@robfordmancs.bsky.social @psurridge.bsky.social @timbale.bsky.social @tabouchadi.bsky.social I believe - going to be embarrassing if I simply hallucinated - there was a recent-ish paper on the Danish Social Democrat's positional shift showing that they:

Er... yes, well: happy 18th birthday to Ken Russell’s penultimate film, the heart-warming, Christmassy... oh fuck me, is it really called that?

The only thing that saves me from burning more food from not paying attention is that I often don't pay enough attention to put the heat on.

I noticed this when someone on substack shared Nate Silver's commentary. This is pretty the exact sort of stuff which - when it's done by random chemistry students on 'the left' - is denounced as Purity Politics. The failure to distinguish *different subjects* and *different degrees of bad*.

bsky.app/profile/mari... Nitpick - the 'abstract' that goes with the link is good, but there's only paragraph actually providing - limited - evidence and it's third from last. Which is a shame, because it's actually true.

I think you can have Reasonable Concerns about affirmative action on fixed/hard-to-change traits (the crudest solution ... bar 'doing nothing'). But affirmative action on something as changeable/vaguely defined as 'ideology' is just 'purge' with some extra waffle.

I've been jumping up and down on people arguing that you can Fix The Radical Right with a spoonful of Good Economic Policy. I still think that - while the reflex is totally understandable - you just can't make it stand up with reference to actual research.

I shared a breakdown of voter perceptions of UK party positions on immigration level *relative to their own answer* to counter the tendency to assume that *Reform* is closer to the public than other parties. (This is England only, add Wales and Scotland and Reform shifts a bit further away)

I've heard a bunch of people saying that *Reform has <some unpopular positions> but are *closer to where the public place themselves on immigration*. But I can only remember the *last person I heard doing this* - it was @lewisgoodall.com on @newsagents.bsky.social (was listening because I'm a fan!)

I think this is doubly a misrepresentation (i) Being poor doesn't make you racist *full stop* (the contention isn't that it does but it's only one factor) (ii) "Economic policies have no relevance to the development of the far right" is so broad a position it's patently a straw man

jamesbreckwoldt.substack.com/p/why-increa... Late to read this substack piece by @jamesbreckwoldt.bsky.social (randomly popped up on substack app, which is otherwise terribly put together). It's very good!

I'm still trying to make it through Foundation S03 out of a sense of completionism but it's just so ... AnySciFiFantasySeries, despite all the money/talent poured into it.

Another interesting point here is that extremist murders are very rare and do not actually seem to be rising—there were twice as many in 2018 as in 2022.

Political Compass Dominance Map for Current (May 2025) Voting Intention (coloured by 'dominant choice' for each pixel). (I've removed people saying they wouldn't vote because - well, will attach and you'll see why)

I think some people may be slipping into the fallacy of assuming "UK Radical Right Vote Intention High" implies that the UK Radical Right has gotten more popular. It's actually substantially more unpopular than UKIP in 2014. What's different is that the Cons. are *waay* more unpopular than 2014.

What's the strongest predictor (that isn't directly party-related) for whether someone will give their Voting Intention as Reform? How respondents feel about Trump winning the US election in 2024. Reform are *a long* way away from other parties/general public on this.

Super pednatic cross-site nitpick to a post by @luketryl.bsky.social (trying to reply on twitter has gotten irritating since it's reading cursor presses as 'cycle through images'!). > Reform is not simply UKIP remade

Raw/steamy regression for Reform(VI) relative to any other choice. No filtering here other than dropping variables about parties (do you like Cons/Labour, how did you vote in 2024)

Akshually, I hated so much about Peter F Hamilton's "Misspent Youth" - strictly speaking about the guy getting rejuvenation but strongly *felt* like a divorce story - that that was the last book of his I ever read.

We have a paper on how Labour's strategy is disastrous. There's an exclusive coverage in @newstatesman.com www.newstatesman.com/politics/202...

Great breakdown from BES folk (now very excited for the Wave 30 release!). Stresses the point that Labour won in 2024 with a lot of 'vote lending' - across the Lib-Left bloc - which, unlike Johnson in 2019, it has failed to acknowledge.

Long blurb thread in response to @rentouljohn.bsky.social sharing a substack article/quotes from Peter Hyman. I'm never sure if people will feel that Quote Tweets are more hostile/tedious than Replies some I'm hedging my bets by doing both (or is that double-bad?).

I think this neatly encapsulates a delusion that a lot of people have had about representative democracy - that voters are ultimately there as a safety net. But the reality is that that this is not what voters are for in a representative democracy.

Finally watching the US version of the bleak UK sf tv series "Utopia" - it is literally the exact % less subtle in every aspect. Like someone watched the original and decided that everything needed to be *precisely* 40% more overt lest the audience miss it/rebel.

'Immigration doesn't bother me but it seems to bother everyone else' – Everyone. This is what happens when the media runs away with Hard Right narratives.

I thought I'd calm down about this given a day to mull. But now I've read all the way through the reports *and the full data tables with all the questions*, I'm even more angry. @liambyrnemp.bsky.social is making a strong causal argument ... which is not in fact supported by the linked report.

@liambyrnemp.bsky.social has just shared a substack post where goes through evidence from a pretty serious research study (linked) by @bestforbritain.org and referenes the work of very respected people in the field (like @profjanegreen.bsky.social). What more can you ask for?

So I think Shor's position here is a reasonable *hpothesis* - based just on *attitudinal data* - but the wrong conclusion - based on *revealed preferences*.

NEW - How Mainstream Politicians Erode Norms - cup.org/4lfeHvD "we find that statements by mainstream politicians lead to more norm erosion than similar statements by radical-right politicians" - @valentimvicente.bsky.social, Elias Dinas & @dziblatt.bsky.social #OpenAccess

Letter of the day (in the Times)

Saved this absolute banger from last year because if you told me someone had said it I would not have believed them.

A bit behind schedule, but how voters moved in the year since the 2024 election. Labour facing same splintering of the last govt: a significant bloc crossing floor to primary electoral opposition, with a numerically larger chunk moving to opponents on same side of spectrum, plus many 'don't knows'.

> I’m increasingly convinced that, come the late 2020s > and early 2030, we will see a clash between duelling > populisms drawn from the left and the right. It's certainly something people have been saying for the last decade.

This is a zombie myth that plagues social democracy and will lead Labour to oblivion.

(Context: Tom Harris' "On leaving Labour substack") I have read this paragraph maybe 12 times at this point - including reading up and down through the article to see if there was some context that would make it Not Insane. How can this happen to someone?

There are many legitimate complaints you can direct at Bluesky, but when I dip into Twitter and look at people who engage with a mass audience their capacity for logical reasoning has visibly degraded.

substack.com/home/post/p-... I dropped an *insanely speculative* reference into this bloglet about the One Drop Rule but I didn't have any data to back up the argument that Black Americans would be less restrictive about who can be defined/described as Black than White Americans (and part Repub.)

The fish rots from the fish brains.

It's interesting that the messaging screw-up around ID cards/digital ID is the same in 2025 as it was in 2002-2010: www.bbc.com/news/10164331 It's a weirdly consistent Basic Politics failure mode given that the people who did it said 15-23 years ago pointed out exactly what they did wrong.

Fascias building whites-only enclave in Wales. WTF?!

Kathleen Stock and James Orr came to Nina Power's defence after the lawsuit, causing me to raise questions about standards of quality control in the intellectual movement of which they were a part

Irritating Discourse Cliche - "The Public Are Frustrated With Mainstream Politics" - up there with vague references to "the dangers of populism". Look at the last century of democratic politics - * Pre WW2 * Post-War * Post-Post-War

How is it that the richest man on earth can share this kind of openly white supremacist and misogynistic trash and it be met with a shrug by the entire US elite?

I was just reminded that ~1/3 of the 2015 Labour vote who voted Remain blamed Jeremy Corbyn (alongside others) for the Leave result - more than the % of Conservative Remain voters who blamed David Cameron.

There's a **vast universe of space** between (i) blindly trusting doctors (ii) blindly deciding you have the chops to engage in independent medical research (But if that *weren't* the case and you *just had* to pick one of these two options, you'd suffer on average less for picking (i))

Re: Trump Administration handling of his involvement with Epstein. I've long been of the opinion that Trump - and the people he's had a free hand in choosing - are not particularly competent in managing the press/their coalition.

I'd heard that this was a big enough predictor of terrorist violence that you get *security services* advocating for more funding for investigating domestic violence accusations but a 40% correlation is an insanely high level (noisy, uncleaned raw data).

Wow - would not have guessed Tim Minchin would turn into a middle-aged "Smug Weimar Progressives Caused Hitler" type.

Building up some predictive models of vote choice, looking at the BES wave before the 2024GE and noticed that normPartyVote*(Reform) has quite a big impact on Reform voting (parties now correctly coloured!). Also true for Labour ... but that's just obv true for most people at that pt in time.

Little known: there is no strong link between deprived areas and immigration salience. Basically even: salience peaks in local areas in second most affluent quintile. Eg Epping (Political + cultural + demographic drivers of Reform/Cons support neutralises/slightly trumps socio-economic drivers)