Techpriest

On this note, notable that Cameron's first speech from the doorstep of No 10 included the line "I believe this country's best days lie ahead"

The fact that 10-24 governments did a lot to achieve the opposite is not the point, the point was giving voters fresh from the GFC a sense of agency mattered

Yeah, I think there are few things voters in a democracy hate more than a sense of being listless ships in the water getting buffeted by events. No matter how true it is, people want *some* sense that government can do things and that the course ahead can be altered

Not to keep tapping the "Chaos with Ed Miliband" sign but it's notable how Miliband and the energy/net zero dept has stuck with an almost ruthlessly optimistic outlook throughout, in its comms at least, even with significant challenges within it's remit

Hope sells better than gloom

Some of it I think is vibes relating to them going *so* hard on doom & gloom in the first year and "the Tories left us a mess" that it sucked the optimism out of the room. Nothing will make you more disliked than having indirectly engineering having the nations anxiety about decline projected at you

Ed Davey's line of "continuity Sunak" had more than a grain of truth in terms of a managerial technocratic leaning style that is bad at Comms

Plus, tacking soft left on economics & taxation and tacking borderline faragist on migration & rejecting racism is a recipe to infuriate *everyone*

Screenshot of an article The Clinical Teacher / Volume 23, Issue 1 / e70315 RESEARCH Article 🔒 Open Access Investigating Death by PowerPoint: Do Medical School Lecturers Adhere to the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning in Their Slide Design? Rajin Le Blanc, Nicola Cooper First published: 10 December 2025

First ever research publication!

Ever been bored to tears by walls of slide text? Then this is for you.

I have no shame - please share widely.

(Thanks to @profnicolacooper.bsky.social for her support as co-author.)

#MedSky #MedEd #EdSky

asmepublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

I remain convinced that means testing child benefit and the child benefit cliff edges were a deliberate move to undermine middle class and upper middle class support for the welfare state. It is not a coincidence that political support for uprating benefits in line with inflation fell sharply after

It is not new fangled economics to know that arbitrary cliff edges suppress economic activity and encourage income suppression in a manner that actually reduced treasury revenue!

The continued existence of the 100k cliff edges is prima facie evidence of a government that is not serious about it's mission being "growth". A ruthlessly growth focused government could have abolished the cliff edges and raised higher rates marginally to compensate

This is entirely logical given the story of British politics for ten years has been "politicians are like generals, always fighting the last war"

A lot of people are going to go "surprised Pikachu face" when it turns out socially liberal voters *exist and give a damn about voting*

The problem is not that the bar is on the floor, the problem is that the bar is on the floor and that Starmer-McSweeney *insist on bringing a shovel*

Defending anti-racist norms is literally the overwhelmingly popular position, it is the duty of government to ignore loud racist ethnonationalists

Irony: pre 2016 I would probably have lived with soft Brexit/being stuck in the rule-taker position of Norway and the EEA

Now? I've been negatively polarised to Hard Rejoin

Sterling abolished/Euro adoption
No opt outs
O2 is renamed Telefonica
Great British Railways if franchised to ÖBB (/s)

Zombie politics: how Dead Man dominates British politics Britain’s parties are catering to a voter who is, often literally, dead

Credit where credit is due, @duncanrobinson.bsky.social wrote a column pointing out how British politicians (who much like generals, are always fighting the last war), have spent a decade chasing a voter who doesn't exist

www.economist.com/britain/2025...

The notion that demography is real, that the Brexit referendum narrow majority was achieved due to a unique confluence of demography and politics *that no longer exists and could not be recreated ten years later* was somehow spun as offensive or ignoring "ThE WiLl oF tHe PeOplE"

Shadow of the Colossus (2005)

Is this half-baked Morgan McSweeney/blue Labour logic that headlines around an inflation busting fare rise in London are fine, but that "Hero Voters/the Lee Anderson archetype" wouldn't tolerate the same elsewhere (even if it's for more investment!)

Black kitty on duvet looking at camera

He says he is cute and this means he should be given third breakfast. #proofOfCat

I went on LinkedIn.

Oops.

Here is how I converted that experience into billions of sales:

(Blah blah blah etc)

Black kitty perched in fluffy donut

UPDATE: The fluffy fort has been recaptured while the garrison were distracted.

You should be able to get rich being silly online instead of being evil online, that would solve a lot of problems

See also: "Party that hasn't held power in Scotland for nearly 20 years and is seemingly physically incapable of remembering it last did so in concert with the Lib Dems despite viewing Scotland as a heartland" etc etc....

IMO on this front Starmer-McSweeney ism seriously downplays the risks to its majority from the SNP in this regard. A big chunk of the majority was built on recapturing the Scottish central belt... which is a place where voters have a big-tent vaguely left of centre alternative that *is not Starmer*

It's a like a left of centre version of "Stop the Super Majority!™" from the last days of Sunak. Many left-ish voters actually now *like* the idea of the Labour right being restrained by the party being forced to deal with the Lib Dems and Greens with something *other* than majoritarian contempt

This harder to pull off this when the Starmer gov is proposing making some immigrants wait *30 years* for permanent residence and deporting British born children in certain circumstances

"It's us or Farage" is harder to sell when you've convinced many that you are Faragist on social policy

Almost no one who shifted from Lab in 97/01 to voting for Charles Kennedy's Lib Dems in 2005 did so to try and install Kennedy as PM, they voted for Kennedy to give Blairism a kicking whilst staying in the left bloc

Starmer Ultras are shadow boxing against something that doesn't exist, yelling at voters "you can't vote for him! He's unfit to be PM because X" doesn't work when left of centre voters are not voting GPEW for a PM, they're defecting both as a riposte to and an attempt to restrain the Labour right

The prequels are proof of some kind of "meme law", "the more objectively bad the film, the more salient it's relevance as meme template material"

E.g. TLJ is the best of the (also bad) sequel trilogy but generated few memes, meanwhile "somehow, Palpatine returned" is all over online discourse lol

Also going "but NATO" against Polanski really won't hold traction in an era when atlanticism is in free-fall on both sides of the Atlantic and Polanski has shifted to a "favouring common European defense" line. It's actually quite hard to attack someone for a literal Gaullist/Macronist position

Ironically I think Miliband putting up a fight against the Greens goes much better than Starmer doing it, Miliband has had net-zero credentials since the Brown government, and isn't seen as Faraagist on immigration

IMO Starmer now has the negative polarisation reverse midas touch, the more he attacks Polanski and the Greens the *more* likely it is that wavering leftist voters who see Starmer as a hack whose all but handed the Home Office to Reform will go "huh, the enemy of my enemy is my friend"