Chris Brooke

Any centre left governing coalition is now:
- Young people, especially graduates
- Urban progressives
- Minority groups
- Working age people with low incomes
- Educated Professionals

If both your political and economic strategy is not geared towards these groups, they will find a party that is.

Great thing about this is it's a double mythology of sticking to the road towards doom while pretending the ones who don't want to are sticking to the road towards doom. Very Sophoclean:

Labour's likely response anticipated by Brecht:

On Prudential Liberalism, and the New International Order pt. III The previous two posts in this series were published some time ago (here; and here). When liberalism was invented as a political and ideological doctrine at the tail end of the eighteenth century in E...

On Prudential Liberalism, and the New International Order pt. III with a shout out to @chrisbrooke.bsky.social open.substack.com/pub/digressi...

What an excellent review.

Brava!

I think that must be where my dad was doing National Service with the Royal Engineers in—significantly—1956.

Woking pizza express

A couple of hours to kill in Woking so figured I’d look for the blue plaques

theonion.com/this-war-wil...

I finally gave up and admitted to myself that I hated it and everyone involved when Mishal Hussain left, I at least found her voice and manner bearable in the morning but all the others are just aggravating. Who wants to get to work in a foul mood every day?

I gave up on it some years ago and the positive affect on my life was such that I still have a burst of pleasure every morning when I recall that I'm not listening to it. In that sense I'm glad it still exists out there, so I can enjoy its absence.

We've had a Green MP for just over a day and there's already someone in the neighbourhood WhatsApp group complaining they haven't solved flytipping yet.

So far I've come up with one rational explanation for Labour's response, which is that maybe Reeves has placed a significant amount of Treasury funds on a very specific accumulator about this May's elections, including Labour losing all their London councils and finishing fifth on projected vote.

That article is a bit weird though. I agree Today is appallingly bad and its style, priorities, and biases have a deleterious effect on the country’s politics… so it was jarring that the author’s first complaint was “it has too much arts coverage”

I've barely listened to the Today Programme for twenty years, because it was so terrible for so long, but apparently it has more recently been getting *even worse*.

Q: "Mr Lyman. After you delivered the President to Little Saint James--aka Epstein Island--you were overheard saying, "Let Bartlet be Bartlet". Just what did you mean by that?"

A: "On the advice of counsel, I invoke my Fifth Amendment privilege & respectfully decline to answer your question, sir."

Labourites chasing Reform voters remind me of Democrats who couldn’t “imagine the Democratic Party without West Virginia”—historically a miners’ union state—even decades after it had gone hard Right based on race, culture wars, and anti-environmentalism. [more]

Reboot of the West Wing, but it’s just members of the Bartlet administration testifying about their appearances in the Epstein files.

Welcome back!

Farewell to William E. Connolly We are very sad to learn of the death of William E. Connolly earlier this week at the age of 88. Connolly was the author of six books with Duke University Press, the subject on an edited collection…

We were very sorry to learn of the death of political theorist William E. Connolly this week. He published six books with us. Here is our appreciation.

Alan.

If Labour had lost Gorton & Denton with Burnham as the candidate, he wouldn't have had to stand down as Mayor (unless he had pre-emptively resigned as a way of showing just how committed he was to his possibly-doomed candidacy in G&D).

Not that anyone asks historians anymore, but I think my sense that the last GE was Labour's 1906 (they are the Liberals in this analogy) still might stand. What remains unique (and so without historical analogy) is that the Conservatives are being *successfully* challenged by a party to the right.

A good overview. Also includes sound advice for Labour should it wish to revive its fortunes.

www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/fe...

One of the weirdest things about British politics at the moment is the consensus view that Badenoch is now doing quite well on the basis of no discernable electoral or polling evidence whatsoever.

(Or did you mean Gorton & Denton?)

Allister?

It's a sort-of Anglicized version of a Scottish version (Alasdair) of a Greek name (Ἀλέξανδρος).

Tough morning for Goodwin, but doubt it hurts as much as when I beat him in the 2014 Political Studies Association Executive Committee elections.

From the excellent Allister Heath headline generator.

I’ve learned that you can write four million Substacks with five million graphs and they will still absolutely refuse to admit that there is any voter that matters other than Dave and Carol, aged 63, hate immigrants.

#politicalscience