Employers - a Reform government is going to tell you how to run your businesses.

Modest weakness in £/gilts today It would “be a bit of a shambles, markets-wise, to do it, and that might help dissuade the party from doing it now,” said one FX/rates-watcher www.ft.com/content/3261...

I watched The Souvenir and The Souvenir Part 2 over the weekend. So very good.

U.K. might lose a prime minister because a guy who worked for him knew another guy who hung out with Epstein. Meanwhile the U.S. opposition party is telling our President, who was Epstein's best friend, that his secret police should get better training so their public street murders look less messy.

I'd assumed Sarwar was going public as part of a coordinated move to force Starmer to resign. I did not even begin to consider he was just freelancing on a whim. How on earth did I forget this is the Labour party we're talking about here?

The party that just want to love and protect women and girls strikes again

As far as I can tell only Monica Lennon out of Anas Sarwar's 20 MSPs has so far backed his call for Starmer to resign. On the most basic political level not having folk lined up to support you in advance of making your statement is staggeringly inept. Scottish Labour conference is in eighteen days.

Anas Sarwar has done a brilliant job for Keir Starmer. Perhaps not for himself, though.

This is significant, IMO. Starmer is being a real chance here. He would be mad not to take it. But I guess he has to realise first.

Someone did an ' is Britain ungovernable' article a couple of weeks back and until politicians start telling the truth about the trade offs we all need to make to improve things, nothing will change and Governments will be unpopular in shorter and shorter timeframes

The excuse for the incoming May catastrophe and Gorton & Denton humiliation is now there, of course - Mandelson and all the damaging speculation that ensued. It's not true but it will buy more time.

I would love to be hearing the conversations Sarwar is currently having with his advisers!

That is pretty impressive work.

Jeremy Kyle is interviewing Reform MPs at a live press conference Discussing who might take over from Keir Starmer as PM, Kyle just said: "She's had a makeover, Angela" Lee Anderson: "She's throwing her money away, isn't she, to be honest with you" *applause from the audience*

I'll tell you what, though: it would be a hell of a comeback from here.

The fightback starts here

I'll take a deep breath - but this and the Sadiq Khan intervention have probably brought Starmer a fair bit of time. That would be good news for Rayner, of course.

Note to self: stop reacting to everything immediately!

quite funny that the entire Labour party has been spending months saying "let's wait for our Welsh and Scottish colleagues to be massacred before doing anything hasty" without really thinking through if anyone outside of England could hear them

Bingo!

Yep - there is absolutely no way on earth the EU is going to take the UK seriously as a prospective partner, let alone a potential member, until we sort ourselves out.

Yes, we have a terrible, bad faith, anti-Labour, right wing press in this country whose agenda is slavishly followed by the broadcast media. So, lesson one: don't keep handing them gifts to play with; understand the bar is absolutely always higher for a Labour government.

That Scotland and Wales were so totally sidelined by the McSweeney/Starmer approach in government shows how little they understand about the Labour party.

It still surprises me that McSweenry either didn't speak to his wife or didn't bother listening to a word she must have been saying to him.

The McSweeney approach particularly hurt Scottish and Welsh Labour, so this is not a surprise. Under this government, Labour has abandoned the UK to become a party whose political strategy is focused solely - and entirely counter-productively - on small town England from the Midlands up.

Either Sarwar or Starmer is gone by the end of this week then!

Completely get the argument that changing PM would be economically damaging to the country & politically damaging to Labour. But there’s a point when a wounded PM with no authority hugely increases economic uncertainty & is more politically damaging. That point has been crossed.

Pedro Sanchez is in Huetor Tajar in Granada province, where much of the upcoming asparagus harvest has been lost to the storms. The mayor says 80% of residents earn a living from asparagus and rely on revenues normally generated in the spring. Sanchez emphasises the link with climate change.

Indeed! People keep talking about 'oh, the soft left this', 'oh, his rivals in Downing Street that'. No, it's not the soft left on the backbenches or the Blairites in the Cabinet or No 10. It's the 'alliance of MPs who can count and would like to remain MPs'.

Nothing says indifference to harm done to girls and women like posting on X, the Nazi child abuse site.

How long do HMRC investigations take?

And the only thing it has done to Labour's polling is make it worse. Pursuing a policy that is morally indefensible, economically suicidal, politically disastrous and which most ministers do not actually believe in is the definition of insanity.

I accept the meaningful policy distinctions but it is remarkable how similar the "vibe" of this government is to the last tory ones. Stumbling from self inflicted crisis to self inflicted crisis, excessively internal looking, polling obsessed and almost uninterested in policy.

The daft thing about Starmer is I think if he was honest about who he is - soft left, socially liberal, strong on law and order, believes in strong borders but also compassionate to those in need, leans left on the economy Labour members would be right behind him.

Streeting's only chance is a coronation, which means he has next to no chance - unless he does a deal with someone like Rayner or Miliband Mahmood just has no chance at all

I'm no longer a Labour member. Nowt suspicious I just like a break every few years. However, if the Reform like attitudes are commonplace I won't be returning. Not just a slight difference of opinion but 180 degrees different to my beliefs.

The kindest thing these two could do for Starmer - and the best for the Labour party and the country - is to tell him it's over.

I don't buy the argument that an Angela Rayner cleared by the HMRC would be more unpopular in the country than Nigel Farage. I don't think she could win an election in which 40% was required for power. I do think she can win one where the threshold is closer to 30%. Not only her, mind.

But given none of the likely successors would make major changes to borrowing, I don’t think it would take long for “no major change in deficit, possibly more open to EU links, less hostile to immigration, although more tax” to win out. 2/2

Need a bit of caution on gilt/sterling wobbles I think. As much about increased uncertainty at this point as anything else. If Starmer goes - initial market reaction will almost certainly be “UK govt shifting left, sell”. 1/2

Lluís Llach acusa al Gobierno de „trato colonial“ entre los aplausos de los descendientes de cincuenta dinastías de tratantes de esclavos:

🧵 / To be more serious, one of the advantages of Westminster types taking more than a surface-level interest in elections would be to stop falling for this 'great man theory of elections'.

This most of all pertains to the state defence and security structures. These are especially sensitive and inherently vulnerable, as we see with the scandals engulfing both the DNI and government surveillance in the US right now.

Most politicians and advisers seem to way underestimate the stakes they're playing with. The fantasists, conspiracists and wreckers of Reform UK deeply sympathise with the dictators we face. Idea of them with executive power and access to the panoply of state functions dwarfs most else we've faced.

Step one - leave the ECHR Step two - take control of the courts That's it. Job done.

Restrict the franchise ✅ Politicise the courts ✅ Seize personal property ✅ Remove citizenship ✅ Mass deportations ✅ Introduce routine censorship ✅ Scrap broadcast impartiality ✅ State control of Electoral Commission ✅ End habeas corpus ✅ Dictate school and university teaching ✅ Etc etc

I don't think political commentators - let alone ordinary voters - have begun to understand the implications of leaving the ECHR. It will allow a government with a Commons majority to literally do whatever it wants. We are just over three years from the nationalist right having that power.

Ah, it’s not the Member States who have spent the last few decades blocking all meaningful progress on a range of reforms who need to get serious, but the Commission, which doesn’t even have a vote on these issues. Right.

Morning. A reminder that the names will continue to change with regularity in UK politics until leaders realise that there are no easy solutions and that difficult choices have to be made and justified.