Len Metson

GitHub - drcaprosser/gbpartyscales: Map common party-name synonyms to canonical Great Britain parties and provide ggplot2 colour, fill, shape, and linetype scales with standard labels and sensible leg... Map common party-name synonyms to canonical Great Britain parties and provide ggplot2 colour, fill, shape, and linetype scales with standard labels and sensible legend orderings. Includes a helper ...

I made a little R package to handle the faff of assigning party names to party colours when making plots about British elections in ggplot.

I made it for myself, but if you're someone that also works on British politics and uses R, you might also find it useful!

github.com/drcaprosser/...

Aesthetic validity > internal validity

Great opportunity if you’re interested in pursuing a PhD in political science at @lsegovernment.bsky.social - with a particular interest in elections and campaigning ⬇️

Could not recommend this highly enough - LSE is a great place to be doing a PhD, and Campaign Lab are a fantastic organisation to collaborate with -

More than happy to talk to anyone thinking of applying!

LSE Collaborative Studentship with Campaign Lab LSE Collaborative Studentship with Campaign Lab

🚨 We have a cool new ESRC PhD studentship opportunity on the topic of political persuasion for someone interested in campaigning, field experiments and/or computational methods @lsegovernment.bsky.social, in collaboration with
@campaign-lab.bsky.social. All info 👇
www.lse.ac.uk/study-at-lse...

Anyone remembers the panic in 2023 because Labour lost a by-election in Uxbridge and South Ruislip over ULEZ expansion, and the pressure Khan was under to axe his climate/air quality policies? Feels like a decade ago now.

Can someone ask Farage or Zia Yusuf why, if they're so concerned about incitement to violence, they had Lucy Connolly as a guest star at their conference?

Some more recent polling: headline figures on 'Reform are racist' seem similar since July 2024

bsky.app/profile/youg...

Labour have been on the attack, branding Reform UK policies "racist" . A new YouGov poll for @itvpeston.bsky.social examines what Britons think

% saying Reform UK...

policies are generally racist: 46% (net +10)
party is generally racist: 47% (net +11)
voters are generally racist: 43% (net +8)

I hope Starmer doesn’t retreat from the tone he struck yesterday. Lesson from the U.S.: the far right will accuse you of everything they already do. The shamelessness IS a tactic. Biden simply retreated from engaging. But people need to keep hearing a version of what starmer said. Every Single Day.

People often claim it's a mistake to call far-right figures racist. But it's extremely telling how much they hate being called racist. Farage doesn't welcome it. He is afraid of it. And he has benefited from people's reticence about using it to describe his policies.

I wonder how large the gap between people's perceptions of these descriptive norms and reality is, given the huge amount of attention Reform has got from the media and other party leaders

Not sure that's a problem with the survey design - if the group is big, they are a larger part of society, so the issue sort of takes care of itself, no?

Public views of Reform,July 2024

Need to do more to keep out candidates with racist views:
64% to 9% (+55)

Risk bringing prejudice to immigration debate
51% to 20% (+31)

Say things they shouldn't say
45% to 24% (+21)

Mainly dangerous + divisive
43% to 28% (+15)

Racist
41% to 30%
29% on fence

Stand with posters

Panel discussion

Sign reading Expo

At the Campaign Fringe by @campaign-lab.bsky.social today -

If you're in Liverpool today, make sure to drop by to meet some amazing campaigners and chat about what works in campaigning!

It's at Camp & Furnace (outside the main conference area) so you do not need a pass to come

luma.com/rpu1av03

Congratulations 🎉

a man standing in front of a ice cream truck Alt: a man pulling out a chair and sitting down

Me today with back-to-back Arsenal then England rugby 🥳 🌹

Our research makes it clear: by capitulating to the right, Labour is driving voters to Reform UK | Tarik Abou-Chadi and Stuart Turnbull-Dugarte Mimicking Farage on immigration is senseless. Labour voters feel betrayed; anti-immigration voters see through the ruse, say academics Tarik Abou-Chadi and Stuart Turnbull-Dugarte

For the Guardian, @turnbulldugarte.com and I discuss our research that clearly shows one thing: Labour's anti-immigration strategy will only strengthen Reform and weaken its own electoral prospects. It won't win voters back but ultimately normalizes the far right

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Check out the full programme of the Campaign Fringe at #Lab25 to plan the best way to spend the day

🔗 mailchi.mp/fc4c936052a8...

Dont forget to sign up today

📍 Camp and Furnace: L1 0BY
🕛 29th September: 11:00 - 19:00
🔗 luma.com/rpu1av03

LfTR Campaign Day with Alex Sobel MP

Thank you to those who joined us for our Labour for Trans Rights campaign day with one of our top allies in Parliament, @alexsobel.co.uk 🏳️‍⚧️

We estimate that Donald Trump's approval rating is negative among 2024 voters in eight states that voted for him in November:

Texas -1
Arizona -3
Pennsylvania -6
Nevada -6
North Carolina -7
Georgia -10
Wisconsin -11
Michigan -11

Imagine you're in a weird romcom where Paul Hollywood is your rival. Do you go "let's have a bread baking competition" or do you emphasise your own relative strengths?

Because that in short has been the central problem with the traditional two's approach to anti-immigration voters and Reform UK.

The UK’s Local Inequality Problem: Big Debates, Bad Data We talk endlessly about inequality, but the tools and data are fragile and misleading. Good local income data is missing - yet house price proxies, small-area models, and AI offer ways forward.

I got stuck measuring local UK inequality, so I wrote a Substack about it: "The UK's Local Inequality Problem: Big Debates, Bad Data" Do share your data and thoughts! open.substack.com/pub/laurenle...

Shame on Downing Street for going along with this. So much for being committed to a free press

🎉 Huge congratulations to our brilliant LSE @lsegovernment.bsky.social colleague, Mathias Poertner @mathiaspoertner.bsky.social for winning APSA’s Leon Epstein book award for his excellent book Creating Partisans!
www.cambridge.org/gb/universit...
👇

Not that anyone in politics listens to research, but there is a bucket of research (including some excellent recent studies) which show exactly this. Voters listen to leaders and respond to what they say.

They are not even that close to Conservative voters on a lot of issues!

This is untrue on most major issues (though the media eıite don't know this). It is untrue on immigration in particular. Untrue on climate, on Trump, on human rights, on inciting racism. And much else

This is a council by-election obviously, so large swings are to be expected, but the analysis overall is right. First - just about - past the post. The electoral system has already produced an entirely disproportional distribution of seats in 2024. It could be worse next time. (1)

First Past the Post cannot handle this level of fragmentation. It will produce completely freak results.

We can grasp this problem now, or wait for the train to crash.