Sorry but this is just wildly regressive and trad

damn you're telling me that sin taxes work to reduce consumption of socially harmful goods while keeping them legal and thus avoiding the problems of criminalization?

Still all in on this TBH. I am not an ostrich. AI obviously is having a material impact on a few sectors of the economy, but it's going to take more than a breathless blog post by someone who WORKS FOR AN AI START-UP to make me go full Butlerian Jihad.

All of the 4% very favourable to Keir are on this website

The answer to this is that if we do not repeatedly reinforce the taboo against this stuff and explain why it is wrong it gets worse. “Just call it names” does not work. We’ve seen the failure of that over the past 18 months.

Big insights for many types of food early on here

I just realised that Starmer’s Labour isn’t aimed the median voter - it is a median voter. That’s why none of the policies match up with each other and the one constant belief through everything is that the government is doing a bad job

This is exactly it. On essentially every issue, this Labour government is either too leftwing - a bunch of anti-business measures that nobody cares about, an infrastructure binge at a time when it should want downward pressure on rates, etc. etc. - or too rightwing (as set out below).

Bruh

Like I said a couple years ago, leftist antisemitism is getting worse. Like, we're at the Naming The Jew stage and next I guess will be the triple parentheses

Want to flag that Daisy lists universities and creative industries as two of the UK’s big success stories, thereby showing more economic knowledge than any Chancellor

“The myth of London as a third-world sinkhole is now central to Maga politics. Restoring Britain’s allegedly vanishing character is also an official goal of Donald Trump’s foreign policy.” My column. as.ft.com/r/5d92d208-8...

This reads as a little grudging

Does Wes have strong principles? No. Does Wes have good political judgement? Also no. Does Wes have any sort of winning charisma? Again, no. But… is Wes the most unintentionally funny British politician going? Absolutely

A fascinating "why format matters" example here. Making this the text of your post would be standard government minister boilerplate. Posting it as a screenshot in the official font makes it look like you've been asked to carry the portrait of Lenin at the May Day Parade.

0.78 of a Liz Truss.

I love how few pixels she's given this statement

Every comment from one of his defenders reads like either the set-up or punchline for one of those old political jokes from the Soviet Union

Starmer defining himself against corbyn and boris and becoming both corbyn and boris....absolute cinema. Wish it didn't affect me

Yes. People love to paint Corbyn and Starmer as opposites but there are throughlines over their tenures atop the Labour Party: corrosive, faux macho bullying, horrible appointments made for loyalty rather than competence, a sneering indifference to racism & gaslighting of its victims

Surely it won’t be him but every time I think about it makes me come to the conclusion Ed Miliband is Labour’s best choice at the moment

The way Chris pincher has been basically been erased from boris downfall is really instructive in Westminster culture and how these people get away with it

Can see why he’s doing this given the disaster he faces in three months time

Polanski trading the shires for the cities

The problem is most of these things work *against* him holding on to the position of PM. Unless Starmer’s whole career was just a long game for him to destroy the Labour Party.

well... i do play football manager which is this but with an emails and spreadsheet simulator attached

It absolutely applies to Scotland. Tony Blair won 56 seats out of 72 in 1997, and indeed the success of the SNP has been in winning over Labour voters without demoralising *their* core, too.

This screams “disastrous result in 4 years” to me. Unless Takaichi gets lucky which, to be fair, often happens to the LDP

Fundamentally it’s not in general British liberal or partisan Lib Dem interests to have a Labour Party that’s a flaming wreck with a government hated by everyone so I hope they can sort themselves out soon

This is real tragedy of the commons stuff

Thank god for that

Another electoral alliance L. Many cases

me when i lie for no reason

When a what

Again this reminds me of the late days of Boris. Of course he’s not going to call an election

Young men are the second most liberal group in the country after young women.

If only there was some indication in November 2024 that he’d be Like This

Wait seriously. My word Starmer. Genuinely did not expect comical corruption from you.

this is what i'd make in the neolithic period

Man who stood up and scapegoated immigrants for making Britain into an island of strangers begs to be taken seriously as a conscientious public servant.

The fundamental issue is that Starmer ran on an unachievable manifesto, had no real plan to deliver it, and now due to constraints he imposed he is running on a policy agenda that is actively rejected by his own MPs. Those are all choices that governments don't actually have to make.

On the Labour side, there’s a lot of “the public are not able to face up to Hard Choices” - you never gave them the chance to! You instead presented a manifesto that was either an act of self-deception or just of regular deception!

One of the cases where the right-wing love of free markets butts up against right-wing conservative sensibilities

The problem with the ungovernable hypothesis, is that it's undermined by every stage of this government becoming more unpopular having an obvious - and understandable - cause.

There's no reason to accept this as normal, though. Much of Starmer and Labour's unpopularity is not misfortune but his own doing. Mandelson was a choice. Consistently pursuing policy positions designed to appeal to people who will not vote for you - and alienating core supporters - is a choice.

Eyebrow-raising Lib Dem list share.

IMO it's hard to find any part of the broader left as utterly discredited by the events of the last two decades as the anti-trade, anti-globalisation set. Just fundamentally wrong about absolutely everything, and in a way that opened the door wide for the far right to come charging through.