This is a really good, sensible policy. I would give my right leg for the Labour leadership fight to be composed of ideas like this.

This is a failure of journalism, on a really basic level, but it is also a failure of political leadership. It was going to fall simply in the basis of what the previous govt did. But Starmer somehow conspired to actively spread the impression it was rising.

The current government has been criticised for many things but I suspect history will judge its total failure to act on the degeneration of both established and social media as its greatest and, in the longer term, most costly mistake.

Am I the only one to be shocked by BBC news? For days, its lead story has been breathless reporting of the US moonshot, repeating something already done nearly 60yrs ago, while the US pounding of Iran, which has huge consequences for all of us, comes 10 minutes later as an afterthought

And this is how they report "equal lowest number of small boat arrivals by this time in the year for five years". The one-year comparison is in the standfirst but in the story it's the 11th par and there's no mention of a five-year low. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

the curse of the anglophone "hispanistas" , this one pontificating from the arse end of Queensland

Janan rated George Osborne. That ends it all.

He had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the tiniest piece of generosity. Yup, it’s obvious what he believes. Not this.

The problem with this analysis is that these policies have either been pursued by all PMs since 2010 (more taxes and more debt) or were u-turns (welfare and two child). Not a convincing case that he had a plan.

Most people (in the country, not here) don’t realise how much immigration has fallen in the UK. Legal and irregular. But even if they did, I doubt it would make the government any more popular. 1/

eh, what the hell

See also the weak version, “I can’t believe a party with 400 MPs can’t find a better option than Burnham”, well the thing is no other party has a politician remotely as popular as him either and it’s been a long time since anyone has. Why this is, obviously a fair question

People on here are very invested in the idea there’s something fake about Burnham’s popularity and like, will he still poll at +9 after 3 years as PM. Probably not! Will he poll better than the alternatives who *start* at -26? My assumption is yes! He’s not glup shitto, people know who he is

Well whaddya know?

This (and the followup post) rather emphasise what @benansell.bsky.social has been saying about Labour being in the lead if they hadn't annoyed so many of the voters on the left.

Same as Europe. Same as budget. Would be better for people to worry about ‘what does Burnham really stand for?’ than assume this means much.

The 2026 Labour leadership contest is a large scale social experiment to determine what exactly it would take to get BlueSky to begrudgingly root for Wes Streeting

At the floating stage. We shall see. I imagine there will be no change of tune til after Makerfield for fairly obvious reasons. No-one even knows what the post-consultation version of Mahmood’s reforms are and how those will be spI’m.

lol, absolutely fucked it already

Guess Labour can stay in the bin then

If anything the last ten years have proven that UK regulatory instincts are remarkably close to the European average, and that even without the trade costs we still wouldn't do things dramatically different to the EU.

Also see previous posts - we are likely to see a growing backlash against technology, much of it entirely deserved, and the idea that the UK can stand aside from this and regulate it towards growth expresses a heroic faith in UK government skill.

Oh dear. The fallacy of the UK regulatory dividend has burnt deep into the commentariat consciousness notwithstanding the absolute lack of evidence it exists and can offset inevitable trade costs. Otherwsie, yes, rejoin would have to be part of a bigger story.

In 2005, Karen Stenner estimated the proportion of authoritarian as about a third of any population.

Reform are actually advertising this post. I've volunteered already - I think it's my patriotic duty.😆

A right wing media the govt decided to do nothing about when coming into office

Frustrating that there was the furore over his meeting with a voice coach around the pandemic era. I feel he would have been better approaching you for tuition!

I remember you stating this early on. You should know about vocal training, and I thoroughly agree it is one of his major issues. I didn't really realise the lack of verbs or nouns though, very legal but not so great for politics.

Like, posh people can be trusted with flair, but oiks can only learn strict manners. Maybe that's just my foreign eyes seeing things.

It's not just voice production. His nasal quality is a symptom of how held and afraid his body is. Chokes everything. But also his rhetorical choices of pacing, stress, dynamics, and variety are poor. He loves adjectives and conjunctions - never goes for verbs or nouns, which is where meaning lives.

You may remember, first thing I said about him, waaaay back when, which I continued to push for years, was some serious work with a vocal coach and public speaking expert.

I really do think people who like Starmer underestimate just how much of a battering canvassers took in the last couple of months and how that ripples through a party.

Our Makerfield candidate Rob Kenyon has just joined X. Please rest assured that having gone to the trouble of deleting his entire social media history, we sure as Hell won't be letting him write a single word of this himself.

The council does not move this quickly usually.

One of most destructive acts of the Cameron-Osborne era was the decision to target austerity on local government.

Look to be seeing a split between old-school Greens like Lucas and Ramsey and the newer, more Corbynite, converts when it comes to the priority of keeping the Far Right from power. Me, I just keep having flashbacks to Corbyn and Swinson's zeal leading to Johnson's victory...

Another “landmark” report. Let’s see if any of this comes up even once during the next three weeks of the Makerfield by-election. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

After the unmitigated disaster of Corbynism, the left should avoid Zack Polanski like the plague. (But then Owen Jones has a penchant for leftist charlatans.)

I can understand this. Place no trust in saviours, as the song says. But Starmer has turned out to be uniquely unprincipled, even by the normal standards of politics. We’ve seen enough of Andy Burnham with executive power to know that he’s different. Not perfect, but someone with sound instincts.

This is the most embarrassing thing to happen to Southampton since they had Rupert Lowe as chairman.

Presented without comment

I dont recall the BBC giving the level of coverage to the much, much bigger pro EU marches of the past that they’ve given to the Yaxley Lennon march.

Bowman is ofc an immigrant. He doesn’t think of himself as such though. Just like McSweeney.

No. Look at electricity in Germany, water in France etc. But UK has gone further than other European peers.

George Osborne, the man who broke Britain.

Labour in 2010-15 never worked out whether to say they'd under-regulated the banks and allowed the crash, or borrowed too much, but they didn't want to admit any mistakes and never quite got their story straight.

Agree: see my footnote 1. The Eurozone crisis created the institutional consensus, and as I say in my post bond markets always like austerity. Maybe worth noting that most ofl the powerful got it wrong but basic economics got it right.

New post: Why Labour's current disarray is ultimately the consequence of Osborne’s austerity mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2026/05/why-... The media's belief that 2010 austerity was necessary led to Corbyn's victory, which then led to Starmer's Blue Labour and their subsequent polling disaster.

"Those on Labour’s right who wanted Johnson rather than Corbyn in 2019 gave us a version of Brexit that has produced the economic stagnation that limits what Starmer can do today." @sjwrenlewis.bsky.social on austerity, media and Labour boxing themselves in: mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2026/05/why-...

Excellent, ending with this: ‘Taking macroeconomic advice from bond market traders is like taking advice on how to deal with pandemics from undertakers.‘