This is absolutely damning.

Won't get the coverage it deserves today but this is a just end to an utterly horrendous story. A privy councillor for 20 years, knighted for services to politics, and having risen to the leadership of a major political party, he has been found guilty of the most abhorrent crimes against children.

My professional advice to all public officials is to develop their perceptions of public opinion from high quality opinion polls, rather than marinating in media controlled by right wing oligarchs, most especially those that appear to be organic "social" media like X

re the day's debate - I get that I was pretty precocious but I did move to an entirely different country where I didn't know anyone, by myself, at 17 years old, and I'm yet to regret it for even one moment, and I hate that we're apparently building a world where 17yos as seen as babies instead?

You can't "legitimate concerns" a pogrom.

It's just remarkable that if you're white, male, and conservative you are allowed to call for political violence that would get anyone who doesn't tick all those boxes absolutely pilloried. The group with the fewest legitimate grievances in society provided the widest grace to rage. Wild.

Everyone on X and elsewhere who called for a violent response should be charged with incitement. Everyone involved in the pogrom should be locked up with exemplary sentences. Govt should make it clear that will be the response in future anywhere else. Enough.

This is no more about the details of immigration policy than the progroms my great great grandparents fled were about Jews committing crimes. It's straightforward racist violence and it needs the strongest possible response.

can strongly, strongly recommend a game of 'sit in the pub with your friends and try to guess the price of an item on Peter Murrell's Embezzlement List' www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

reading about the May government for a thing and mad, mad, mad that a Conservative Prime Minister said this nine years ago, I hate how much we've lost since then! I hate it so much! www.theguardian.com/society/2017...

Government still posts on a platform that produces and distributed CSAM on industrial scale. Maybe get off that as a first step?

Young men are the second most left leaning social group in this country after young women!Your base is racist pensioners! Incredibly revealing that they assume people can only radicalise right and also how they are now just implicitly leaning on the idea young men are inherently violent.

Reform crypto policy:

DfE pupil data is out today and shows that the number of private school pupils has dropped 5.6% since VAT was introduced. Not 25% like the independent schools council predicted. Or the 50% we saw in some right-wing papers. 5.6%.

The absurdity of contrived BBC 'balance' on full display here. Apparently choosing not to politicise a tragic murder is somehow the same as choosing to do so.

Last year, we shared a paper showing that Labour's accommodation of the radical right did not work. We now have a new version of the paper online: osf.io/preprints/so...

Great bit of research looking at the impact of Starmer's "Island of Strangers" speech (shifted perceptions of Labour to more hostile to immigration ... only succeeded in hurting support for Labour / helping Reform in the group Labour were targeting).

Appreciating it's a buzzword currently but this is just elite radicalisation. There is no significant constituency in the UK for this sort of open racial animus, and yet it has totally permeated the right's "intellectual" spaces.

Shameful from Reform and a good example of why you should never share anything by that godawful aggregator account, which just happens to be run by a Reform councillor. Obviously prostate cancer is a particular problem for black men, who are twice as likely to suffer from it in their lifetimes

Who, I wonder, is too racist for the BBC now? This is the language of the NF and the BNP, neither of which were invited on to the sofa to chat politics. Racism spreads when institutions legitimise it

I am once again wondering whether "no, the legitimate concerns racists don't have a point, fuck off, they're racist" might have been a better way of combating the far right.

Every crime in which an ethnic or cultural minority is the perpetrator used to justify repression or worse of minorities. Every crime in which a minority is the victim used to argue for the idea that ethnic diversity is inherently unstable and should be reduced or eradicated.

Talking about “remigration” implies you are merely repeating or correcting a minor error which already happened. Resuming what was before. A simple policy change which a new PM could implement at the press of a button. But opponents need to be clear about what it actually means:

Exceptional reporting of a tragic story. At the centre of it is violent institutional failures despite persistence from a small number of individuals who noticed major safeguarding risks. Staggering that no one has lost their job or even been disciplined for these multiple and abject failures.

A truly awful tale of human tragedy and organisational failure.

The Starmer government will do anything to avoid having to persuade the public of something or fund a cash transfer:

terrible. 20 years ago, the internet was full of hobbyist blogs and forums. over time, these have been replaced by paywalled substacks and private discord channels, each a walled garden. google's decision to prioritize AI just makes it less likely people will create free, public info

"I need the most on the nose statement of populism you have"

“Interviewing” LLMs goes about as well as you’d expect from interviewing a Frankenstein’s monster built out of spare Reddit threads, X posts, and Wikipedia articles, which is to say not well at all. Just cut it out already

Markets should be working through that the real risk to UK finances is from a Reform govt, or a coalition unrestrained by Tories, who seem to have shed their love of liberal capitalism and are trying to outbid Reform, on migration, deportations, higher ed, Europe.

cba getting yelled at on this because life is short but man alive I've not loved this whole strand of "well Polanski isn't as bad as Nigel Farage so any attempt to hold him accountable for any wrongdoings is inherently biased and bad" thinking, that's just not how you should want things to work!

even the trailcams speak to me of the labour party

We need a democratic big bang, just like the economic one in the 80s: real local politics with autonomy, discretion, and tax-raising powers; proportional representation across the board; an elected upper chamber. All of our other problems are downstream of that. Just grab the bloody nettle.

One of Starmer and Labour's major failings is that they did not see that now was the time for democratic renewal. They haven't pressed on it and, as things stand, it will be their successors who get to shape it. Just a colossal strategic error all round. It was a chance to shape the future.

The impact of the alphabet on electoral performance is real (data from 2023 locals): ⬇️Every position lower on the ballot within your party costs ~1.2 percentage points of vote share. ⬆️Being an incumbent is worth ~1.7 percentage points so being 2nd wipes out 70% of the incumbency advantage.

The Institute of Jewish Policy Research do vg rigorous research Jewish opinion split across parties in July 2024 GE Strong aversion to Reform (just 3% v 14%) Prefer Labour under new leader [44% from 12% 2019] Cons 32%. IJPR say 2024 Greens more popular with Jewish voters than other voters

Morning, Sunderland. Meet one of your new councillors. "In now deleted posts, Gibbins ranted on social media that he ‘carnt [sic] believe amount of Nigerians in town’ and they ‘should melt them all down and fill in the pot holes’." What happened to Reform's " metro.co.uk/2026/05/09/r...

I’m pleased to see people realising this morning that a Lab>Reform seat change can happen because Lab>others and Con>Reform. The underlying vote flow evidence has been screaming this since autumn 2024 😎.

🧵 A new Byline Times investigation raises fresh questions over Nigel Farage's claim to have driven the far-right out of British politics.

Exactly what I talk about in my @isrfoundation.bsky.social piece this week. Increasingly Arts and Humanities will be limited to so-called 'top' universities, with large cold spots across the country which mean that students from lower income backgrounds simply cannot access them. Do you want that? 🤷‍♂️

Green Party leader does need stronger boundaries, policies & processes to vet & reject antisemitic candidates than it had when selecting at pace in this cycle. He is also being portrayed using antisemitic tropes in the national press. The newspapers need their cartoonists & editors to recognise that

No Party is immune to antisemitism. In the last month, @jewishnews.bsky.social has published examples of antisemitism from Reform UK, Conservative, Lib Dem & Green candidates. It took a matter of days for Reform, Tories & Lib Dems to publicly announce suspensions. The Greens are the exception.

Lyanne Nicholl, CEO of 50:50 Parliament: “Men continue to dominate both locally and nationally, and without proper representation women’s views will once again be sidelined. “This isn’t about political point scoring, this is about women’s representation and how that has benefits for everyone.”

Way more needs to be done about this at every level. Including an onus on landlords to make sure they are leasing premises to reputable businesses. With a side order of doing a lot more to make the high street affordable for the types of shops people actually want to use.

That the two parties currently leading the polls are constantly having to respond to dehumanising rhetoric made by their candidates... it's a bad scene, it really is.

Candidates like this will be a crucial test for Polanski’s leadership. Both action and inaction send a clear message about what his Green Party will and won’t accept.

Feel like Farage failing to declare a £5 million donation from 'Bitcoin billionaire Christopher Harborne' before standing in the 2024 general election should be a bigger story

Subsidising energy consumption in the face of both a short-term supply shock and the long-term need to decarbonise. Bad for the economy, bad for the planet, bad for the world's poor. And *if* you favour a wealth tax (I am sceptical but there's a case) spending it on *this" is just idiotic.

Politicians just seem to have given up trying to explain the world as it is to people. It's a huge problem.

women next to me at the cafe discussing a European couple they know who moved to London and hired a schools consultant (?) who advised them on what neighbourhood to buy a house in so their kids could get into the best state school, so I reckon that we actually could tax high earners a bit more tbh