so what’s going on here? - just subsamples not being representative? - Labour voters are younger and older ones struggle to engage with the hypothetical? - Labour voters are more likely to be actively religious? (not sure this is true but there’s some correlation with ethnicity iirc?)

society if Rachel Reeves had just increased income tax last year

This is pretty obviously entirely the correct approach. The Government should not be intervening in judicial decisions, or setting policy on the basis of whether people are prepared to self harm in protest.

oh Christmas!

the words “inspired by” have never been so evil and intimidating

I need the most Labour story you have. No, that’s too Labour.

it must be a good time to be a gender critical lawyer. “yes of course I’ll help you sue the University of Bristol because students protested your talk. oh by the way, my rates have gone up 50%. you know, inflation.”

then: Super Mario Galaxy 2 now: probably same, haven’t replayed it since it came out on Switch

Any potential Labour leader who says UK taxes are too high will just repeat the mistakes of the current leadership.

The thing that all the contenders need to explain is what they would do differently. The problem isn’t just appalling communications, it’s policies that don’t cohere to deliver what they claim to deliver.

I think I am less instinctively anti-Streeting than most on here, but this is the second recent interview he’s talked about taxes being too high, and it’s just Reeves all over again.

“How did that work out for trans?” I’m sorry, you should be fired on the spot for submitting a sentence that ugly when your whole job is to write well.

Enjoyed this a lot!

Who remembers the starmer operation pushing Sadiq under the bus over ulez

I agree with this piece by Luke (Don’t pit YIMBYs against NIMBYs), but I think there is a trade off being ducked here. If you want new housing to integrate with nature and come with GPs and schools, you either need to make developers pay more, or you need more public investment…

I am sure this is right about public opinion, but I don’t think this government needs external encouragement to follow the polls and pretend trade-offs don’t exist.

Never mind, when we vote the Tories out the new Labour government will sort this

I don’t think “Reform and the Greens are the same actually” is ever going to fly. Voters aren’t fools.

Labour are going to need a better argument against Polanski than this. It’s not like there aren’t options out there!

our current system has a strong chance of putting a far-right government in complete power with about a quarter of the vote. electoral reform *must* be a Labour priority. FPTP is simply not set up to deal with a system with five competitive parties.

wonder how much of LLM discourse is driven by the fact that the most visible LLM to people who aren’t interested in it is the one at the top of Google search, and it’s *much* worse than the best available

Very likely to be the truest measure of voting intention today given their Methodology and the expense of doing so / record at the general election. Reform surge real, labour collapse at worse end of expectations, big gains for liberals and greens. Tories at higher end of polling

the episode's synopsis is: "Mandy rarely dabbles in global diplomacy, especially over Christmas when it's so cold out and there's good telly on, but..." i think we can guess what's happened here. luv muh free speech

"So it's like the Olympics but only for ex-British Empire countries, aside from Rwanda because Paul Kagame, and we sort of kept it going because of the Queen and now no one wants to host it so the UK is now paying for Glasgow to do so." "Oh right. Still, at least it's free sport on TV, right?"

this is the most minor last day of work for the year post ever, but I miss when windows let you click on the clock at the bottom right and it would show you the time in hours, minutes *and seconds*

I like to think this source knew how funny this quote was.

booooooooooooooo

Very pleased to see this excellent article on the same topic!

Honestly should have just done the televised briefing plan, would be healthy for both sides. having sat through loads of these briefings I’m not sure it’s a big loss, often relied on one side trying to catch out a spokesperson who would largely read from a big binder of pre-prepared answers.

I know I harp on about this, but it is important than in a year we've gone from condemnation of racist rioters to: The Government arguing you have to cut immigration to prevent racist violence. The opposition pushing mass deportation to stop violence against women. Reform committing to end ILR.

Defeated Ted Knight (through the passage of time). Retook Lambeth (through mean reversion after 2002). Beat the BNP (because 2010 was a general election year). Masterminded the 2020 and 2024 elections (by going “just tell them what they want to hear and worry about implementation later”).

"dark arts" - or as normal people call it, "lying"

Oh my god…

Even by my low expectations for Kemi Badenoch ‘violence against women and girls is something done by immigrants and nobody else’ has shocked me.

'globalize the intifada' is motte-and-bailey shit, it's mostly people who want the thrill of being associated with violence but a deniability option when questioned.

Matthew Goodwin objects to prosecuting this: ‘I think it’s time for the British to gang together, hit the streets and start the slaughter. Violence and murder is the only way now. Start off burning every migrant hotel then head off to MPs’ houses and Parliament, we need to take over by FORCE.’

The Edinburgh trams are so good. Fills me with such a good feeling seeing how busy they are literally whatever stage of the route you see them! So impressively proved the naysayers wrong. Next line can't come to soon!

lots of tweets about trams this morning. as of this year I live near a tram stop in Edinburgh and it’s so good. if you haven’t experienced this you maybe don’t appreciate just how much better than buses it is, in terms of the psychology of extra frequency and reliability

Unison’s new general secretary is first of all a labour story not a Labour story. Some thoughts on how it will change British politics in today’s note:

you forget the joke density in classic Simpsons. just watched Marge Be Not Proud and it’s sooooooo good

find someone who loves you like Christmas cards for husbands love having a pair of animals that are heavy-handedly one man and one woman

I’m introducing a moratorium on people saying this until we have a PM whose unpopularity can’t be explained by some combination of bad strategy and incompetence

I think I’m less anti-gen AI than the Bluesky View on it, but it’s soooooo unchic to use it to make low quality header images for your Substack posts.

Another bad set of labour market data today. Don’t think it’s quite entered the public consciousness on here how badly the NICs rises plus soaring minimum wage is affecting employment. Uk labour market very soft now.

New post just out: "The Overshoot" Net migration is collapsing, and will fall further over the coming years. We could even have net emigration. What does that mean for the country and the political narrative as we head towards the next election? (£/free trial) open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/t...

Continually amazed at the lax consequences for bad driving, including by professional drivers.

Obviously I don’t read or like the Telegraph, but I don’t think it’s illegitimate for a fashion correspondent to write about what public figures wear, nor do I think it’s helpful to mislead about their overall coverage by focusing only on the fifth article they published about a given story.

This line rankled in the Beeb's write-up of tributes to Rob and Michele Reiner. It flows into Trump saying the deaths were "very sad", as if it were a tribute like the others. And as for "a swipe" - 90% of Trump's post was mockery and boasting.

We all laughed about his reaction to learning of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, but he was sufficiently sharp to know that he had to have some inhibitions about what he said. This is not that.