Daniel in Cornwall

I have friends in Bendigo and yeah... lovely town, but in terms of proximity to anything else, including Melbourne, I'd put it more like living in Penzance for its convenient access to Exeter. Or possibly on the Scillies.

Definitely vanilla buttercream and jam for the classic version, though if it's going to be eaten quickly or fits in the fridge, Chantilly cream is good too and harder to get wrong than buttercream.

“joining the Tufty club” is darker than I previously imagined.

Nine nori wrapped cones full of rice, avocado and fishfingers (sriracha mayonnaise and yuzu sesame seeds not pictured)

Everyone’s making fishfinger temaki these days.

The target is people who read the Times because it’s the Times and see many issues as alien/irrelevanf/unimportant - which means it can print what it wants and shift public opinion with fairly extreme content its readers give little thought to.

I'd like to see how Reform voters' support for grammars varies if it's specified that pupils will wear lanyards and the uniform won't include a blazer.

This is beautiful - will they be for sale at all (other than by talking nicely to a venue sometime after the tour finishes)?

Would be interesting to see how support changes if the proposal is to introduce a grammar/secondary modern split in every catchment, but with a substantial funding premium for the secondary moderns so that they can be the "best" schools despite the greater costs/challenges their intake implies.

I don't know the BlueSkyers you reference (maybe they go to a different feed or something) but the normal objection is to introducing a system where 25% of children go the "best" school and the other 75% get worse provision - irrespective of where "my" child goes.

For those moments where the Chiltern Hundreds and even the Manor of Northstead come with more responsibility than the candidate can be trusted to handle.

Not convinced by that because the current comms instinct has been to denigrate the views of typical left of centre voters *even in cases where Labour is implementing policies that they like* - fixing policy would be good, but wouldn't fix the view that Labour's voting coalition is an embarrassment.

I suppose that this is one of those cases where the fact that there's definitely a comms problem masks the actual policy problems too - it's not naive to think that a centre-left party will have some economic ideas that offer more hope than Labour's current policies do; comms can't fix that.

Definitely the right tone, but undermined by Labour's determination to run with the Tories' unrealistic/unfunded tax cuts - Labour needs a much more coherent tax reform plan to meet the spending needs associated with fixing public services before it can win on economic realism.

Happy St Piran's Day to all in the *duchy*

A sandbank to the right of a cliff with pink and orange tones of rock, with black seaweed at the foot of the cliff into a channel of green sea water with rocks, wave and blue sky in the distance.

Porthcurno demonstrating that we only have two seasons: Cornwall, and Occasional Summer (nice while it lasts).

(...and this is a reason to go there)

Also I'm just not sure there's anywhere else that you can get spaghetti cacio e pepe made at your table on the surface of a giant parmigiano wheel by an actual pirate.

I'm not sure it's easy to define "real output" and draw a line from "workers on boards" to improving that metric. It may be true that British private sector management has coincided with poor performance but harder to establish the causal link and explain why the input of workers fixes the problem.

The first step that's implied by Labour electing someone more "amenable" is that Labour pivots away from a strategy of insulting its own supporters at every opportunity, likely to lead to a move back from Green/LD/DK to Labour in the polls. Polanski's negotiating position becomes a bit different.

*wrong in the sense that they are picking the bit of the "provincial C1/C2" circle which is characterised by liking Reform policies, having a low probability of voting Labour, and general only being interested in a party which actively repudiates most actual Labour voters' values.

Gearing your strategy towards groups XY&Z doesn't mean "jettison" group W. The Venn diagram of what appeals to the groups has some decent overlap but then you have to pick which non-overlapping circle is bigger. Current Labour strategy assumes they are two separate circles and picks the wrong* one.

30 minutes to the pub =/= 30 minutes home from the pub

Apparently it’s saying we must give ordinary voters the tougher immigration policies they want whilst making sure we don’t give in to sectarian and divisive politics.

Maybe pivot the garden to food production

It doesn't work well for a party to give the impression that they think "hope for positive change" is basically an extremist position when you're dealing with an anti-politics mood best summed as "we need change and the established parties can't deliver it".

Can define 'proper' in different ways, but there is a lot of scope to fix obviously bad parts of the tax system. In some cases that ticks the "tax the rich a bit more" box as well. What's now difficult is a) council tax reform and b) honesty that unaffordable NI cuts should be reversed and then some

I'm not sure that's accurate. If you conclude that it shows Reform hoovers up 95% of the right-nativist bloc and the left-liberal bloc splits 60-40 between two parties you could extrapolate to a lot of Reform wins (the atypically high left-lib vote here prevents that) but lots of args against that.

Most plausible explanation is that if you don't instinctively share your core supporters' beliefs, you have to rely on other sources of information about them, and the source of choice in Westminster is the X/Mail/Telegraph/BBC doom loop which has successfully skewed perceptions of 'typical' voters.

The only thing the right is devouring is the principles Labour keeps cheerfully feeding to it - the actual votes just went left as a result.