My main "picking party leaders" thought here is it's a better rule would already be inclusive of combined authority mayors. The parliament side can be sorted later, and not doing it gives you an awkward set of "senior party figures who are not contenders without a jumping through weird hoops".

Hmm, not sure. Daughter is wise to some of these tactics. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

The Inquiry uploaded a *lot* of new documents over the past few months. I’ve finally gone through and added all 11,757 of them to postofficeinquiry.dracos.co.uk for all your searching needs

And side point but what's really annoying about this is you can only really get people on a technicality, which *maybe* get a slap on the wrist. The actual scandals are just allowed.

Given the main parliamentary rule about what you can and can't do is "you have to write it down", just a really low bar not being met here.

Mark Carney's speech really is terrific: full text is here and very much worth your time.

New report: Leaky Pipes - what we learned about where candidate donation data comes from research.mysociety.org/html/leaky-p...

Having a think about what to do differently with the new registers this year - but here is the link to today's

I really cannot stress what a precise "oh this isn't serious" signal launching things at what3words is

*walking past Jeremy Bentham's skeleton on the way to lectures* Ah the good ideas man.

Just under a month away! Join @mysociety.org and others (in London and online) for FOI FEST 2026 Keynotes, discussions, lightning talks, skills tasters Thursday 19 February Sign up here: pretix.eu/mysociety/fo...

And there's a bunch of costs in "maybe there are more important things than price" when Palantir is bidding to run government services

There are principled reasons for thinking party switching is bad, but also it's annoying because it's a manual process on TheyWorkForYou.

Yes the combination of "don't publish nil returns" and "don't publish names *with* interests" seems odd. In the march version only about 20% of entries had interests.

Really pleased that @ecprtheloop.bsky.social have published my blog setting out my research around how well politicians understand which issues matter to voters, why they sometimes get it wrong, and how this misperceptions play out in real life decisions theloop.ecpr.eu/how-well-do-...

Yes the combination of "don't publish nil returns" and "don't publish names *with* interests" seems odd. In the march version only about 20% of entries had interests.

For 10 years, we've convened a global community, with a shared interest in how digital tools can defend and advance democracy, via our TICTeC conference. Now we're surveying the current state of affairs to provide applicable learnings for all. Join us: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/shifting-l... .

Good to see Full Fact banging the drum for regulation of election advertising. fullfact.org/documents/39...

Been having waves of sadness about this this week. Deeply unfair and a very kind and generous man

Something curious about this moment is that for the last 15 years congressional Republicans have railed against "tyranny" for all sorts of things that a Democrat in the White house tried to do. "Forcing Americans to switch to more expensive electric stoves is straight up foolish and tyrannical."

New report: Leaky Pipes - what we learned about where candidate donation data comes from research.mysociety.org/html/leaky-p...

Writing notes for this now - come along to listen to a fun and educational rant about the different thresholds for public transparency depending how you gave money

Join us as we launch our latest report, on where crucial data on election donations gets lost in the system. A free, online event - reserve your spot here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/mysociety-...

"No such thing as a Gruffalo, not on our watch"

This has been added to our open letter collection and MP profiles votes.theyworkforyou.com/statement/co...

Hello old and new followers. Important news: it's my birthday. Can't unfollow me on my birthday.

On the state capacity arguments, this is one of the arguments that comes out of the democratic perspectives compass (full write-up gets further away each time I write a thread).

New year, new register. All data viewable and downloadable through the link.

And there is a little red dot there votes.theyworkforyou.com/decisions/di...

Loose thought that the approach we use for "What are people writing to MPs about" would also work well for "themes in parliamentary questions" research.mysociety.org/html/wtt-ins...

I've quickly done a pivot table on this by department (discrepancy in overall numbers *I think* is my dataset doesn't have withdrawn questions) data.mysociety.org/datasette/?m...

I'm broadly a pro regulatory state guy - but talking about people hiding behind regulators does make it slightly harder to say "OFCOM's job, what do you want from me" www.gov.uk/government/s...

Still thinking this through, but I think our recommendation to the procedure committee is: government should adopt a convention that if a parliamentarian resubmits a failed question as an FOI, this is taken as being the internal review stage.

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We've been looking into money in politics for a while now. Come along next week to hear about what we found out about the donations system, why it's, er, not great, and how we can fix it!

New year, new register. All data viewable and downloadable through the link.

Miriam seems much more reasonable as time goes on youtu.be/iwqN3Ur-wP0

I know we all know this, but it's ridiculous to talk about a counter-narrative when the platform's algorithm is stacked against you ideologically. You're lining up to be censored while the propaganda megaphone is held to your face.

This is the "house of lords appointments as solving patronage problems elsewhere" thing www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

Other game roles The Traitors could introduce: 🧵

Me on the traitors: "I can read people well, because I've been trained in the use of certain mind powers"

New releases from the National Archives of government records from 2005 show how ministers and officials reacted uneasily to the implementation of FOI, and how they handled some initial cases - "This is becoming a real problem". What I found in the files: rosenbaum6.substack.com/p/tony-we-ha...

I think there's a few things, but there's a basic numbers explanation in the crosstabs: people who didn't vote Labour don't like him a lot, people who did vote Labour don't like him a little, and the labour vote was 10 percentage points less than the conservative vote in 2019.

Need to just commit to the bad BTTF2 future. Bring back ties, twice.

"As if I had the money in a safe! Your money's not here! It's in Joe's Ponzi scheme! And a wide range of political donations to ensure a positive regulatory view of that Ponzi scheme! And a castle to decide how best to spend money. What are you going to do, foreclose on the castle?"

The kind of wisdom that gets you a life seat in the House of Lords

LOVE CREATES THE LAW, GOVERNS KINGDOMS, AND THOSE THAT HATE IT WILL LOSE EVERYTHING

I know its bait but lots to disagree with here www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio...

My colleague @juliacushion.bsky.social made a “sunlight optimism” spreadsheet, my colleague @zarino.co.uk said there should be a postcode lookup version, I have the day off, the kid has gone swimming, and so, I present: The Sunlight Optimism Calculator: dracos.co.uk/made/sunligh...