Buck Frexit

The Board for Peace starts its first war...

Starmer wants to be Macron. He risks becoming Hollande. And why Conservative/Reform shrieking about the rise of "sectarianism" rings hollow

Starmer set himself up as Macron. Today he looks more like Biden or Hollande.

And why claims of the rise of sectarianism in British politics ring hollow. Apparently British Muslims, uniquely, aren't allowed to decide who best represents them.

New substack from me

open.substack.com/pub/goodalla...

Trump: "Maybe we'll have a friendly takeover of Cuba. We could very well end up having a friendly takeover of Cuba."

Trump: "Maybe we do one more term. Should we? Do one more term! We're entitled to it."

Whenever he speaks of the country, he means him personally.

I try not to get too conspiratorial in my thinking, but it is getting a bit coincidental how every time the Epstein scandal closes in on Trump, the US launches a major military operation in another country

This is very odd framing from Starmer. Half of Labour's vote in Gorton and Denton just went to the Greens. Saying they've all been duped by extremists isn't going to help

Jesus! Yet again we are teased with a few hours of hope that lessons will be learned only to have it dashed again. Depressing.

Voters yesterday did exactly what they did in the GE in 2024 - voted tactically to keep Reform and the Tories at bay. Such a shame Labour hadn’t remembered that. Hopefully now they do and will start governing and communicating as if centre and left leaning voters matter, because we bloody do!

Starmer’s entire approach, from his project’s earliest days, rested on the new core coalition of younger, more urban and ethnic minority voters had nowhere else to go. That idea is in tatters.

As I wrote yday, it arises from Labour not valuing the coalition it has and romanticising one it does not

Btw this is the real one today, impossible to parody

I’d really love to know how often Farage, Tice, Goodwin, Braverman actually go to church on Sundays.

Like in Caerphilly last year, G&D shows ‘stop Reform’ is a real motivator. The Green & Labour combined vote shade was more than double Reform’s. Goodwin’s candidacy likely fuelled it. Obv at a GE there’ll be many seats where it doesn’t apply. But in terms of a Reform majority, it’s a real hurdle.

What we have seen in Gorton and Denton is what we saw in Caerphilly in October.

A lot of people really don’t want the hateful politics of Reform and will work hard and smart to try and keep them out.

Labour must now listen to this and stop the grim attempts to mimic Farage.

Zooming out again on how big this is the insurgent parties came first and second and got 69.4(!)% of the vote between them, the two traditional main parties got just 27.3%. Politics has fragmented & the parties that promise the greatest change from the status quo are benefitting

The Greens finished second to Labour in 39 seats in 2024 – the party should have been far more alert to the threat on its left from the very start.

Whereas basic benefits for a single adult would sometimes replace as much as a third of average earnings in the postwar era, the chart shows how this ratio then declined unremittingly over decades on end. Long before the austerity or general stagnation of recent times, anyone relying on the safety net was prone to fall behind, simply because income support and unemployment benefits were not routinely adjusted in line with rising living standards among the wider population. As real wages rose, the proportion of those wages that benefits would replace would tend to decline. Before a temporary bump up in the safety net at the depth of the financial crisis, the proportion of an average wage that basic benefits replaced was languishing at 15 per cent – less than half the peak postwar proportion

There has been a long slide in the relative value of basic benefits over the past decades.

Even long before the austerity or general stagnation of recent times, income support and unemployment benefits were not routinely adjusted in line with rising living standards among the wider population.

JD Vance: "We're announcing today that we have decided to temporarily halt certain amounts of Medicaid funding that is going to the state of Minnesota in order to ensure that the state of Minnesota takes its obligations seriously to be good stewards of the American people's tax money."

Ministers could announce U-turn on student loans next week Options include increasing the repayment threshold and cutting interest rates amid warnings over crippling debt burden for recent graduates

Interest rates are only a psychological problem for over 70% of Plan 2 graduates as they will not pay off the loan until it is written off in their fifties bit.ly/4tRJTqB the burden is the extra 9% tax on income. Raising the threshold where that begins would help them all

Epstein and Andrew’s week together in New York Former prince spoke of brief visit but documents describe dinner party, glamorous guests and an invite to the Boom Boom Room

Epstein papers reveal a very different truth about former Prince Andrew’s 2010 New York visit bit.ly/3MLj3Q8 not a visit to break off his friendship as he told Newsnight but a week of parties and socialising

Great to see the Conservatives wanting to reform student loans. Would like to see an account for Osborne replacing maintenance grants with loans in 2015. This has left poorer students with bigger debts vs richer ones for a whole decade, compounding inequality between rich and poor. It’s scandalous.

(I say that because “fairer” could mean just making higher earning graduates pay more as at the moment they pay less overall than middle and lower earners. We need him to go further than just addressing that)

What a snivelling coward Mandelson is.

NEW: Commons speaker Lindsay Hoyle passed info to Met that Peter Mandelson planned to flee country.

“To prevent any inaccurate speculation, I’d like to confirm that upon receipt of information, that I felt it was relevant I pass this on to the police in good faith, as is my duty & responsibility.”

Not just fairer though, it needs to absolutely cost students less. How they are supposed to get on the housing ladder and have kids if they are paying effective tax rates much higher than everyone else (without correspondingly higher graduate pay as that’s been severely eroded) is beyond me.

How student loan repayments leave graduates squeezed Graduates earning more than £26,575 pay a marginal tax rate of 41 per cent, compared to 32 per cent for non-graduates.

Starmer says the student loan system is “broken” and that “we will look at ways of making it fairer”.

This is a big win for those who’ve written about it for years (I first raised it in 2021). www.newstatesman.com/politics/202...

Trump after honoring a World War 2 veteran: "I've always wanted the Congressional Medal of Honor but I was informed I'm not allowed to give it to myself"

I’m begining to think this is what he wants, he’s saying it so often, almost as a prompt to voters. I reckon he wants out but is too spineless to quit.

Reform is refusing to suspend one of its councillors for calling for a Labour MP to be shot, saying it's a "mistake that we can all make from time to time.”

I reckon it is, if you’re a fascist, nasty, sexist, racist arsehole.