Lance Parkin

My hotel room was disgusting. Urine soaked mattress, liquid shit everywhere, swastikas scrawled on the walls in Sharpie, shitty peeling gold decals, fast food wrappers everywhere, reeked of farts and bronzer.

Serves me right for booking the Presidential Suite.

Trump, who has dementia, can't remember which country he appointed Herschel Walker ambassador to earlier this month.

Herschel Walker, who has claimed his acts of domestic violence were a result of dissociative identity disorder, doesn't remember, either.

The solution is for Labour to stop being shit, not Labour getting in on that toad-faced fascist stuff.

I return to my perennial point that Farage has not changed, at all, in any way, since the days when he was a toad-faced sickly fringe lunatic who made people want to throw up just looking at him.

The other parties have sunk. The problem isn't Reform are suddenly great, it's that Labour are shit.

I think both that it's right to be terrified by that prospect, but also that it's mildly insane to see a split right-wing vote under FPTP as meaning anything other than a Labour landslide. There's Labour, the Tories and the Tory protest vote.

If the right coalesces, that's a different story.

To be honest, I thought they might have peaked with 'new tax break for captains of whaling ships', but I was wrong.

mustreadalaska.com/big-beautifu...

I mean, I grew up reading and watching things where the villain would cackle 'your evil is my good', I didn't realise it was an actual, real world gameplan.

It's Fawlty Towers plotting: Basil running around insisting everything's fine, OK slight mishap but under control, OK the solution was worse than the problem, etc. An insistence among the political class that the basic plan and fundamentals are strong, the annual disasters are freak events.

Their commitment to cartoon evil is total.

The plan 'let's just wait for the Boomers to retire, then sort it' didn't factor in Boomer willingness to occupy every job until the day they die. Millennials will be retiring, still with student debt, before Boomer talons have been extricated from everything.

And the reason is that the Clinton generation Dems and Blair/Brown generation Labour people were joint architects of the crash. The entire political class failed, and instead of, y'know, changing tack, they just all agreed not to bang on about it.

There are some very bizarre 'we're heading for a crash like 1929' comments around right now.

We had a bigger crash in 2008. Every single person on the planet had a worse life than we would have had without it. We are still digging out from it.

It barely figures in punditry.

'How are we going to solve this, starting now?' - that's the only question.

We're obsessed with politics like it's political discussion on social media. It's not. It's did the bins get emptied *this week*, it's about feels about supermarket receipts and electricity bills and GP wait times.

Indeed. But literally no one gives a fuck about what their favourite summer album of 2017 was. We're massively overestimating the length of voters' memories.

If the problem is they really think Brexit was a great idea and continues to be, it's a different problem. It's not that, though.

US political coverage is the same. It's like when we did History GCSE and we didn't do the history of our own lifetimes. Any discussion of Trump has to stop in 2016. Any discussion of the economy assumes 2007 as the baseline.

If one were to check in with the American public, one would discover 'evolving views' since 2016 on the issue of whether some on the right are deplorable.

The call to action here is not to summon the ghost of Hillary Clinton to tell her she was right, it is to come up with a 'so we're gonna ... '

(With both Clinton and Brown, it wasn't *just* their almost supernatural lack of affability, it was also that there was a massive recession pretty much as a direct result of the 'let banks figure it out, that'll prevent recessions' policy they helped engineer).

Brown was, broadly, right. His problem was that she wasn't *egregiously* racist. 'There are ten million voters more racist than that' doesn't make him wrong.

But at some point, ffs, you have to be able to say some voters, at some point, voted badly.

Labour still fear another Gillian Duffy moment, in exactly the way Democrats are haunted by 'deplorables'.

They still believe they lost because of this one, small moment, and not because of the actual reason which is literally no one, at all, ever really liked the deeply unlikeable candidate.

'Whatever the Brexit Party is calling itself these days, it's not the solution. Here's the solution.'

OMG, this isn't an open goal, this is the FA letting you start the game five goals up and banning the other side from having a goalkeeper.

'Leave turned out to be a terrible idea, but no one's gloating apart from sickly fascist Russian-funded toads, so it's up to us to move forward and fix things. Here's how ... '

That's what means you win.

If you poll 'Leavers' from 2017, you'll magically discover a vast tranche of people who voted Leave but think Leave was a bad idea and don't think of themselves as Leavers.

Because people who aren't online the whole time quietly abandon stances no one really ever knew they had.

Labour lose exactly no votes by alienating Tory protest voter civil war scum. None. Zero. Not one single vote.

Use the phrase 'Brexit is shit, we're stuck with it because of Tory protest voters, who are scum'.

As a lawyer, Starmer will know that truth is an absolute defence in law.

If someone says 'I voted Leave, are you calling me scum?' reply 'Yes', check their hard drive, prove they're a nonce.

This absolute ... netbrained idea they can't, now, in government go against the principles they adopted two leaders and ten years ago, because they might retroactively offend 2017 voters in an election they already lost ...

'Oh but it's far more complicated than that, because in opposition, we agreed with the right wing lunatics who wanted to isolate Britain and destroy its economy along the broad lines Putin wanted'.

Feels like an astute political operation faced with both (1) a threat from Reform and (2) the now almost universal belief Brexit turned out to be a disaster might be able to make something of the fact that Reform literally used to be called 'the Brexit Party'.

Training students not to rely on AI search results, then *how* not to will set up those students for a life where not everyone was lucky enough to learn that.

It's a pain that they are called on to do it, but it's only really a broader equivalent of checking no one's using calculators or crib sheets.

I don't think it's at all unhealthy if the growth of AI means part of educators' job becomes setting prompts, questions, and classroom activities that weed out students who fail the Are You A Robot test.