When it comes to handling Reform the Labour leadership echoes apocryphal accounts of how in the summer of 2007 the CEO's inner circle of a major player convinced itself that from the top it had a more profound insight into global trends than traders and financial analysts begging it to derisk

Classic Labour combatting of the Reform proposal to recind past indefinite leave to remain status. 'Unworkable'. What does that even mean? Sounds like civil servants arguing amongst each other. To be swept aside with 'of course it's workable'.

Imagine you're in a weird romcom where Paul Hollywood is your rival. Do you go "let's have a bread baking competition" or do you emphasise your own relative strengths? Because that in short has been the central problem with the traditional two's approach to anti-immigration voters and Reform UK.

America’s current stance is the US should hurt Brazil’s economy and prop up Argentina’s economy. The entire reason is that the US president and his fans like the leader of Argentina—or a successful version of him they made up—and dislike that Brazil upheld its laws against a coup plotter they like.

I don’t think British political commentary/chatter has ever got over the adrenaline rush of 2016-19.

26,000 YouTube views for Sinclair’s Charlie Kirk tribute special. Just for comparison, Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue on any average Wednesday will get between two and four MILLION YouTube views. Right wing culture is fringe stuff. It is not American culture by any stretch.

Keir Starmer’s spokesperson asked for the PM's response to Nigel Farage’s plan to deport hundreds of thousands of people living and working completely legally in the UK, replies that he thinks it is “unworkable” and “unfunded”. So his objection is that they’ve got their sums wrong

David Petraeus greeting Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa at the Concordia Summit in NYC. When Petraeus was a 3-star in Iraq in 2004-6, Sharaa was fighting the US as a member of the al-Qaida branch there; when Petraeus was a 4-star, Sharaa was teaching fellow Camp Bucca detainees classical Arabic

Yet Niall Ferguson and Ulf Poschardt will still demand that American and European conservatives should follow Milei's example

The issue here as well is that in France the strategy pursued by RN has involved tacking to the Centre on some issues like European integration in order to defuse opponent lines of attack while in the UK the incentives for Reform have been towards the pursuit of escalatory radicalisation

Also greatest tv episode of the 90s

Unlike France the UK is a union state of four national spaces each with their own distinct politics. If Plaid and the SNP become viewed as more plausible leaders of an anti-Reform front in their nations and LibDems or Greens in specific English regions then McSweeney's strategy wipes Labour out

And that absolutely is about the government's agenda setting power - everything they do is couched in shallow electoralism, so everything is assessed in those terms, too.

It just straightforwardly *insane* how much political chatter in the United Kingdom is about the next general election, an event that is a long way in the future, and how basically none of it is about 'uh, this policy agenda doesn't look adequate to the scale of the inherited problem'.

It's obviously true unless something unexpected happens, but a) the incumbent government needs to actually have *delivered for its coalition* to lead a republican front b) the leader needs to be a plausible leader of it and c) they do need to actually be able to say 'Vichy was bad'.

Is it really *that hard* to say that it is totally morally wrong to say to people who have come here legally, worked, paid taxes, built their lives here, contributed to Britain, that they have to fuck off now, rather than "unfunded".

It’s worth asking the question why British politics is trying so hard to copy American politics when the same policies aren’t even popular there, let alone here.

Changes to immigration requirements -- including changes proposed by Labour -- are an almighty "fuck you" to people who have already paid a lot to be in the UK.

Any journalist quoting this absurd, invented £234 billion number cited by Farage/Reform should make absolutely clear that it has been withdrawn by *its own authors* (the Centre for Policy Studies) after they admitted it contained several major errors (1/3)

There is also a tendency towards fatalism amplified by social media dynamics among Liberal and Left milieus that tends to exaggerate how much of the UK population will automatically back authoritarian agendas. Succumbing to panic and paralysis is not going to defeat the Far Right.

If Labour and other parties can't find a way to scrutinise, criticise and condemn a policy like this, they give Reform a free ride and make the future less safe & certain for those who come here, work hard and contribute.

This should be an opportunity for the other parties - Reform's proposal is extreme, violates basic fairness norms, and would threaten millions of people who have made their lives here and played by the rules. This approach should be condemned as nasty, unworkable and contrary to British fair play.

This is not a policy that would survive contact with reality - it would be hugely disruptive and would likely become very unpopular fast. The Trump administration is already showing us how even migration sceptical voters will not like such heavy handed approaches

I'll have more to say on Reform's proposals to scrap ILR at some point but for now I'll just note this - anyone telling you this is a popular idea doesn't know the polling. Overwhelming majority of public back giving people who work and pay taxes most or all rights after 5 years or less

This is very weird because there are literally no details in this scandal which were not reported at the time. McSweeney said that the donations had to be covered up because the donor was scared of anti-semitic trolls, the donor said "never heard of that, it sounds like a mistake" and that was it.

Taps sign:

The claim that reneging on ILR is about “cheap foreign labour” is interesting for two reasons. First, it would also affect (say) people like me with spouses on marriage visas. (Which also means it would be a way to leech even more revenue in visa fees and surcharges.) on.ft.com/4gTvkwF

Second and maybe more important, it’s the Gastarbeiter trend again in the evolution of immigration politics. The “cheap labour” can still come and fill shortages in ageing societies but on terms that can be reneged at any time.

The one other issue here worth noting is how far a rampant Reform government would play into the hands of NI, Scottish and perhaps even Welsh nationalists in ways that would break up the UK

Sam is right to say that the correct argument is that a Reform government CAN & probably would attempt things that are ethically reprehensible + currently unlawful + broadly unpopular if they commit to using majority power in the UK political system to repeal all judicial limits on govt + parliament

Lots of terrible stuff in this but "banning dual citizenship" a bit of a buried lede www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/...

Reform's ban on dual citizenship is going to require a rapid u-turn over Ireland. It would be pretty mad to apply it to call existing dual nationals, but maybe they will fancy & welcome the row in the cases beyond Ireland, like Israel, USA, Canada, Australia,Nigeria, India, and Pakistan

Next, do not assume ‘digital’ means error-free - rather, it means that people in enforcement will assume there are no errors. ‘Computer says no’. This is a patten repeated again and again. 5/10

A short thread on digital ID (cards) just to bear in mind. There are a few myths that I keep hearing about this idea that need clarifying/debunking. 1/10

Reform’s new position on indefinite leave to remain is even more extremist than Donald Trump’s crackdown on US immigration. If any of Reform’s political opponents fancied saying they publicly, that might be nice. Handily, it’s even true.

Ich denke, Ende diesen Jahres spätestens ist Elmar Theveßen nicht mehr USA-Korrespondent des ZDFs, und uns wird das damit erklärt, dass er aus eigenem Antrieb heraus gekündigt hat und nun ein Buch über seine USA-Zeit schreibt.

Der Korrespondent in den USA, der hier angesprochen wird, ist Herr Theveßen.

My grandfather's and mom's generation of Ukrainians, Jews and Italians in Montreal organised their own security arrangements for their businesses and even religious sites for decades because they didn't entirely trust the state until the 1990s

The main explanation I have for this is that most Western elites live in milieus where liberal democracy and the rule of law are a given but they feel besieged by demands of the “woke”, minorities, etc. The rise of the far right is seen as a contrary faction that will put “those people“ in line.

This If Reform were proposing to go house to house shooting family pets, it clearly wouldn't be workable That doesn't mean you shouldn't be fucking outraged by it and do everything in your power to stop them getting the chance to try it

Trump’s delusional if he thinks this ends with Bubba from Oklahoma landing a tech job. Tech firms will just move operations overseas to reach top-tier talent. 📌 After Trump slapped a $100K fee on new visas, several passengers bailed minutes before takeoff, afraid they couldn’t get back into the US.

I think scepticism is warranted when it comes to whether Keir Starmer's team will ever fully realise that every attempt to outflank Farage on the Right will just lead to Farage escalating demands further.

You know why ethnic minorities in the UK always feel second-class as if they're never safe in this country and could be asked to leave at any time? This is why:

Julia Ruhs hat aus politischen Gründen erst eine Sendung bekommen. Der NDR hat sie nie gefeuert, weil alle geplanten Sendungen bereits gemacht wurden. Sie wollten sie aus handwerklichen Gründen nicht wiederhaben. Es ist so krass, wie Rechte inzwischen bestimmen, was für Erzählungen sich durchsetzen.

really dislike that "Boriswave" used to be something you'd exclusively see being used by racist Twitter accounts but it's now made its way to the political mainstream, including today's Playbook headline

It's really important to note that even if something doesn't prove workable in the end doesn't mean that a populist party won't do huge damage in trying to implement it before it fails.

also engenders a dangerous complacency where the mass civil society response that is required to actually push back on this stuff doesn‘t happen because people convince themselves “it won’t happen so why should they have to put their heads above water on it“

They'll try anyway, plunge the state and economy into chaos then try to get rid of dual citizenship and NI's special status on border issues which plunges relations with Ireland and the EU into chaos

This is important. In Poland, PiS had to back away from the more vicious aspects of its persecution of LGBT+ people when it became clear that quite a lot of people with negative views on LGBT+ rights nevertheless found bullying vulnerable people rather distasteful.

If you throw in attacks on dual citizenship and this proposal ends up affecting the friends and family of a much wider range of voters than Farage seems to assume including Reform supporters