Fintan Smith (Mac Gabhann)

This is not a reasoned political response. Labour has spent two years making all the voting groups who backed the Greens feel unwelcome and unheard, and now attacks them for daring to back someone else. They believe Labour isn’t listening and Starmer seems determined to prove them right

Sources close to Shabana Mahmood pointing out that the polls show her policies are popular with Green voters.

Sources close to Shabana Mahmood pointing out that the polls show her policies are popular with Green voters, continued.

You know, if the stakes of the next election were lower, Blue Labour doing a “actually, the policies are really popular…it’s just that the people who say they like it didn’t vote for us” would be incredibly funny.

Community meme: I CAN EXCUSE FASCISM. BUTI DRAW THE LINE AT MERCANTILISM.

The Supreme Court:

Most annoying internet tic is how nothing can ever just be bad, it always has to be proof that things are worse now than they’ve ever been before

It’s now quite hard to sustain that ex-mining, pro-Brexit, Labour-to-Reform swing seats (via levelling up) have been overlooked or forgotten by Westminster. They’ve been the axis of politics 15 years. Why it hasn’t worked is the question

Gorton is really going to test the idea that progressive voters will naturally come back to Labour to stop Reform, or else naturally figure out who is best placed to beat them.

Super messy information environment where even the most informed voter might not be able to figure it out.

Tables are up now. The number of respondents for the headline voting intention, once don't knows and won't votes are removed, is 51.

<Meaningful stare>

Breaking: Matt Goodwin says his internal polling has him up by 814%.

So how much do you think our defence spending should increase by?

It continues to be a bad failure that essentially there's a policy debate that is obvious to you if you read a business newspaper OR the gov dot uk website or the MI5 threat update OR a decent policy Substack is basically invisible on the BBC and in 90 per cent of Commons debates.

British education in a nutshell

Also, "loudly proclaim your love for Reform voters!" is disasterous as an *electoral* strategy when the next set of elections - this year - is largely being held on terrain where Reform are weak, and Labour voters alienated by this kind of thing are over-represented

The gov' is hoping its new comms strategy will help its cost of living policies cut through. So far, they are not. In fact, at the Budget, the most supported policies around cutting energy bills, freezing NHS prescriptions, freezing rail fares were also among the least well-known announcements.

‘Once whispered, now discussed’: the rise of dubious claims of civil war in the UK Dystopian warnings once reserved for the far right have found a wider audience – but there are good reasons for scepticism

Good article this. Racism really is the reverse of a performance-enhancing drug, the mad, stupid shit it leads people to believe in and to do:

A real Good Samaritan One act of kindness that befell Leeds writer Bernard Hare in 1982 changed him profoundly. Here he tells his story.

i post this story every christmas, and will keep doing so until it stops making me cry

merry christmas xx

Watching linear TV for the first time in forever, and you know who *is* overrepresented in adverts?

People who look about 27, have two kids and a massive house.

The original yahoo website that has a list of 14 categories for finding sites on the internet.

Do you remember when the entire internet could fit under 14 categories?

quite fun that everyone was stunned by figures showing a massive decline in trips to america, then everyone realised it was a statistical artefact of a different date for easter, and then… there was a massive decline in trips to america www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

Bus usage has been increasing across the North – but one of the biggest increases has been seen in Greater Manchester.

Is this a result of @andyburnham.bsky.social taking buses back into public control?

And are there other reasons for optimism?

Short 🧵

1/4

It's all so bizarre because ... we just don't have to live like this? Rather than pick Denmark to emulate, they could pick Spain. It has encouraged some immigration and is booming compared to the rest of Europe 🤷‍♂️

Surely has to be some sort of projection. I've been all over the UK and US and I've never seen inequality, poverty, or destitution of the type or at the scale that I've seen it in some American cities.

The British General Election of 2024 The British General Election of 2024 is the definitive account of one of the most consequential elections in recent times.

The Appendices for The British General Election of 2024 book are available (for free) under "Back Matter" at link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

The first 71 pages are constituency results analysis by John Curtice, @lottehargrave.bsky.social, @patrick-pme.bsky.social, and myself.

My parent’s local A&E doesn’t have pillows, time, beds, capacity. The GP doesn’t have emergency appointments for emergencies, services with capacity to refer people to.

Caring like this about nomenclature and pronouns seems to me a luxury pursuit, frankly.

The number of global deaths of children under-5 is projected to increase this year (from 4.6m to 4.8m) for the first time this century. (FT)

The price of aid cuts.

If you’re a Briton born in 2000, and especially if you’re from London, you will also be strongly aware of a loss of patrimony. You are now priced out of your own city, which has become notably alien, declining from being over 70 per cent white British at the time of Blair’s election to just over a third today.

No surprise that Ed West thinks you have to be white for London to be "your city", but still shocking that the *London* Standard prints this stuff.

[NB 1/2 of Londoners born in 2000 were not "white British"]

www.standard.co.uk/comment/gen-...

Politics that makes a difference Over half a million children, lifted out of poverty

Keir Starmer doing an email newsletter is a good idea, but the execution needs a complete overhaul:

Genuinely what are people like Ed West doing with their lives? Go to Wigmore Hall, go to the movies, go to Koko, go to the Vortex Jazz Club, go see an orchestra, go see the Last Dinner Party...it ought to cure you out of having this weird, unnatural reaction to your fellow citizens.

Welcome to slot-machine Britain! Our cover this week is on First Past the Post, the voting system that turns multi-party politics into a lottery.

Featuring our new modelling of British elections: www.economist.com/interactive/...

If it were steel works we would have a government bailout plan, yet losing thousands of jobs at unis is met with a shrug. & unlike steelworks universities were profitable when they had foreign students.
You are killing the golden goose… one of our best exports…

HOW IS THIS HELPING GROWTH?!