I get endlessly sick of middle class southerners posing as “the voice of the working man” speaking as if everyone north of the Watford Gap (or doing a job outside the professions) is an unreconstructed racist homophobe.

For about ten minutes after Keir Starmer’s conference speech it seemed like the PM understood what his voters wanted to hear – an actual challenge to the racism of Reform. But instead of seeing it as the start of new messaging, it feels like his team just regarded it as job done.

The Prime Minister said in September that we are at a fork in the road. These asylum proposals suggest we have taken the wrong turning. The idea that recognised refugees need to be deported is wrong. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

Okay is there some sort of game of forfeits going on in the treasury or what

I like this as a test of credibility. It works.

The cat has decided she’s going to be my co-author this morning.

This feels like an ad written, directed *and* acted by people who have 1. Never played a game 2. Never watched anyone play a game 3. Never seen anyone interact with Alexa 4. Never seen anyone interact full stop 5. Never been alone in a room?

Oh my

Exactly this. You don’t get to pick what voters care about! You certainly shouldn’t tell them what they care about! Boris Johnson’s team learned this the hard way in the UK, when they kept telling the public that they didn’t care about them partying during Covid. Turned out they really, really did.

made a similar point on the opinions podcast this week in response to the idea that epstein is a dead end. not only are actual voters interested in this but it divides the gop and puts pressure on the president. it would be political malpractice to treat it as a sideshow

Labour is terrible at coups: its rule book is set up in such a way that makes them harder, and the party’s MPs have lacked the killer instinct ✏️ @jamesrball.com

That’s why “blue Labour” is doomed and was doomed from the start: you cannot make water run uphill. A party whose core electorate for over a decade has been socially liberal university graduates and ethnic minorities cannot sell itself as a party hostile to socially liberal values.

MPs can’t even fix their own workplace. And they have failed to do so for more than a decade as it crumbles around them. There is no solution in sight. Political metaphors don’t come more heavy-handed than that.

The BBC needs to urgently review its board structure as to its ability to respond to an existential threat. There are multiple credible reports that board members involved in its response aren’t on-side. There are allegations some leaked. And the response has been slow and disjointed throughout.

“‘He kept putting Robbie’s name on the list and Boris kept taking it off,’” Shipman reported one of his sources recalling, adding: “The plan to send Paul Dacre, the former editor of the Daily Mail, to run broadcasting watchdog Ofcom is from the same playbook.” @arusbridger.bsky.social on the BBC

The government just keeps doubling down on the strategy that’s taken it to genuinely historical unpopularity ever harder. The horse will be flogged until it sprints.

And is the government’s principle now that the few European Jews to whom we granted asylum in the 1930s have been returned to Germany, Poland, etc, where it was ‘safe’ in 1945?

This looks like an Emmerdale new cast member announcement created by a previous-generation LLM.

Bad news kids: budgie the little helicopter has crashed.

If there’s a nascent power struggle around the WH COS (and there always is), the thing that will quash it is definitely a major cabinet secretary publicly calling attention to it with vague accusations in a social media post.

In case it’s not obvious, Trump’s attorney general has, at his personal request, started an investigation into the Democrats and Dem allies mentioned in the documents released this week. But no-one else!

Genuinely think this might be the first real test of the limits of Trump’s brazenness this term. This shouldn’t make Dems back down – there’s no-one in there they feel obliged to defend (nor should they). So it’s just gonna draw more attention to Trump’s own role. www.nytimes.com/live/2025/11...

🎥 Political editor @jamesrball.com breaks down The New World's exclusive that Michael Prescott - author of the dossier into the BBC - himself doctored Trump quotes in the report. It's an extraordinary revelation that calls into question Prescott’s journalistic judgement Read now 👉 buff.ly/lRs7cws

Banger lede

This is the point. Policy *should not* be adjusted or fine-tuned in response to minor forecasting judgements. Decisions about whether or not to break a prominent manifesto promise *should not* depend on minor forecasting judgements. This stuff matters. We've got to do better than this.

The shaggy defence in action.

Just don’t ask what happened to everyone else who did, or what’s behind the door that makes the weird whooshing sounds

Little @thenewworldmag.bsky.social diary scoop – word on the street is Lisa Nandy’s intervention sunk the Telegraph sale to Redbird. Meaning the Labour culture secretary has defended the Telegraph’s independence more fiercely than the BBC’s this week… www.thenewworld.co.uk/rats-in-a-sa...

Sisyphus takes one look at the telegraph sale and says “absolutely not”

“It would be good to think that Sir Keir read the Institute for Government’s March 2024 report on reforming the centre of government. His failure to grip these issues last July or since suggests he did not.” www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

pray for the media correspondents, the proudest and noblest of all the specialisms. They've had a hell of a week.

Telegraph sale to redbird (who sort of owned it already) collapses. This has got to be seen as a triumph for Chris Evans, who must be the first editor in history to declare war on his own proprietor and *win*. Arguably, twice.

Replies to this are a good case for why the lobby system absolutely doesn’t work in the 21st century. It is the standard practice of government to brief stories from unnamed sources. *Official briefings* come from unnamed sources. But a sizeable subset of the public thinks unnamed means made up.

Exclusive live footage from inside the Treasury

Unless someone in the Treasury reassures the markets pretty soon, there’s every chance the UK will need to raise *more* tax for less in return. Total clusterfuck in the making, this. Having a budget fall apart more than a week before it’s actually be delivered might be a new record.

There is a small subset of pro-Starmer ultras on here who either genuinely don’t understand that budget stories *are directly briefed out by the Treasury, with permission* or pretend not to know that. And so they claim the plans never existed, haven’t changed, etc. It is maddening, and dumb as fuck.

Thanks to months of pitch rolling, the Labour government has now effectively told anyone paying attention that income tax rises are necessary, but they’re not going to do them because they’re politically weak. Let’s see how that plays!

Bond markets not happy about Reeves bottling it on tax, it seems.

Because the combination of freezing personal allowances and tinkering around the sides worked so well last year. Faced with a choice of meaningful tax rises to fund substantive change or not enough to do anything, Reeves is clearly choosing the latter.

I am excited to see the gilt market reaction to this news. Think it could be quite bad. A big chunk of the recent gilt rally was predicated on Labour showing they could hike the big taxes if needed and….well I guess that idea is dead.

Adam isn’t speculating here: it’s what Reeves did last time (alongside a hefty employers’ NI hike) and it *didn’t* go down well. It also didn’t raise enough to protect against shocks, hence more rises being needed now. This is total, dismal, political failure.

The good thing about u-turning on tax rises before you ever do them is you get most of the popularity for considering the hike, some bonus popularity for looking incompetent and indecisive, AND none of the revenue

The government’s plan to deliver change without ever actually change anything is somehow not working, to their apparent shock.

The phrase of the night in my WhatsApps reacting to this is undoubtedly “fuck’s sake”.

This sign is a war crime against typesetting, so I guess it’s in keeping?

had to see what this disambiguation hatnote was about and sure enough, apple's original thumbnail (before they fixed it):

X categorised itself as “News” so that it wasn’t obvious how it was performing on app charts versus other social media apps. News is a less competitive category so Elon gets to “win” even as he hides X’s weak performance. (Also I notice Truss went to the effort to find the silly “X” of the logo)

if those Q-Anon people were actually about shit they'd be honking around like truffle pigs right now. but they were clearly just in it for the merch and sense of community