If you’re heading up to Labour Conference from Euston today, remember to say thank you Louise Haigh for getting the giant departure boards back 🙏

I've written about Mainstream, "The Starmer Symptom", and why the soft left getting organised is a good idea – if they can update themselves. www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2025/0...

The evidence for this argument has grown and grown, and become increasingly convincing. The policy remains difficult, unavoidably. But the rhetoric is clearly wrong. Critically, the centre left must directly challenge the slow normalisation of far right ideas for both moral and tactical reasons.

Lots of cats love shoes… but not many quite as much as Mordred.

The good news: I finally have my Labour Conference pass. The bad news: The party’s printer has done something to my photo which makes me look like a Halloween zombie 💀

Retrospectively removing indefinite leave to remain would be immoral and economically damaging. It would tear families apart. Attacking it as ‘potentially illegal’ is completely beside the point. Argue with the (awful) idea. Don’t try ’well, actually you can’t do that’.

Thousands of Londoners have indefinite leave to remain. They have legal rights and are our friends, neighbours and colleagues, contributing hugely to our city. Threatening to deport people living and working here legally is unacceptable.

Yet another example of the bot-filled, far-right X atmosphere shifting norms in mainstream journalism

I wrote about the noticeable Vibe Shift around Keir Starmer's viability as PM: www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-...

Me for SEC Newgate News: ‘What was forgivable in opposition, faced with a long-serving and unpopular Conservative administration, is not enough to carry a party through five years in government.’ www.secnewgate.co.uk/our-insights...

At a point where both following and working adjacent to UK politics was feeling depressing, this thread was a delightful read.

So now No10 Director of Strategy Paul Ovenden has quit over “lurid comments” made about Diane Abbott. Every time I think I could not rate the judgement on display at the top of government any lower, I’m proven wrong.

Our Government needs a revolutionary change... in the social media platforms it uses.

It’s far from the only (!) problem with UK political discourse, but the government could do a lot worse than get off X. Journalists would adapt. It’s not widely used by members of the public. What‘s the remaining audience, apart from bots, fascists and a billionaire owner who does things like this?

👇 Leadership matters and does change things. (A smaller scale version of this is watching people on here who have a red rosette where their own moral compass should be sharing a statement that only earlier this morning they thought it was Actually Wise Not To Make)

At this point, I don’t even think the No 10 operation is listening to dissenting voices from the Labour *right*, let alone the middle and (soft) left of the party.

Why Labour’s deputy leadership contest is - and isn’t - significant. Me for SEC Newgate News ⬇️

A rare example of an all-women planning panel - you love to see it! #GGsummit

I understand (though I do not accept) the government's case for remaining on X. What is totally indefensible is the *exclusive* presence of many MPs & departments on that site. They are handing a monopoly of key government communications to a site that's increasingly run by & for the radical right

"The Cat Read the Emails First" (2025) acrylic painting By Ukrainian artist Nataliya Bagatskaya - n.bagatska [IG] #art #painting #illustration #caturday

Nothing I have seen so far has convinced me that a Reform majority/largest party outcome at the next general election would produce a whip-able Parliamentary Reform party…

Happy International Cat Day to Mordred and Hoid

Corporate needs you to find the differences between this picture and this picture.

Emerged tonight that my six-year-old understands (and reads aloud) an ellipsis as [dramatic] "DUH... DUH... DUH!", one DUH for each dot, and when you try it out it works every time and is very good.

If I had fewer morals, I would be *excellent* at making up and selling quack health treatments involving woo woo and crystals. (I am a professional lobbyist with a creative writing MA and a childhood obsession with sparkly stones.)

Essentially every core understanding a Labour leader needs to follow to succeed is contained within Tony Blair’s 2011 foreword to the Unfinished Revolution.

JUST PAID THE LAST NURSERY FEE. My god. I added it up and over seven years we've spent almost £70,000 on childcare - and they only went to nursery for 3 days a week.

Exactly! A terrible decision and a sad thematic successor to the BBC’s awful general election night coverage last year.

This would be consistent with the govt's whole approach to the genocide: - at least months too late - confusing signalling (put this alongside the boneheaded PA proscription+ the police's authoritarianism) - fails to deal with indefensible arms sales loopholes www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

New post: "Why are young women increasingly left-wing?" There's been a lot of focus on young men + the right but less on this much bigger political shift amongst young women. Why is it happening? How could it change politics? (£/free trial) open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/w...

This line is common on the left - that support for Farage is born of anger and impotent frustration. But what you find at Farage's rallies though is less dumb fury, and more a clear-sighted transactionalism: that he best caters to their policy preferences. www.newstatesman.com/politics/lab...

You’ve seen Dogs Playing Poker. Why not try My Husband Playing Poker with Our Cat? (@colmpm.bsky.social absolutely routed Mordred.)

This is a really perceptive and sharp piece by my colleague @tonymcn64.bsky.social. He's a former government whip and government minister turned academic, so he would know! theconversation.com/starmers-sus...

The right-wing press is going mad over votes at 16 ("a naked attempt to twist democracy in Labour’s favour", an "election-rigging move"...) Oddly, they said the same 100 years ago when the voting age for women fell from 30 to 21. Let's revisit the Mail's campaign to"Stop the Flapper Vote Folly"...

Watching Sinner v Alcaraz in a lovely open-front pub in Keswick that’s been showing the tennis… While being serenaded by an enthusiastic but truly awful busker who has, impressively, managed to play Chappell Roan and Nick Cave and make them sound exactly the same.

Op-ed from me summarising my new report and announcing the launch of @compulsoryvoting.bsky.social

If anyone’s looking at today’s zonal pricing decision from the government and wants an overview of the policy debate to date, I wrote an explainer back in April.

Exactly this! The case for zonal pricing wasn’t without merit, but ultimately, it risked making our most productive and affordable renewable energy technology (wind) basically un-investable in the areas of the country where it is windiest.

Wrote something earlier this year on Musk (and other techbros) inability to understand sci-fi. www.theguardian.com/books/2025/a...

A good time to reshare this fun piece I did with @alfiesteer.bsky.social on the Labour left's options: Conversion, Loyalty, Voice, and Exit. In resigning the party membership, Sultana bets on Exit...and a new party. We cover the opportunities and risks 👇 journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

What happens when you antagonise much of the middle of the party into getting organised? What then, left-libs? www.newstatesman.com/politics/lab...

You know what, I love this idea:

A good boy who has been coping very well with the heat (digging soil out of our potted plants and rolling in it to stay cool.)

New Statesman cover this week. Online tomorrow. On newsstands Thursday.

Review of parental leave and pay is great, but the framing is all wrong: it is not about being "generous and supportive," it is (or should be) about basic equality, and addressing what is currently flagrantly sexist government policy. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Ten years ago, in July 2015, 48 Labour MPs defied party whips to vote against the Tory government’s Welfare Reform and Work Bill. Two Corbyn leadership election wins and one Starmer landslide election victory later, here we are again. Me on why and how the Labour welfare rebellion got this big ⬇️

It feels like it ought to be possible for the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom to avoid giving a running commentary on a music festival.

Always grimly fascinated when transphobic groups and individuals do things like this. Obviously, trans women are the main and intended victims of these campaigns. But their implication, whether they realise it or not, is that cis women must be cognitively inferior to trans women and cis men.

This doesn’t strike me as a good thing for policy development. It also doesn’t strike me that it will actually work for long. But it does make me wonder whether anyone in No10 looked at how well a similarly heavy handed approach towards the PLP has worked out and asked the obvious question.

The second point here about sustainability is at least arguable. But PIP does not trap people. In many cases it allows them to work. It's just totally disingenous.