I always want to ask people who write this stuff what the world will be like after their revolution. Ok so the country is whiter, we have somehow broken up concentrations of ethnic minority residents, the Church of England is somehow more dominant. What problem is solved?

This Bew piece is fascinating. This is a highly intelligent thinker of the centre right offering a sophisticated historical analysis that ultimately comes up with... not much. It's the same old moralising analysis that suggests we have become too soft and must now renew ourselves through suffering.

I read Betz and... I'm struggling. Civil wars presumably erupt due to irreconcilable and existential differences that cannot be resolved politically. The survival or otherwise of protestantism and slavery, for instance. Betz has 'London becomes Mogadishu' as his spark.

So that’s that, right? We don’t have to put up with endless drivel about how expensive it is to save the planet abd ourselves ever again? Cool.

This is pretty awesome.

Fascinating piece of history which dramatises the debate within the Labour movement between improving material conditions for the working class and aiming for a broader transformation of society. The former won out, the latter remains a fascinating road not taken.

'Lol Polanski isn't good at policy' would be an excellent own if he wasn't polling in second place.

For the record, I looked it up and to my considerable surprise the Greens do not want to leave NATO.

A sickening society is clear in these statistics So why is it not in the news? Powerful wake-up call from @chakrabortty.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Happy birthday to us @shirvill.bsky.social (and all who celebrate).

Those hippies you keep punching...

Iran and Ukraine should join the Commonwealth? Mate...

The dirty secret of almost every politician who tells you to do STEM is that they didn't. Eng Lit rocks.

This doesn't pass the sniff test, does it? And it's interesting that @ipsosgroup.bsky.social seem to have taken it off their website. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

I think the best way of understanding this is 'people want to pay less tax' rather than 'people want less public services'.

If we don’t build housing to solve homelessness, we don’t really want to solve homelessness. #UrbanTruth

I always thought Colin Jost was going over the top with Hegseth... maybe not?

Extraordinary that in these fractious & divided times, so many of us can unite around the single, simple fact that Matthew Goodwin is an irredeemable twat.

“The wages are higher in the U.S. but the quality of life is higher in Europe.”

Is it actually an economy though? Very odd choice of metaphor.

We're massively underestimating the countermeasures the public sector will deploy against AI. Your spambot can send me all the requests to reduce your council tax band it wants. I have a spambot to respond. If your case is in any way complex you'll need to visit in person so we know you're human.

I'm not sure I've read at least five books by anyone except JK Rowling. But if we're doing multiple reads by great female authors, I'd offer Becky Chambers, Anna Neima, @gwillow.me and @mandascott.bsky.social.

'We hate you, now shut up and vote for us' is an interesting electoral strategy.

we are going to win

The AI singularity is agents endlessly filing speculative claims against each other with little human interaction. Bureaucracy will be removed as a barrier to entry. The future is burning vast amounts of power to create loads of spam no one will ever read.

I think this speaks to the differential impact of AI. For instance, in the public sector most end users are on co-pilot and it's laughably crap. I suspect lefties might cluster in these sectors, rather than in eg coding, consulting, law where the impact is clearer.

Okay, this is quite outstanding from Bedford Council.

Loved chatting w @beccadove2.bsky.social and @andrewlaird.bsky.social for the Radical Reformers podcast. We majored on relational public services, digging into the history and asking how to embed real change today. Exciting moment. www.mutualventures.co.uk/post/radical...

It has been tried. bsky.app/profile/ojga...

I met him at a party once. Like talking to creosote.

Woke, liberal, identity politician.

Well that's voices from Essex and Norfolk publicly saying LGR is over (and others saying it privately). It isn't clear to me that the fact of elections means we have to call the whole thing off, but resentment of central government is high and the political conversation will be reopened.

I basically agree with this... but we do need to reflect on why splitting the role between Heywood and Kerslake didn't work last time.

We literally fill in a form which shows we have thought about the impact of our decisions on people with protected characteristics, and done what we can to mitigate them. That's the public sector equality duty. As a sometime form filler I think it's a good thing tbh.

This is a pretty bizarre cock-up. "Reform UK-led North Northamptonshire Council has had to halt planning projects after publishing consultation notices in the Northamptonshire Telegraph, which doesn’t circulate locally, instead of the Peterborough Telegraph."

Yeah I think it's pretty obvious that grade inflation at university is a real thing. In the year I graduated 8% got firsts (I was one of them). Now it's about 30%. I can see that factors like improved teaching might explain some of the increase... but a quadrupling?

Nothing says renewal like a septuagenerian Blair advisor.

An utter tragedy. Science solved this problem, but a bunch of charlatans fucked everything up and brought it back

Antonia Romeo is the wrong choice for Cabinet secretary. A government which was serious about improving its performance would not select her. iandunt.substack.com/p/how-one-hi...

With the Winter Olympics in full swing, it's a good time to re-post this image of Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean in 1979 before a grant from Nottingham City Council enabled them to give up their day jobs and train fulltime. They won the figure skating gold at Sarajevo in 1984.

It was a really good idea that the government never quite took seriously. Missions required a new approach to governing and some actual civil service reform.

Who could ever have guessed that the architects of New Labour would turn out to be such a bunch of money grubbing creeps?

You leftie hippies are letting Britain down and I hate you. Please vote for me.

Just heard Rory Stewart suggesting we should raise MP salaries so they're less tempted to chase weird rich dudes for money. And here's my thing: people like Mandelson aren't grubbing about for an extra £50k a year.

Andy Burnham presumably spending this week just watching telly with a massive bucket of popcorn.

So much of progressive politics has degenerated into 'after the revolution we will spend more on nice things'. I mean yes, that would be good, but first you need political economy, institutions, governance. We lack any serious account of the society that could produce such spending.

Jesus wasn't white, so if Charles Murray does the churches I'm sure Christopher Nolan will be happy to change his casting decisions.

I met Goodwin at a party once and can confirm he is really very dull.

There is altogether too much weird foreign money in UK politics.