Honestly, writing r code for doing serious DIY. If I could exchange my ability to build an unspectacular but robust logit regression model for the ability to build an unspectacular but robust summer house, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

Yes, "you do not 'got to hand it to' Mandelson" etc, but he's not exactly a man devoid of political antennae so it's not too surprising that he was going off about the flaws in the Starmer project, given his experience of New Labour.

It's bleakly funny in its own way that Keir Starmer and Morgan McSweeney took such an avoidable and predictable risk in order to appoint someone who (correctly) had the measure of their limitations and did not agree with their project:

📅 SES EVENT TODAY 2PM 📊 What happened in the 2026 Scottish Elections? 📍 Edinburgh Futures Institute, Room 2.35 www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/what-happe...

As part of the ongoing Ballot Box Scotland crusade against deposits (which has been going on since the project was set up in 2018!), I've made a very, very, VERY simple example of what a signature based system of ballot access could look like instead from a voter's perspective test.ballotbox.scot

So I decided to take the psychic damage of reading Blair's piece on Labour, and quite besides his lack of analysis of inequality and unwillingness to recognise the trade-offs the govt actually face, his tendency to ascribe almost mythical status to 'forces' like AI is intellectually offensive.

Clean energy *is* cheaper energy!

Our post-election Scotland poll suggests independence was a very important issue in deciding how 34% of voters voted, the second most important issue of the campaign after the NHS. Our pre-election polling suggested it was very important for just 24% of voters by March, a big campaign shift.

There are now more Tory supporters who *say* they voted Remain than Leave. In the BES, which has EU vote information from previous waves rather than recalled vote, the split is 50-35 for Leave (vote intention is 2025 though). If anything, false recall is even more damning for the Brexit project.

Let's treat Musk as the absurdity he is: he claims only a white woman should play Helen of Troy. If he'd read the classics he'd know Zeus was Helen's father and he seduced her mother disguised as a swan. So surely, Elon, only a woman with feathers can play Helen... In @heraldscotland.bsky.social

1226 toilet rolls cut from list of Murrell embezzlement charges after plea.

In a joint @ipsosinscotland.bsky.social & @uofgpolicy.bsky.social report published before the election, I argued that independence was much more influential on voting intention than issue polling had suggested. Something of a vindication...

Our post-election Scotland poll suggests independence was a very important issue in deciding how 34% of voters voted, the second most important issue of the campaign after the NHS. Our pre-election polling suggested it was very important for just 24% of voters by March, a big campaign shift.

New @ipsosinscotland.bsky.social post-election poll findings, out today, show a third of Scottish voters only made their minds up in the final week of the campaign, with 1 in 10 deciding on polling day itself. For more findings, see bit.ly/4wUkv4J

Theresa May fucked this sound logic by running a presidential campaign despite being a charisma chasm. But generally, if you get a bounce as a new PM I do think you should go for it. You get more time in office and your own mandate & manifesto... And if you lose, well, you were gonna lose anyway.

'Leftwing' does not have to mean fiscally loose. "More open policies on migration and Europe and a fairer tax system would be economically “left” of the present government. But they would improve the public finances and reduce the deficit." Me in @financialtimes.com www.ft.com/content/7235...

🎵I'm talkin' as the man with the money, I'm asking me to buy a onesiiieeee🎵

I've been enjoying this new @theguardian.com pod as an explainer of US issues, but my god has it reinforced my preference for a sovereign, democratically elected Parliament over a Constitution interpreted by political appointees...

I'm not sure what Makerfield looked like when it voted for Brexit *a decade ago*, but MIC's modelling would have it a comfortably Remain constituency today,

Apparently even places that are bang average are "left behind" now www.economist.com/britain/2026...

Watching England implode over WC squad selection when I'm just happy we're there

Crossing the Forth Road Bridge in a bus increasingly feels like trying to traverse a bombed out highway in a Fallout game...

Parties Stop Outsourcing Vetting Challenge

Westminster by-elections scheduled for the 18th of June following the election of the SNP Stephens as MSPs: Aberdeen South (Flynn), Arbroath and Broughty Ferry (Gethins). That's a week before George Street/Harbour by-election. Which is in Aberdeen South. So err, turnout for that has just been sunk!

The most accurate use of demented I've ever come across is for this guy.

John Swinney (SNP) has just been confirmed as Parliament's nominee for First Minister, with 56 votes (someone flubbed it!) vs 17 apiece for Malcolm Offord (RUK) and Anas Sarwar (LAB), and 15 for Gillian Mackay (GRN), CON and LD MSPs abstained.

It's almost like the decades of studies showing that poor economic performance leads to incumbent unpopularity and ultimately a change in government was right.

I'm not opposed to MRPs in principle. They constitute a sophisticated set of approaches with a lot of potential. But it appears that such approaches are being tested "in the wild" rather than privately, and misleading coverage when we have little confidence in them ourselves as pollsters.

I have some polling-retrospective content coming out later this week, but I can't do much better on the Q of MRPs than @eoghanly.bsky.social. On aggregate, they were useless and negatively impacted election coverage.

Something you quickly learn as a reporter is that a lot of folk who say they are interested in politics really, really hate political science. This story seems to trigger loathing on both sides of Scotland’s big constitutional divide. Why? Read it and see. www.thetimes.com/article/05e7...

Great reporting from @leaskyd.bsky.social in @thetimes.com of the collapse in the pro-independence vote last week, while the vote for unionist parties largely held up. Which I was happy to help inform using the findings of our joint @ipsosinscotland.bsky.social / @uofgpolicy.bsky.social analyses.

Being fair, I don't think it was a clear-cut penalty. But it's such an indictment of our football culture that Beaton's family have had to have police protection because of a refereeing decision...

I'm being negatively polarised into thinking it was a dead cert handball by all the English pundits who've never given a fuck about Scottish football suddenly having such passionate opinions that it wasn't...

This is where wanting to run your country "like a business" gets you. I won't bother asking when Americans will clock that these are two different endeavours, because we know that they won't.

I'm very much on board with the 'Wes wants a Granita-esque deal' with Burnham school of thought. But there's the very real possibility that Burnham loses the Makerfield by-election and then the soft left candidate becomes who? Rayner? Miliband? Leaving him out in the cold.

When Democracy for Sale started publishing stories about how Labour Together under then minister Josh Simons hired a lobby firm to investigate journalists I *really* couldn’t have foreseen this…

Josh Simons? Josh Simons of Labour Together? Josh Simons of 'send all the asylum seekers to a Scottish island'? Josh Simons of paying hacks to stalk and discredit journalists? Josh Simons of nobody owes his seat to the Starmer-McSweeney project more? Well, okay, if you insist...

Great reporting from @leaskyd.bsky.social in @thetimes.com of the collapse in the pro-independence vote last week, while the vote for unionist parties largely held up. Which I was happy to help inform using the findings of our joint @ipsosinscotland.bsky.social / @uofgpolicy.bsky.social analyses.

It's sort of, I dunno, clinically insane of ScotLab elected legislators to be holding on to Sarwar - who has presided over their two worst Holyrood results ever - while their English colleagues are on the verge of ousting the first Labour PM in over a decade over locals.

The way the Conservatives do this can be messy in its own way, but it's cleaner and more decisive than this.

Taking bets on whether Chuka really is in No 10 right now or British BlueSky is experiencing a collective fever dream.

What if delivering that necessitates a new leader, rather can continuing to meander between anaemic 'reset' speeches and devastating election defeats?

Not going to repeat my response to Reform's Helen McDade. I'll just point to this as the latest example of how wildly out-of-touch with the majority of Scots who voted last week McKenna actually is.

Burnham when his supporters accidentally get Starmer pushed out too early

One of the undercovered stories of the Scottish Parliament elections revolves around the future of party politics within the pro-independence bloc. Not only did the Greens win two SNP constituencies and establish two further SNP-Green marginals, they could have done more, per the regional votes...

The SNP fell seven seats short of a majority last week, on a significantly reduced vote share compared to 2021. But the gap from 58 seats to 65 could have been bridged by as few as 8,472 votes across eight constituencies (eight because they'd have lost a H&I list seat), just 0.37% of the vote.

100% agree with this. An elections regulator able and willing to nitpick over the word "Alliance" in "Alliance for Unity" back in 2021, but unable/unwilling to address an obvious spoiler party that is compromising the integrity of Scottish elections is fundamentally unfit for purpose.