The most ridiculous #traitors thing is Stephen Fry and David Olusoga mutually going “The traitors are playing a really clever game and you’re really clever so it must be you” without thinking “I’m really bad at this game & I’m conventionally clever so maybe a different kind of clever is traitorous”

If David Olusoga gets this wrong tonight, will it be another nail in the coffin of academia’s reputation?

During the reshuffle I read a lot of column inches about how Shabana Mahmood had impressed at Justice by making quick decisions and not generating negative headlines. Given what's transpired about mistakes with releasing prisoners, I wonder if that viewpoint is still widely shared?

BBC News bulletins leading on the story of an Algerian man being mistakenly released by the prison service. Funnily enough I don't remember these cases ever leading the bulletins when an average of ten prisoners were mistakenly released a month in the final year of the last Government

Notable in today's YouGov that the centre/left bloc - Lab/Green/LD/SNP are on 54%. With Reform/Tories on 43%. That's the biggest differential in a long time. I think useful to track blocs given instability between parties at the moment.

Stephen Bush on the extraordinary draft legislation which Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp, Matt Vickers, Katie Lam and backbench colleagues have proposed in parliament It is a proposal that would seek to deport around 5% of the resident population, including over a quarter of a million with ILR

Perhaps a timely reminder of the work @drjennings.bsky.social & I did with Gerry Stoker showing that politicians in power are generally aware of people's low trust in the political system but unwilling to invest effort in trying to alleviate it doi.org/10.1177/0032...

"You can legislate all you want, but these systems won't work unless people trust them" The information commissioner, John Edwards, today told MPs on the science, innovation & tech committee that the government's digital ID policy won't work without public trust, reports @matildamartin.bsky.social

It's a remarkably persistent idea that loads of remaining Tories are just waiting to make the switch, but it's just not true. Just 1 in 8 still loyal Tories have an outright positive view of the Lib Dems or would consider voting for them. They're ideologically miles away from the Lib Dems.

It's a day ending in a 'y' which means a French Prime Minister has resigned 🤷‍♂️

Kind of feels like a big deal that a Reform/Brexit Party former MEP has been convicted of taking bribes to promote Russian interests in Ukraine, and it feels like a bigger deal that this isn’t being treated as the major scandal that it clearly is.

All is not well in ‘Your Party’. Note the absence of Zarah Sultana’s name at the bottom of this statement

Very thought provoking article from Steve Richards arguing that Starmer over-corrected after Hartlepool www.newstatesman.com/uncategorize...

[me, a journalist who spends all day every day on a social media app where the discovery algorithm is personally controlled by its owner, captain birdseye] you know, a lot of people are talking about fish fingers, we should probably cover that

Elon Musk openly called for violence on our streets yesterday. I hope politicians from all parties come together to condemn his deeply dangerous and irresponsible rhetoric. Britain must stand united against this clear attempt to undermine our democracy.

As it happens I think it's downstream of Labour in opposition, which took the view that public and press opinion were immutable and so trying to win arguments, rather than side-step them, was futile. But if it that was true in opposition it certainly isn't true in government.

We need to see more of this from progressive MPs.

Govt should take this message seriously. The far right, backed by the world's richest man, is actively stoking racial & political violence. Staying quiet, flattering them, saying "we hear you" won't work. Stand up for decency, for respect, for the best of modern Britain or watch those things burn

It is absurd how little consequence we are letting Musk’s rhetoric and politics have. Every time we ignore it and pretend it will go away it gets worse.

Perhaps the British media might like to give this story some prominence

If he’d help off on the reshuffle for a few days he could have made David Lammy Ambassador to the US

More extraordinary still is the sanitising of Kirk's politics. Kirk was - and this is just a straightforwardly factual statement - a far right activist. And here's a former British Prime Minister not merely mourning his death or condemning his murder but actively *praising* his politics.

Honestly, it is absurd to publish a league table with confidence intervals so wide that a single trust could be in either the top 10 or bottom 10

Interigued to hear Deputy Leadership contenders and others accuse Labour leadership of being too London centric. They're not exactly appealing to London voters by chasing after Farage! But perhaps the accusation is that a London leadership has a warped sense of how to win votes outside the capital

My hunch is that if Zack Polanski's Greens or the Corbyn Party were platforming quite this level of crank madness about cancer in the Royal Family, they would get quite a lot of heat for doing so

Indeed Gordon Brown refused to appoint Harriet Harman DPM and appointed Mandelson as First Secretary of State instead

As Housing Secretary, Rayner should have sought expert tax advice on her home. But unlike some of her critics, she didn't use tax-avoidance schemes to drive down her taxes. She didn't hide her money in offshore accounts, or threaten to sue whistleblowers. Those are much more noxious problems.

Really intellectually invigorated (and a tad exhausted) after @ecpr.bsky.social Great conference full of interesting papers and researchers. Particular thanks to the @ecpr-elites.bsky.social group for organising some great panels. Now to find some ouzo…

Imagine if the Green Party got a front page headline every day to warn that climate change is ultimately bad news or the Lib dems got one to point out the long term crisis in social care funding

This is why the pledge to stop housing asylum seekers in hotels has always struck me as daft. The reason so many Brits can’t afford holidays is down to general cost of living. Increasing the demand on the already broken housing market may only make that worse and create more resentment.

“If I said I was wearing a Palestine Action T-shirt would you get here quicker?” From the new Private Eye, in shops now.

What a joy to start the week with the discovery that the university's travel partner failed to book my flight to a conference.... It's so efficient this delegation!

I have a new article out at @polstudies.bsky.social. In "Electoral Hope", I make the case that supposedly irrational "wishful thinking" is actually a crucial part of how voters make rational sense of their role in democracies. OA link: doi.org/10.1177/0032...

The British state seemingly can't fathom that the Italians have come up with a much more efficient way to do this

Love these

Seeing as I'm always such an Eeyore, what are the big public policy success we can learn from? *Channel Tunnel *Seatbelts in cars *Plastic bag charge *Teaching people to swim *Smoking ban *CFCs and the Montreal Protocol *Banning lead in petrol *Minimum Wage *Covid vaccine *Lottery sports funding

Flashback to when The Independent Group was forming and struggled with the question "why not just join the Lib Dems?" and then later most of them joined the Lib Dems.

I still don't understand why a consortium of university libraries doesn't give a few million bucks to a few university presses to publish journals at cost, and then unsubscribe from the for-profit ones. It would save them money even in the short term, and ... (1/2)

Beyond infuriating that the state seems to have little capacity or intention of dealing with blatant law breaking. No wonder people are fed up

all the angles of the Ann-Katrin Berger save are unreal #WEuro2025

A typically brilliant piece from Jason Okundaye. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

This explains the current state of my mental health

The whip is now removed/suspended for more easily than it ever used to be. No Labour MP lost the whip under Blair because of their voting; those few cases that did were for things they'd said or done outside the voting lobbies.

Fascinating research on the link between the subjects you study at school and your later voting behaviour 👇

How do UK political elites reconcile with a low trust environment? @chrisbutlerpol.bsky.social, @drjennings.bsky.social & Gerry Stoker examine this question in @polstudies.bsky.social: buff.ly/3E6DkuS (OPEN ACCESS) @polstudiesassoc.bsky.social @uoypolitics.bsky.social @sagepub.com #polsky #polsci

Fascinating article by @pjsloman.bsky.social detailing why the Lib Dems' two flirtations with UBI in the early 90's and post-Covid felt apart. It starkly sets out that such radical economic ideas are unlikely to be promoted by parties in a FPTP system

Irritating quotation from Seldon. Thatcher had a "clear and consistent plan", so the 79-81 crisis was fine. Except her government performed a screeching U-Turn on its core economic (monetarist) policy, despite her rhetoric. I don't expect most people to remember that, but I do expect historians.

In doing so we find that the UK's registration difficulty level is closer to that of countries transition in and out of democracy, as opposed to other electoral democracies (according to V-Dem's categorization)