UK politics these days is just unending competitive whingeing.

Not so many years ago I would put queries about fiddly data issues in my area out on Twitter and usually within half an hour I'd be getting responses from some of the best experts in the field. It seemed to good to be true! but -this is the point of this post- it wasn't too good to be true.

Combining a couple of thoughts from this, perhaps a good way to do electoral reform (and what LDs should have demanded in 2010) is an (Irish-style) two-stage process where an independent Citizens' Assembly ponders the best system and then their choice is put to the rest of the public in a referendum

Huge numbers of Labour policy spads read @samfr.bsky.social’s Substack, where the exact scale of the repair job was written in black and white. What actually happened is those people were cowed into silence by a set-up that valued polling over policy.

HAPPY FOUR SEASONS TOTAL LANDSCAPING DAY TO ALL WHO CELEBRATE

I do slightly think that what is happening in Chicago could be the beginnings of a non-violent civil disobedience movement that goes way beyond just like, No Kings protests, and could grow quite a lot

Me neither.

Fantastic expose from my friend George Turner in the Guardian. So good to see George back in print. The two of us also have a *very* exciting project due to hit the airwaves in late 2026... 🫣 www.theguardian.com/film/2025/no...

I wish she hadn't done this. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Is there a prominent Brexiter left who hasn’t torn off their mask to reveal the rancid racism beneath? Boris Johnson’s chief fluffer accusing anyone else of being over-promoted is peak process. The bitterness of insanely privileged men with empty souls knows no bounds.

I'd forgotten you can mute hashtags. Timeline is a lot quieter.

Would like to read the new Pynchon but I have never not regretted buying a novel in hardback. I need someone from the future to send me a paperback, for which I'll happily pay the hardback price.

*Have new WCA claims exploded in the last year?* My new blog post on (another) mess in DWP statistics... inequalities.substack.com/p/have-new-w...

Tax policy on the British left is pure "anti-bedtime left". Bizarre idea that you can have a big social democratic welfare state without everyone contributing properly www.economist.com/britain/2025...

Suella Braverman has every right to make her own choice for herself about her own identity If her argument is to refuse to accept that Ian Wright & Michelle Agyemang, Rishi Sunak, David Lammy and Priti Patel are English - their identity & birthright - on grounds of race, she should lose the whip

good morning specifically to the FBI agent who introduced Mamdani’s dad to Marx

GET THEM, ELLA

The first question to ask whenever you hear a statisical claim about sickness & disability benefit receipt is 'has @benbgeiger.bsky.social posted on this yet?' and if the answer is 'no' wait until he has before commenting. inequalities.substack.com/p/have-new-w...

A freeze to Local Housing Allowance is hard to reconcile with a child poverty strategy (especially if the government is prioritising the After Housing Costs income measure, as it was last I heard).

📰New @citizensadvice.bsky.social briefing ahead of the #Autumnbudget: The Government if failing private renters by freezing #LocalHousingAllowance #LHA.

One in five people are *now* economically inactive says Justin on the radio, asksing "is there a way out of this mess?" You probably know that one in five people have been economically inactive since we started measuring it over half a century ago.

"London is not a bad place to live, and does a lot better on measures such as crime than many of the populist right ... would argue. However, as so often, housing costs are a pervasive drag on liveability, pushing people into poverty, hobbling aspiration and jeopardising the UK’s prosperity."

I haven't heard the word 'aloof' for years. And never as an adjective.

-Zohran's wife is aloof? -Rama's aloof, Jerry! -An aloof wife... -An aloof wife!!

Monica Vitti, Terence Stamp & Johnny Dankworth are recording the Modesty Blaise soundtrack. Eve Arnold took this marvellous shot, 1965. song.link/y/Zaw0E-5jHSY

Incredibly funny to watch the right wing going Oh so just because I love money and hate poor people I'm a bad Christian according to "the pope"???

If the EU wants to avoid being press-ganged into America's beefs because it fears being abandoned by the US, it needs to find a) an autonomous capacity for deterrence & b) a diplomacy that is consistent with the extent of autonomous deterrence it is capable of mustering. www.ft.com/content/8214...

A super PAC supporting former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the New York mayoral election is running a late ad that depicts Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani in front of video of the Twin Towers crashing down on 9/11. www.nbcnews.com/politics/ele...

What I hadn’t anticipated is how freshly relevant this feels. In Lynsey Hanley’s intro, she paraphrases Hoggart’s argument: “Men with great powers of persuasion are about to suppress what you know about yourself in order to profit from what you haven’t yet explored. Don’t let them do it.” 1/n

Another hero.

Using the English Indices of Deprivation for the first time in years and pleased to find a sub-indicator that I think was designed and proposed by my colleagues at the GLA back in the 2000s.

My first op-ed! What a day for it. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

My first thought was 'How does this fit into the narrative spun by Matt Goodwin and co'? And then I realised I was only thinking that because of this chap's name. So in a way, their rot has already set in, even within myself.

I keep seeing supposedly progressive podcasts saying “the problem is that people feel like they just can’t talk about these issues” while these issues are frequently the *only* thing that people are talking about 😩

Jean de Colombe • Female saints, from Les Heures de Louis de Laval • night Venticelli •

Why the practice of changing the clock doesn't make sense too far south (say <40°) or north (>60°). Too far south the natural change is too small to bother, too far north too big for 1hr to make much difference. NB: much above 60° you don't have sunrise at all for part of the year.

Ingrid Bergman for Notorious (1946). Still by Gaston Longet for RKO.

Grok is (falsely)hallucinating it quickly retracted its widespread false claim. It did not: it carried on claiming there were several independent sources + later falsely claimed these (imagined) eye-witness accounts had been reported in broadcast news segments

Rarely performed, especially in the full orchestral version, but I would love to see a production of this. As far as I can hear there's no reference to Irish music but I wouldn't say it sounds particularly English either (as I often find with RVW).

One of the most harmful attacks on New Labour’s record is the idea that “in-work benefits” are some kind of subsidy to business/a sign that an employer is behaving unethically, rather than a reflection of the fact that in rich countries, most poverty is driven in part by your wider circumstances!

Apologies for posting from the site formerly known as Twitter but this is a pretty clear illustration of why the UK government remains there. Just two ministers ...

"On the right, the leaking of the video is denounced as a defamation of the Israeli military, all but amounting to an act of treason...On the left...[it] is seen as the one time she lived up to the responsibilities of her post." She has now been arrested. www.bbc.com/news/article...

The Boss Sonny Rollins recorded my all-time favorite record 68 years ago today, 11/3/57. This music has not aged a day. If you heard Sonny, Wilbur Ware, and Elvin Jones plays this exact same set tonight at the Vanguard, it would still sound state of the art. www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlHR...

A purported ally threatening diplomats and their families with personal consequences if they maintain the positions they’ve been instructed to take is very deeply shocking, extremely hostile, and undermines the norms by which non-violent resolution of international disagreements are possible.

I recall Enda Kenny saying, if elected, he'd work "just as hard as you do' and my immediate reaction was I'd like a Taoiseach who worked harder than that.

And Clegg nicked it from future jailbird Nicolas Sarkozy: 'La France qui se lève tôt.'

I missed this last week. The new English index of income deprivation includes UC working households who are on low-incomes AFTER HOUSING COSTS. This is a big deal technically & means we now have a hyper local measure of LIVING STANDARDS not just incomes. www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

📉 Calling all chart enthusiasts! 📢 The Resolution Foundation is hiring 👀 This is a rare opportunity to join our senior leadership team and take forward our work on productivity and growth. Applications close in two weeks! ⤵️ buff.ly/x40DZV1

Sister Stanislaus Kennedy, campaigner and founder of Focus Ireland, has died aged 86 www.thejournal.ie/sister-stan-...