Next election result currently giving ‘rainbow coalition’ vibes

Polling actually slightly under-estimated the total left bloc vote, in the end. There's a massive and highly motivated anti-Reform vote in this country. Huge question for the next election about who has the authority to lead it and where.

New report out on this soon, but striking thing about Lab/Green switchers is, in some areas, they perceive Lab to be more right wing than they have been. eg two biggest areas of perceived ideological distance are 'taxing the rich' and 'getting closer to the EU' - things they have actually done !

Only question of long-term importance tonight imo: In an information environment that’s about as messy as it gets, do voters collectively figure out who the best anti-Reform vehicle is, or do they split? Even a narrow Green or Lab victory would be ominous in a constituency that left-leaning

Very cool electoral system!

Thoughtful and, I think, largely correct.

Increasingly fascinated by the Blue Lab tendency as a group of people that can't grapple with the fact it already won. What 'hyper liberal woke stuff' has this government done? Who is he arguing against?!

A small but still real strategic challenge for Labour MPs: gaining a clear consensus on where their vote is going! Is this level of variation between providers normal? Seems like polling error waiting to happen. Also means every factional tendency can cherry pick data to fit their view.

Way too much analysis starts from the premise of Keir Starmer as a bad politician. He went from backbencher to PM in 10 years! The problem is incoherence - across policy agenda, comms, electoral strategy. Anyone who thinks they can replace him without fixing that will just fall down the same hole

I'm fortunate to sit on the advisory board of @persuasionuk.bsky.social, the excellent public opinion outfit headed up by @steveakehurst.bsky.social. They're currently recruiting for a new communications lead - a great opportunity: careers.meliorefoundation.org/postings/a92...

Listen, I hate it when Janan Ganesh is right as much as the next man - but think this perfectly sums up the sociology of Mandelson/Epstein type relationships. www.ft.com/content/ce83...

this, to me, is blueskyism

I regret to say I think we will need to hang this in the Louvre

I don’t even know if sinister is the right word for most Mandelson-Epstein exchanges. Above all they are just pathetic. A man so clearly obsessed by money and status - a life he felt entitled to but couldn’t afford - that it corroded any decency and duty left inside him. Good riddance.

Gorton is really going to test the idea that progressive voters will naturally come back to Labour to stop Reform, or else naturally figure out who is best placed to beat them. Super messy information environment where even the most informed voter might not be able to figure it out.

Would quibble with Mr Burns here but this is really a stupendous bit of work

I know there are concerns that BlueSky only represents metro lib elites, but I’m at this orchestral dramatisation of the climate crisis at the Barbican and I’ve already spotted two people I know off here. So I think we are good 👍

Funny thing here is right now Burnham is only Lab politician with reach into both the Reform & Green vote. Some of this will be because he's 'outside' the system, not wrestling with the gordian knot of the British state. But also ironically makes him the best shot Lab have at holding the seat !

Carney has shown more political foresight in understanding (a) Trump 2 is not Trump 1 (b) he only understands strength & (c) you can use standing up to him to wrong-foot your domestic opponents - than every European leader combined. A former central banker!

Jenrick, Zahawi defecting surely now makes certain that Reform will be running as a small-state, economically right wing party at the next election. Quite a big shift from the positioning they were flirting with just 12 months ago, and a new potential vulnerability for them.

if you want to understand the misinformation about Net Zero estimates this is a great starting point

Always look under the bonnet of polls before reaching sweeping conclusions. Even in this poll, left bloc voters are (a) less likely to say they'll vote(b) more likely to say don't know. Ergo more are taken out the sample and/or re-modelled. Many left bloc voters aren't switching, they are hiding !

It’s worth mentioning, though it’s been said repeatedly: the Lizzie Line carries 1/6th of UK daily rail passengers (not including the Tube) and has already paid off its entire costs. And if HS2 had been committed to, without plans being tweaked every 5 minutes, Phase 1 would be opening next year.

Merry Christmas to all and here’s to another year in this intensely normal media environment!

Quite the chart. www.ft.com/content/30a4...

Verian’s polling in the 2024 GE campaign was a) by an innovative random sampling method rather than a panel and b) pretty accurate, in that it had a lower Lab number than most.

Fascinating and beautiful piece of magazine journalism by Kate Mossman on the plane that was nearly crashed by a passenger nine months before 9/11:

The Bondi Beach Jewish community was gathering to light candles for Hanukkah. They were targeted because they were Jewish. They should be alive today. What we saw today was antisemitism and it was the definition of evil.

By coincidence was reading V13 by Emmanuel Carrere when learning of Bondi attack - this Simone Weil quote in it seems v apt today: “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvellous, intoxicating...

I found this today (from Peter Kellner/YouGov) which answers part of your query.

& there are signs now of govt recognising that. Will it last? Is it too late? Will they cock it up? possibly, but I wanted to write this week about recognising a good thing when you see it rather than immediately jumping to all the reasons it’s not good enough www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

This is just excellent, every single point is essential to understanding UK politics - and I can’t wait to read the book by @timbale.bsky.social @psurridge.bsky.social @drjennings.bsky.social @robfordmancs.bsky.social

On electoral pacts, 'just for fun' I asked this recently: what if the choice in your area was a candidate from a left alliance (Labour/Green/LD/Plaid/SNP) or a candidate from a right alliance? (Con/Reform)? +10 lead for prog alliance, narrow margin even in Red Wall. Via @yougov.co.uk

With thanks to @luketryl.bsky.social for the inspo on the ther place, here's migration salience and Reform vote share plotted over 2025. Ok, not one-for-one, but pretty decent positive correlation. Likewise, anytime economy spikes, Reform vote softens slightly. Agenda setting matters!

the one thing we didn't want to happen

Option B! Option B!

Having watch child poverty rise like a slow-motion car crash since the two-child limit was introduced, sat in meetings up and down the country, in foodbanks, in schools, to work out how to get child poverty down, the idea that this undoing this policy is 'PLP management' is a joke.

It's such a bizarre framing. Labour MPs think taking 450k kids out of poverty is putting the country first! That's why they wanted it to happen! It's not because they personally benefit.

Britain's left-wing government is left-wing www.economist.com/britain/2025...

Tactically I think Reeves made best of a bad situation today - the individual measures were sensible and some good stuff in there. But we're 4 years from an election not 4 months. Key is whether less pain now (re: manifesto) now means less progress on public services, cost of living etc by 2029.

The two-child benefit cap might have been popular, but consequences of keeping it (rising child poverty) would not be. And its those Lab would have been punished most harshly on, as @persuasionuk.bsky.social research showed. Brave but right decision to lift it this far from election.

This daft jewellery story - which turns out to not even be true but proved needlessly divisive on a sensitive topic - happened because bits of Lab are *still* obsessed with briefing right wing tabloids. But here's thing: nobody reads these outlets anymore. Labour/Reform voters don't. So why do it?

I am very much team ‘you need to reduce the salience of asylum’ - but fixing a manifestly broken system has got to be some part of that surely. There’s aspects of what was announced yesterday I’m not sure will work, but there’s not enough people on here engaging with the problem itself imo

This is important and depressing. Key point for me: you cannot understand anything in British politics today without understanding the radicalisation of right-leaning media in Britain and the power X has added to its ability to set the agenda.

One nice detail that can easily be lost in this graph - even right wingers trust the BBC more than the right wing tabloids

This story currently has more views on the BBC website than the Tim Davie resignation. We are still a country

I suspect there's also a strong element here of far too many journalists and BBC managers spending too much time on X and getting a wholly misleading impression of how big a story the Trump edits were. They're excessively influenced by right-wing activist opinion, and particularly US opinion.

Great column here as ever from @gabyhinsliff.bsky.social - Gen Xis the key to understanding Reform, Trump etc, not Boomers. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

The discourse would be less annoying if everyone just acknowledged that some of what you see in elections, especially in the US, is just cycles of anti-incumbency

A great day for the golden rule of political analysis: when the right wins it is a resounding ideological victory that humiliates the left and when the left wins it is a precarious fluke that will surely end up humiliating the left. Conservatives are power’s landlords and the left merely tenants