There's a trend among the liberal commentariat to say the UK would be better off in the EU but it's going to be terribly, terribly difficult to rejoin and it will be controversial with the public, so we can't . While criticising Starmer for taking the same attitude to every other difficult decision.

Extraordinary credit to Sadiq Khan for pushing through this deeply controversial policy. This is what can happen when politicians are prepared to stick to their principles.

Was on Times Radio yesterday making the point that Burnham won big in Makerfield mainly because he was so successful at consolidating the progressive vote and turning out people who hadn't viewed in the locals and less because he has a magic appeal to Reform voters.

A remarkable Labour win last night. The real lesson of Makerfield? In our latest substack, Christabel Cooper explains why rebuilding a larger progressive coalition, while persuading more transactional voters that Labour can stand up for them and deliver in office is the path to beating Reform.

It is extremely important that Labour understands that the movement of voters between Lab and Ref was not the crucial factor, it was consolidation of the anti-Ref vote and Lab voters turning out in droves. Otherwise Burnham will make the same mistakes as Starmer in targeting only one set of voters.

Absolutely fascinating polling by @christabelcoops.bsky.social @thinklabour.bsky.social. Says a lot about the (mis)perceptions of voters - and the cues they use to evaluate the social background of politicians.

NEW from @convergent-opinion.bsky.social Labour 12pts ahead in Makerfield, with Kenyon's sexist comments actively costing Reform votes Lab: 49% Ref: 37% Res: 5% Grn: 5% Other 5% 525 adults, 2-12 June 2026

If there had been a crucial by-election in, say, Bristol - I wonder if the Westminster commentariat would be quite as keen on playing endless vox pops when people might be complaining about Gaza, student loans and that Labour isn't standing up enough against the far right.

And last week we had the "two tier policing" discussion when there is no actual evidence of this phenomenon (other than police continuing to stop and search brown people at a disproportionate rate).

Really worth reading @thinklabour.bsky.social's new political economy piece. It sees technology as an engine of growth but in order to save social democracy not ignore it, as Blair's essay did. It proposes a bigger state, but one that stays in its lane and lets business get on with what it's good at

Maybe we should ban men from social media.... 🤔

Feels like I'm going a bit mad. Much of the commentary claims the guidance says police shouldn't treat people equally. It actually says they don't always have to treat everyone the same, with the explicit aim of achieving equal outcomes. Treating different people differently is...er... common sense.

Was a pleasure to chat to @pimlicat.bsky.social and @sturdyalex.bsky.social about my report "Who Is Labour For?", which argues that Labour has treated its values-based voters transactionally, and attempted to appeal to right-leaning transactional voters on the basis of values. This hasn't worked.

My debut on Quiet Riot discussing the tragic Henry Nowak case. Seems clear that the far right Restore party is doing to Reform, what Reform did to the Tories, ie pushing them further right, hence Farage's awful language in this case. But this simultaneously puts at risk their more moderate voters.

Helpful poll which (as with every other bit of data) shows the challenge Labour faces But, combining with @christabelcoops.bsky.social work, you can sort of see a path through if you squint Populist/transactional on economics/tech/FP, socially liberal on culture, quietly competant on immigration

Aside from anything else, the vast majority of the Makerfield voters who would die on a hill about building in fields will be among the 55% who would never consider voting for Andy Burnham anyway

Key finding in this new research is that Muslim voters more contested & more fragmented - less of a bloc, not more of a bloc. A more accurate discourse if media + all parties were to pay more attention to age, education, geography,gender dynamics within minority groups as well as the majority

This work by @christabelcoops.bsky.social and @fintan-smith.bsky.social gives us novel and rigorous insights into a group of voters that is normally very hard to reach in traditional surveys. They're both too modest to blow their own horn but I'll do it for them

Today @thinklabour.bsky.social publishes our report on Muslim voters, dispelling some misconceptions. Muslims - like most other Brits - prioritise the cost of living above any other issue including the conflict in Gaza. thinklabour.co.uk/thinking/gon...

If you want to read something genuinely thoughtful about Labour's future, try this. A single paragraph contains more interesting ideas than all 5,000 words of Blair's nonsense.

The reactions to this are mainly focused on the move to the right, but what's really striking in reading Blair's essay in full, is how little Labour's most electorally successful politician understands the current electorate. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

The battle of ideas has started in Labour and social care is back on the news agenda. This is another area where "incremental change won't cut it". In @arguablymag.bsky.social I argue to unlock social care reform, only a "big bang" approach will work

As David says, crime is a really important issue for voters, particularly in post industrial towns. In Burnley, shoplifting has increased way more than the average in England.

Me for @labourlist.bsky.social today on Labour's electoral coalition in which I argue that the government's current attempts to hold together a broad group of voters is not succeeding. labourlist.org/2026/05/who-...

Really excellent report here from @christabelcoops.bsky.social and @danmead.bsky.social on the politics of post-industrial towns - covering both how Labour can win them, and what a politically and economically credible future for them could look like (spoiler: it's becoming like Reading)

Looong week so only just got round to this @christabelcoops.bsky.social analysis of who Labour’s lost & where to pitch to get them back (economically left, socially liberal). Clarity across labour now that chasing Reform isn’t the answer but …https://thinklabour.co.uk/thinking/who-is-labour-for

Whoever ends up leading Labour will face the same existential question after the local elections: how does Labour rebuild a coalition broad enough to win again? I argue Labour should be clearer that it is an economically left-leaning and socially liberal party. thinklabour.co.uk/thinking/who...

For an Opposition, the position you take is important given you can't control the status quo and you want to avoid being the "scary' alternative. But astonishing how many people in a governing party don't see policy outcomes as a serious part of their political strategy

Since everyone (including the voters) have forgotten about the Tories it's worth highlighting that some of Labour's major losses to Reform are partially the result of the collapse in the Cons vote share In Tameside: Lab -30 pts vote share lost 16 seats Con -27 pts vote share, only lost 2 seats

I suspect the problem is not absolute deprivation but disappointed expectations - both for the young and for the average 55 yo Reform voter who doesn't have the gold plated early-retirement enabling pension of older Boomers, who own low value houses in fairly run down areas they can't move from.

If Trump had walked away a lot earlier he could have claimed the victory his ego needs - killing the Ayatollah and degrading Iran's military, while Iran would have got what it wanted - establishing its stranglehold on Hormuz as a credible deterrent to further attacks. But he didn't. And here we are.

This is a terrible and deliberately divisive piece of reporting by the Times. Somewhere near the bottom of the article, they admit that actually Muslims prioritise the cost of living above Gaza. It's not even close - cost of living was prioritised by 50%, Gaza by 25% www.thetimes.com/article/5c7c...

This is really good from Chris -a just read for anyone with an interest in polling.

We’ve built an interactive game to show what the pressure of adult social care looks like in practice. In Run the Council, you take charge of a fictional council for four years. Can you run ‘Northfield Council’ amongst mounting financial pressures? Play here: www.labourtogether.uk/council-sim

Looking forward to Nick Timothy condemning the group of Christians outside Parliament right now who are singing religious songs outside, in public, not in a church in a clear "act of domination". Or... Is there something different about these guys!!

Local government finances are in trouble. Council tax is outdated and regressive. Social care is underfunded. But council tax reform sits in the “here be dragons” bit of British politics, since it contributed to Thatcher's downfall 36 years ago. But @danmead.bsky.social has a solution! 1/

Staggering that many on the right (eg Andrew Mitchell) still think the UK isn't supportive enough of the US. They are the equivalent of tankies, so wedded to their pro American world view, that the fact the US is led by a malevolent toddler who is directly harming the UK economy, is irrelevant.

The default assumption that "the right is brilliant at politics" is undermined by their stance on Iran. Twice as many Brits oppose action against Iran as support it. Starmer's initial reluctance was the only sane response to a war that makes Iraq 2003 look like a masterpiece of strategic planning.

A senior Danish guy in the Social Democrats said to me that Denmark does not think of itself as a multicultural country whereas Britain does, which makes our situation very different.

Getting shown up in the arena of elite impunity by *the British monarchy* is an incredible “America at 250!” achievement

NEW PAPER from @labourtogether.bsky.social argues we should allow Thames Water to go down the drain. The alternative is a fudged deal that softens pollution targets and sees large returns for hedge funds. This will fuel calls for nationalising the industry, and the uncertainty could push up bills.

Trade unions are pretty popular! The reluctance to make the case for strengthening them, seems to stem from a historic and now misplaced belief, that unions are still unpopular. Amazing how people who claim to guided by "what the people want" so often fail to look at actual public opinion.

The problem that Amy new leadership candidate has is that they need 80 nominations from a PLP who mostly face Reform as their challenger and many of whom (wrongly IMO) think being tougher on migration will help, but they also need to win the Labour membership who are very socially liberal.

A big factor in Gorton & Denton is the significant number of voters who will be seriously scared about having a Reform MP. Imagine being Muslim and having to go to *Matt Goodwin* with your immigration casework. So they'll be highly motivated to vote for whoever is best placed to defeat Reform.

The most important thing about this by-election won't be who wins, it will be which of the anti-Reform parties comes first. If Reform win it will only be because the opposition has split catastrophically - if Lab come 2nd, it is a warning of what happens when Greens don't tactically vote.

These Tory to Reform defections could trigger 3 dynamics: 1. Blunt Reform's "insurgency" appeal 2. Convince Con/Ref waverers that Reform is the only viable party to beat Labour 3. OR push Con/Ref waverers back to the Cons as the only "sensible" option www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

A Reform majority would probably be won with little more than 30% of the vote with most British people opposed to PM Farage but having been unable/unwilling to organise themselves to stop it. It would be a government which has unrestricted power to make radical change yet no mandate to do so.

I wrote for @renewaljournal.bsky.social on the fracturing of Labour's vote, arguing this has been a long, structural process and can't be reversed by nostalgia about the 1950s when the two main parties got 97% of the vote between them (current polls have Lab plus Con at less than 40% vote share).