What if governments have been governing to a public opinion that never existed? @pauliewaulie.bsky.social argues that the real political battlefield isn’t what people think, rather it’s what people think other people think. 1/5🧵 medium.com/@pauliewauli...

Expect Telegraph columnists to be like "you know who else travelled from exile to power on a sealed train".

Which of Shakespeare's tragic figures is most like Starmer? Hamlet, paralyzed by indecision; Macbeth undone by ambition; Othello destroyed by being too trusting of a lackey; Coriolanus unable to adapt to politics from a role in which he excelled? Or another?

This. Starmer forgot what most businesses know - that it's usually easier to keep a customer than to win a new one.

"All organizational structures tend to produce false images in the decision-maker, &...the larger and more authoritarian the organization, the better the chance that its top decision-makers will be operating in purely imaginary worlds"-Kenneth Boulding: cooperative-individualism.org/boulding-ken...

Successful Prime Ministers should alienate their opponents, as I wrote earlier: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/the-35-str... The odd thing with Starmer is that he alienated his supporters, & didn't change course even when doing so was obviously failing.

One big omission here is any answer to the question: if he achieved so much (v. partially true) why did he so quickly lose the backing of MPs? I hope Burnham has a good answer. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

One thing I hope this report achieves is to shift the agenda - away from immigration & culture war BS towards what matters, and towards areas where media gobshites & Reform have nothing useful to say: www.mainstreamlabour.org/publications...

"The fundamental problem is ownership, not conduct. It is impossible to regulate away a problem created by ownership". Great point www.mainstreamlabour.org/publications... from a brilliant report.

Brexit vote associated with deaths of despair ”An increase of 10 drug-related deaths per 100 000 was associated with a 15.25-percentage-point increase in Brexit votes…while an increase of 10 suicides per 100 000 was associated with a 9.97-percentage-point increase in vote shares for Brexit.”

Good this. We can put this another way. What is the coalition of material interests that the Tory party now serves? Thatcher had a clear answer: Badenoch does not. And maybe there isn't one big enough to achieve a parliamentary majority.

Talk of "divided politics" misses the point - that the division is entirely the result of the rise of the far right: the Greens (for example) are no more leftist than the SDP was in the mid-80s.

"It is the duty of governments, and of individuals, to form the truest opinions they can; to form them carefully, and never impose them upon others unless they are quite sure of being right" - John Stuart Mill.

Tory regrets consequences of Tory government.

"Starmer and Labour are cracking down on the freedoms of young people, and not the far right, nor white supremacist billionaires, precisely because no oligarchical interests will be harmed in doing so."

Got something that's been bugging for a while (25 years!!) off my chest for @thelineofbestfit.com There are musical revolutions bigger than punk and acid house happening in front of our eyes and the culture press just shrugs.

The social media ban for U16s is yet another example of the political class's instinct to reduce freedoms and opportunities. Here's one I wrote 3 years ago: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/the-joyles...

Two interesting blogs over the weekend thinking about ways forward for higher education. This one from @jonathansimons.bsky.social jonathansimons.substack.com/p/to-the-uni... and this from @geoffmulgan.bsky.social geoffmulgan.substack.com/p/rethinking...

This. Fund managers who lose £ms for their clients are "skilled" whereas care workers sensitively coping with varieties of needs are "unskilled". One group tends to be white men & the other women of colour. Which is not a coincidence: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/skill-as-i...

We can call this the columnist's fallacy - the belief that saying is as good as doing, because one neglects both trade-offs & the importance & difficulty of implementation. See also (eg) Brexit.

If you like cricket history, you'll love this substack: oldebor77.substack.com

The Russian threat to UK citizens comes less from its military than from its agents & useful idiots fomenting fascism. But I suspect that many in the political class don't see this as a national security issue, or even a danger.

Dead right. The point of great wealth isn't to buy a nice life - you can do that quite cheaply: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/trinkets-o... Billionaires become billionaires for other, maybe unpleasant, motives.

Got a piece up on Polanski, MMT, economic policy and all that. Punchline: Polanski is right that the current institutional and operational framework is past its sell by date, and Greens are asking the right questions — but Richard Murphy’s MMT is not the answer. blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandp...

The thing is, there are big costs to the increased military spending that Healey wants, as I've pointed out: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/some-costs... The problem isn't only Starmer; it's a political culture that shies away from difficult trade-offs.

It seems obvious but needs saying that most of Labour's core vote is fundamentally opposed to the far right. Failing to fight back against it rioting on Britain's streets will leave many of those supporters wondering what the point of having a Labour government is.

New substack: bond markets aren't a huge constraint on intelligent leftist economic policy; other things are: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/what-bond-...

If the state has the capacity to control who uses toilets, then it should have the capacity to attack the agents of hostile foreign powers who are inciting racist riots. And if it doesn't, then it is not fit for purpose.

What's it actually feel like to live through the decline and fall of mass Higher Education in Britain? Today I've written about this from the inside here... Hope you like it, and hope you find it useful. isrf.org/blog/what-do...

And yet too many people continue to regard public opinion as a datum, rather than something which is malleable and often mistaken.

In light of the proposed U-16s social media ban here's one I wrote recently on why so many people hate freedom: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/hating-fre...

One of the big and neglected issues in politics is what (if anything) to do about a public sphere which has ceased to inform the public & instead become a propaganda tool for a few far-right billionaires.

True. But this is partly the govt's fault. Its lack of ideas & energy provides a vacuum which the media fills with shit. Instead, the govt should be flooding the zone with ideas (not all of which have to be good), & be setting its own agenda.

My discussion of the relation between neoliberalism, classical liberalism and neoliberalism. Builds on an old debate with Philip Mirowski nakedkeynesianism.substack.com/p/neoliberal...

So to explain, rather than excuse, this, I think there are a few things going on. Some structural, some attitudinal, some just moral cowardice. 🧵

The govt should treat the right wing press as it would treat (say) Stormfront - not as a legitimate news outlet, but as propaganda for a socially corrosive disorder, and withdraw all cooperation from it. It doesn't need the votes of that tiny minority that reads such rags.

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...

I'm glad to see Jay Ritter's work on long-term IPO underperformance cited here. See eg table 16 here: site.warrington.ufl.edu/ritter/files...

New post: Immigration numbers and the media mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2026/06/immi... Public concern about immigration is still high simply because most don’t know that net immigration has fallen dramatically. This is a clear example of broadcast media failure.

Excellent column Spanish and Finnish lessons from @sarahoconnorft.ft.com:

New substack: why Rachel Reeves is behaving like an old Soviet nail factory: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/fetishisin...

I see Reeves believes in magic money trees: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/no-magic-m...

The thing about the political/media class is that it is infinitely credulous about the claims of lobbyists, techbros & billionaires, whilst being completely cynical about migrants or benefit recipients.

“I don’t listen to music, I don’t watch television, I don’t read.” One might imagine that would disqualify someone from appearing on Desert Island Discs. www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/poli...

Eccentric positions held by a small number of rich people get massive traction. Same with ‘shrink the state’. Well-funded think tanks get disproportionate coverage and comment slots.

Ok so don't borrow from them then, that's fine. Do it all with taxes, knock yerself out

Bang right. As I wrote here, politicians should ignore ill-informed opinion: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/the-35-str...

As misleading headlines go, that has to be up there with some of the worst! As is the claim that "Immigration is fuelling mass unemployment among under-25s." The "shocking new study" does NOT show that at all 🙄 🧵 1/21

This chart is bonkers. I think there's two possible explanations for why the UK runs so far ahead of other European countries – neither of them good. And the annual April price jump speaks to a wider issue. For more detail, see my column in this weekend's Observer. observer.co.uk/news/busines...

"Technological change is not analogous to a natural phenomenon". Bang right. Sociologists have long spoken of the *socio-technical* conditions of production to remind us that technology is not neutral, but embedded in power relations. It's a shame people have to rediscover this fact.