Further or Alternatively

I mean ... bsky.app/profile/hist...

Turkey is another example - the boom times seem to coincide with periods of negative net migration.

And Poland - famously catching up with W Europe. Of course, Poland's figures in recent years have been massively affected by Ukrainians moving in and out, but Poland's population has been falling since c2000 while it has boomed.

Well, I've just looked them up at Yusuf was at Hampton and Tice at Uppingham. Is Uppingham a minor public school? Hampton's just independent.

You're right. There are a lot of below stairs people commenting on this.

The key point about this story is - the only point, really - is to establish the precise extent to which the school that Mr and Mrs Farage sent their son to in the 1970s is infra dig and, frankly, a bit yucky.

"Reducing the demand on the NHS" = "reducing the demand for NHS labourers"

From now on, when discussing the budget, please use “is this measure bigger than the cost to the exchequer of gen Z drinking less” as your metric for assessing whether something actually raises or costs a significant sum

New post on lying past and present, with particular reference to 1920s divorces and internet forms. furtheroralternatively.blogspot.com/2025/11/glim...

British energy policy – not cheap, not home-grown and not secure - Dieter Helm Some people – and some politicians – seem to believe that if you keep repeating claims eventually they will be believed, even as the evidence unfolds that they are obviously just not true. Any counter...

Morover, the Farage policies quoted in the piece (potential change to triple lock & public sector pensions, end to net zero, etc) are not mad. Indeed, they seem like common sense to many. Eg on energy policy, Sir Dieter Helm's recent piece suggest radical change is needed: bit.ly/4hByPrA.

(Perhaps no-one will advance that particular arg, but other radical changes will be in the aird.) In circs in which it is almost common ground that some kind of rupture is required, Reform's economic ideas, such as they are, may well look plausible to many: trying this failed, so why not that?

This is a good point. Also: Reform won't be the only ones at the next GE saying that Lab has failed in the economic ways you describe and that radical change is needed: there will be both Right & Left args to that effect. One that wd be popular on this site, if not everywhere: 'we must rejoin EU'.

It's sad that this - all of which is sensible, indeed common sense - needs to be said at all

I'm not saying that it's terribly hard, but it's sufficiently tricky that it leaves markedly less time and mental energy for thinking more widely and makes people averse to talking more widely.

Exactly. Over time, first television and now social media have created a dynamic which means it is very important, first, not to say the "wrong" thing (including something that looks wrong out of context) and, second, to say the "right" (i.e. on-message) thing. Getting that right is not simple.

I completely agree with this in theory. But then Blair and Cameron were both modern fathers with young families etc, and were v successful at the top, so I'm not sure it holds good. In any event, I'd be inclined to blame the need for politicians to produce large amounts of trivial communication.

Thanks for replying. I've seen some comment here that people of the BlueSky kind ought to be concerned about the possibility of the death of the Conservative Party as an institution. Any sympathy for that idea?

Thanks for replying. I appreciate that it's a pretty binary question and of course there are lots of nuances in real life. What I'm trying to get a feel for is whether Reform is regarded rather as Le Pen was in France back in the day ("of course! better any crooked old pol than ... that!") or what.

At the next General Election, would you vote tactically for a Conservative candidate to keep out Reform?

It's a lovely old pub

Further or Alternatively on X: "Thread of 'everything went wrong in 2007' graphs. I keep seeing these graphs (enough to raise some qs here https://t.co/iOP8gbUFb2). Thought it might be worth having them in one place. I'll start with a US one (for a change)." / X Thread of 'everything went wrong in 2007' graphs. I keep seeing these graphs (enough to raise some qs here https://t.co/iOP8gbUFb2). Thought it might be worth having them in one place. I'll start with a US one (for a change).

If anyone is interested, see my collection here: x.com/FurtherOr/st...

Bigger than the problems of the 70s or the Thatcher reforms, bigger than going into the Single Market, bigger than North Sea oil.

Not only does it go deeper than Brexit - on some views it goes deeper than people possibly imagine. There are loads of graphs like this, many just going back to WWII, but the moral of them is that the GFC was a bigger deal for the UK than ... basically anything else.

But it's broader than just the C of E (which, as its name suggests, is "of England", not apart from it). @luketryl.bsky.social pointed this out recently. The Left has gained the establishment in this country, as in the US.

Crossness Pumping Station. They don't make 'em like they used to.

Or at least, I consider that to be a distinctive and valuable strand of left-wing thought.

My point about framing is a point not just about rhetoric but about values: what is the value of immigrants? Are they just economic units of activity?

The free-market approach is "here's a market - in labour, goods, services, whatever - and it will decide". The left-wing approach, for all that it is also anti-stasis, is more "here are some people - workers, parents, compatriots - deserving of respect and better treatment".

I agree that the Left is pro-change, of course. But I disagree that centralised economies are not inherently leftist: I'm not sure what is more leftist than a communist state.

But the real point I'm making is one about whether you treat people as people.

(2) my argument is not that sometimes people on the Left have said some things. My argument is that the distinctive contribution of the Left to labour issues is not the liberal free market view (shared by liberals of all stripes) but an emphasis on collective & state action. This is obvious!

That's plainly not my argument. At the risk of repetition:
(1) the context for this debate is the argument from Starmer quoted below and the riposte *to that argument* that in fact being pro-labour mobility is left-wing. That's a debate about people with no jobs or current labour rights here.
...