/2025...

Indeed plus in part a global surge as suppressed movement post-covid unwound. But Starmer doesn't only not make the argument, but repudiates it:

Important. Starmer may regret any perceived allusion to Powell but the most important bit of his pessimistic view of immigration - that Britain has been the victim of "an open borders experiment" remains govt policy

Try telling kids today that the Tories were once a small-government civil liberties party and theyll laugh at you

Labour’s anti-Reform strategy in brief: fund the NHS, hang the paedos.

ok

But the points are interrelated, in that the premise of many of the studies was that better informed publics were likely to be more supportive of institutions (much as people better informed about vaccines would be more liable to accept them). But that premise was weak

Quite a few studies looking at raw knowledge - Eurobarometer runs/has run a tracker of institutional knowledge.

It only gets you so far. Pre-Brexit various European orgs invested a lot of time trying to adduce the link between levels of knowledge about the EU and euroscepticism, and the relationship was weak, and in some studies, inverse.

totally true. a lot of the "misinformation" debate since 2016 esp has focused getting more raw "facts" under people's noses. but it's basically attitudinal

Starmer raises Ukrainian anti-corruption agencies in call with Zelensky

Too much ask perhaps that a New Party would at least have some new lines

Or, famously, blackouts!

The “and you can’t get a decent tradesman for love nor money!” line is commitment to the bit

Moving to Iberia and keeping up with the horrors of the old country via Spectator TV and David Starkey’s YouTube is 10/10 British expatting

Blighty newsletter: Can electoral reform fix Britain’s growth? Matthew Holehouse, our British political correspondent, asks what might happen if Britain made voting compulsory

“If Sir Keir wanted to get really radical about electoral reform, he might flick through a new paper by David Klemperer of the Constitution Society”

Thank you to @matthewholehouse.bsky.social for this exceedingly generous write-up of my report!

U wot

Blighty newsletter: Sir Keir goes back to the future Britain

Starmer is essentially conservative, in so far as so much of his agenda - from relations with the French to waiting times to growth rates - amounts to a battle to restore things to where they were roughly 15 years ago www.economist.com/britain/2025...

PM's liaison committee is useful for the most honest answer yet as to what he sees the raison d'etre of his govt to be. never mind securonomics and missions et al. "I want people to feel that we have cleared up the mess."

Older voters help power Britain’s radical movements Richer, healthier and better-connected, they are ready to cause upheaval

It's such a good study! i had a hunch the same dynamic (assets + secure incomes) might be why older folk are turning up to the front line of protests more www.economist.com/britain/2021...

This line is common on the left - that support for Farage is born of anger and impotent frustration. But what you find at Farage's rallies though is less dumb fury, and more a clear-sighted transactionalism: that he best caters to their policy preferences.

www.newstatesman.com/politics/lab...