What if governments have been governing to a public opinion that never existed? @pauliewaulie.bsky.social argues that the real political battlefield isn’t what people think, rather it’s what people think other people think. 1/5🧵 medium.com/@pauliewauli...

Nice one @libdems.org.uk 👍

Two hours in the pub talking about British politics.

Burnham has positioned himself as someone who wants to do the kind of things that win back voters who defected to The Greens. So have his most prominent backers. If he now *doesn’t* do those things, what will it tell us?

OK, I’m calling it. Burnham to win next election with 550 MPs.

We'll soon know if Starmer's replacement has learned the lesson that the outgoing PM didn't. medium.com/@pauliewauli...

Probably not the most original comment ever but that Steve Bray bloke is an utter dickhead isn't he?

Burnham's 1st meeting should be with the social media companies. "There's a market failure in the info economy. The public are systematically misinformed on things citizens need to know. The BBC will be paid to fix it. You'll pay the bill. The more you do yourselves, the smaller that bill gets."

If you were to ask which of the established UK political parties are most closely aligned to "save are kids" messaging, you'd have to put the DUP at the top of the list.

Former DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson is a paedophile, a jury has unanimously found: Guilty on all 18 counts, including rape of a primary school girl. Judge says jail is "inevitable" and ex-MP immediately remanded into custody. Full breaking coverage:

If roles had been reversed, and it was Starmer - in an overwhelmingly strong position - riding in to replace a PM, it wouldn't have occurred to him to square a rival like Streeting off first.

Ireland is lost.

Internet assemble. Give me a list of songs that no one could fuck up singing karaoke?

Or both. Because all the money to make great public service stuff is wasted if it’s buried on a platform people go to.

Or they could just properly find the BBC

Hearing reports that a large crowd of Wokes have set the bins on fire outside a flat-roofed Edinburgh pub and tied rainbow flags to all the lampposts. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Is the use of the word “gilded“ a too-clever-by-half way of saying decadent? And is it a word that is only used by publicists and sub editors, but never by writers?

Also, because political commentators rarely ever get the full picture that any PM gets, this may form the explanation if Starmer’s replacement also disappoints progressives.

A huge part of the job of any serious lawyer is reading new judgments (and old judgments!) relevant to their field of practice. Not skimming, but reading deeply and reflectively and more than once. You become more or less useless once you stop doing this.

“Mother, I've weighed the risks - which I prefer to living in a world dominated by Nazis. Bill" Thank god for Bill and so many more like him (Pic from @profpeterdoyle.bsky.social on X)

I’m still very not sold on Burnham but Starmer supporters on here remain unvanquished in their oddness.

Apart from the obvious proofing errors in the first post here, wdyt?

Proposal/gambit: abandoned concepts of left and right and replaced them with “capacity for positive sum thinking”

Many political conversations ignore the dangers not being *seen* to meet your non-voters halfway. Farage must be worried today. A large number of voters will put aside smaller differences to stop him. He will also lose votes to “purity test” rivals such as Restore.

This is what Trump's done to the people's house: A third of it is rubble. Another third is a cage match. What a metaphor.

Starmer apparently didn't take soundings among his ministers. Just something else he hasn't done that involved communication.

Trump, Farage, Tommy Robinson.... explained in one image.

How much has public opinion moved ‘rightwards’ on issues like migration? And how much of this shift is better explained by various ‘conformity’ effects?

Isn't the biggest story of recent years the near-total disappearance of Conservativism as a moral democratic force? I mean, there are still decent Conservatives, but they have never been as marginalised and politically defeated as they are today?

Broke: Gramsci's time of monsters. Woke: Tocqueville's mind walking in darkness.

Discovering yesterday that the BBC program I listen to more than any other (the world tonight) is being cancelled, really reinforced for me why Keir Starmer is so unpopular: he is presiding over a degradation of the public realm but neither seems to be pleased (Osborne) or have any pathway out.

Good Tsar, Bad Boyars.

To clarify this, when I say "perceived levels of support among the rest of the population", I mean "take people who didn't personally (e.g.) support 'getting Brexit done' and ask them what proportion of the population DID support it." My guess is that the support level was successfully exaggerated.

On subjects like + opposing immigration + 2019's Brexit support + support for ReformUK now, stats on... (a) actual levels of support (b) perceived levels of support among the rest of the population. ... would be v interesting. My guess is that (b) will have been substantially higher than (a).

He’s taken more than 25 years, after having been recommended to buy a Badly Drawn Boy CD (that I hated and gave away) for me to finally get it. It’s definitely half decent innit?

One curious consequence of the culture wars is that, unlike other non-British ethnicities in the UK, us 2nd-Gen Irish have never felt much pressure to apply The Cricket Test to football. Q: Who are we supporting in The World Cup? A: Dunno. Who are England playing next?

I expect X is full of Grok hallucinations featuring Trump being gang-banged by Iranian mullahs is it?

Lab 67% (+48)

Conquest's Fourth Law of Politics is: "The behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies." For perhaps the first time, a UK government positively embraces that reality and treats it as policy.

BREAKING – BBC CUTS: Radio 4 to end The World Tonight, Midnight News, Money Box Live, AntiSocial, The Law Show and Crossing Continents next year. Newshour will replace The World Tonight on Radio 4 and World Service.

Cheeseburger eating surrender monke

Ooooo! 👀

Exactly 10 years ago today, Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered by a far-right man. She was just 41 years old. One of many victims of far-right terrorism. R.I.P. 💔

Why didn’t you, though

This underweights the argument that a flat ban on teenagers will reduce the pressure to do the real job that is needed (whilst also being illiberal - when you know this, you know why it's a bad thing). BUT it also has some good suggestions at the end. www.edrith.co.uk/p/social-med...

Economic factors - legitimately within the control of democratic governments - are the things that determine the nature of content that is supplied to social media. Replace the vacuum created by the shinkage of properly-funded and accountable information and you won't need to ban very much at all.

Note: A social media ban for teenagers may result in .... teenagers going outside more. If my reading of local WhatsApp groups is anything to go by, this may result in a new, different kind of fear-based meltdown on a scale that we've not seen yet.

To which the solution is of course Lockean liberty!

Prediction: If Burnham replaces Starmer as PM, within the first three months. he will have suffered a the same, comprehensive disinfo-led character assassination that Starmer went through in his 'honeymoon period'. Suspicion: He has no plans in place to mitigate this risk.