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

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)

What the party got was a variant of Cameron 2010 and the Liam Byrne letter. What it needed was a variant of Callaghan in 1976: “I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists.”

www.newstatesman.com/politics/202... An enjoyable read (the review, not the book…)

i keep imagining harold wilson being asked to weight in on the bob dylan goes electric controversy after the manchester festival can you imagine

Perhaps I'm being ungenerous, but HoC leader Powell here seems to combine a vague advocation of change with a firm opposition to specific reforms. E.g. acknowledging that Parliament is not set up for multi-party politcis but refusing to consider a circular chamber... tinyurl.com/ys7hwjrj

Looking forward to presenting early results from our analysis of how politicians evaluate public opinion signals at 11.10 at @epsanet.bsky.social room 1A.10. Looking forward to hearing about other POLPOP papers on the panel too!

Multi party politics you say?

The rebellion over the welfare reforms exposes the Labour leadership being surprisingly bad on party management. How did they not anticipate the scale of the opposition? It would be ludicrous to remove the whip from so many MPs as some briefings to the media proposed

So sad to see the Hotspur Press building in flames, and so incredibly unlucky when it was proposed to be Grade II listed - something its developer owners were fighting against. What are the odds! I work 200m from there and saw it, intact, this morning. Gone forever.

I have killed four mosquitos tonight and still I can hear one buzzing in the room where I am failing to sleep

Great piece as always from @stephenkb.bsky.social . I find the pace of Tory radicalisation on this really pretty scary - and IMO the timing of how it’s played out is closely linked with Twitter becoming a pure cesspool

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

I think if you are not close to politics it's hard to understand how influence works, but on many issues MPs are just receptive to people who appear on an issue they haven't thought much about and present an argument that looks rational, popular, and broadly aligned with their existing biases.