i did not have electropope on my bingo card, ngl

@robfordmancs.bsky.social speaking as a private sector comms person working in B2B, I’d say the need to repeat the message hasn’t changed. It’s making the different channels synchronise that’s gotten harder. /1

Great stuff as ever this from Ben. Does leave me wondering what the implications are for Reform growth - does being so distant from other voters on so many Qs put a ceiling on their support and if so where? Or perhaps there are still enough Tories close enough to their positions to keep growing?

Complete and utter tangent for a Friday afternoon: we have a cargo cult cat*, who remembers that the radiators USED to be on, so will sit mournfully beside them in the hope that repeating the behaviour will make them switch on again *or, as my husband puts it, a "cargo cat"

This is very good from Peter - and basically shows how the British Polling Council rules are supposed to work. kellnerp.substack.com/p/how-whiteh...

Richard Feynman once wrote about "Cargo Cult Science" - "they follow all the apparent precepts and forms, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land." I wonder if we currently have a Cargo Cult model of messaging and media management in British politics

Macclesfield Central (Cheshire East) Council By-Election Result: 🌍 GRN: 41.8% (+19.7) 🌹 LAB: 28.6% (-25.7) ➡️ RFM: 15.8% (New) 🌳 CON: 9.1% (-4.5) ⚖️ EQU: 2.5% (New) 🔶 LDM: 2.2% (-7.7) Green GAIN from Labour. Changes w/ 2023.

Another example of a growing phenomenon - wholesale replacement of the traditional two party competition ;Con vs Lab) by an entirely different 2 party competition (Ref vs Grn). We may see a lot of this kind of thing next May.

Data for high skilled workers entering on a skilled worker visa on pay year ending June 2023. It’s likely they will have had a pay rise since but still looks like a sizeable minority will be pushed onto the 10 year route. Especially engineers, vets, graphic designers and web designers. (1/2)

Great charts in this, but I'm going to take issue with one sentence. These were political choices, not the unavoidable outcomes of a fiscal crisis.

This does feel like a major crossing of the Rubicon – the world's best-funded and in many ways most powerful public health agency is now actively pushing disinformation. I know there's a *lot* going on to care about at the moment, but this one really is significant, and matters well beyond the US.

tomorrow's newsletter is literally called "aren't you tired of feeling insane all the time?" and boy isn't this a darling example, a phrase popularised by full-on racists on Elon Musk's Twitter now being bandied around in the mainstream press and sold as a Labour term

VERY funny that Labour are being pointlessly cruel and haemorrhaging support from their base and yet none of what they're offering is ever going to be enough for the people whose approval they're seeking, WHO could have predicted it

From @philipjcowley.bsky.social - thanks to a happy coincidence we have a much more rigorous than usual understanding of the impact of Keir Starmer's "Island of Strangers" speech. As Cowley puts it "It is not obvious this was the intended outcome"

"If nothing else, the PM deserves a medal for services towards public opinion research".

Have made it into the House politics lesson series and can now happily retire www.politicshome.com/opinion/arti...

No matter which way you cut it, this has become a very unpopular government - now at Johnson on resignation day and Corbyn in mid-2019 levels of dislike, including among their own voters. Only Truss-tier is yet to be reached, though with Reeves already at Kwarteng levels, it's not out of sight.

Gov just published a new list cabinet committees. In short, looks like (1) big vote of confidence in Darren Jones from the PM, (2) existing missions + immigration are top of the government's agenda, (3) PM wants things to happen faster, and (4) Rayner's priorities perhaps no longer front of mind?🧵

Also: most of the Labour voters in these regions do not own such homes! Labour’s electoral coalition skews heavily towards the young - young people are either renting or living in cheaper houses than this!

Yeah, I think Ulez is a useful analogy for so many things, which is that ultimately 'is that true?' does really matter - people who could vote in the London mayoral election who sincerely believed their 2019 era car was gonna get hit by Ulez did not still believe that after Ulez had been introduced.

Attention is on NEETs today, but the problem is much worse. NEETs include stay-at-home parents & jobseekers. Strip those out to focus on people not working, not seeking work, not in education & not parenting: this group of economically & socially dislocated young adults has *doubled* in a decade.

Almost time to pull out Holiday Lights v2 (1995)

Equally surprising is that the v first British Asian Secretary of State is Sajid Javid as Culture Secretary as late as 2014 Rishi Sunak - on a gap year as a think-tanker - described this as a key moment in this convo with me & Helen Lewis on the Westminster Hour, May 2014 bsky.app/profile/sund...

Shabana Mahmood is already the third British Asian woman to be a tough talking Home Secretary on asylum. But the fate of Priti Patel's very similar reforms cast doubt on how far these changes are the key to control in the Channel. My Eastern Eye column this week www.easterneye.biz/shabana-mahm...

💯 “The electoral system is at breaking point now, because we're in this multi-party system, because of political fragmentation.” 🎙️ @alexsobel.co.uk, chair of the @appgfairelections.bsky.social on @lbc.co.uk #CrossQuestion

Obama and Sunak could not have been more conciliatory and inoffensive and a lot of people just lost their minds anyway and decided to spend time claiming they weren’t actually American or properly English.

That American politics went off the rails after Barack Obama and British ethnonationalism has reared its head after Rishi Sunak is the real tell about how committed some people are to integration and post racial politics.

It is important to bring people with you & properly listen to feedback but sometimes it is also important to look at the bigger picture and look at the evidence base behind policies & politics. It is not a new phenomenon for politicians to (sadly!) face these huge amounts of hyperbolic abuse.

Policies can prove unpopular at the time & be bitterly opposed. I remember being told Ken Livingstone would lose in 2004 because of the congestion charge & several people told me I would lose in 2024 because of the ULEZ- we didn't lose!

This week is Road Safety Week & a chance to talk about Barbara Castle! Barbara was Transport Minister for three years yet she was able to introduce the Breathalyzer, a proper integrated transport strategy & more! This was done despite fierce opposition. 📸 Photo from the Parliamentary Achieve

That's a great point about the skillset of being an effective minister, which is not the same as being a policy wonk. (Though Castle was baffled by another effective minister, Roy Jenkins, & how he was able to take long lunches in the middle of the day. He was equally bemused at her work ethic).

Reminds me of Danny Baker saying one of the most terrifying three-word phrases you can hear when answering a phone is: "Where are you?!"

Great paper here with some fascinating data on politicians and their estimates of which issues matter to voters

Several recent studies have found that politicians aren't very good at estimating public support for policies. But we have little idea about whether politicians are good at knowing which issues are more important to voters. Our new publication has a first go at answering this question rdcu.be/eQGm4

Reminds me of how one of the original anti-semitism scales developed by researchers in the 1950s included both the item "Jews keep to themselves and shun outsiders" and "Jews push themselves where they aren't wanted." Prejudice has no consistency. The hate comes first, then the rationale

Includes this titbit -

We actually have a paper that finds exactly that! osf.io/preprints/so...

Tbh, while *obviously* Labour should have done more planning for govt, this wasn't clear for two years - the likelihood of a large majority only arose after Truss (so late 2022) and there was a widespread and understandable belief polls would narrow.

This is very good indeed on how Mahmood talks about race. To suggest that immigration policy and racism are linked "reflects this government’s biggest failing, which is that it is essentially incapable of saying that racism is wrong, full stop".

It's worth noting that there's already substantial heterogeneity in the polling industry in terms if capacity and capability to mitigate the threat of AI to online surveys.

More Bluth Labour than Blue Labour, amirite?

European political scientists are blue in the face from constantly pointing out that accommodating the far right does not help centre-left parties win, and contributes to the rise of far-right parties. There's a mountain of data to support that. But no, the galaxy-brained strategists must be right.

The Danish Social Democrats are currently on course for their worst election result since at least the Second World War, despite their brand of far-right accommodationism being touted as a blueprint for other centre-left parties.

More accurate and rapidly updated migration statistics might help defuse a lot of polarisation and prevent a lot of bad knee jerk policy change - one argument for universal ID systems is they would facilitate this.

Net migration now estimated to have fallen from 944,000 to 345,000 in Dec ‘24. Some projections even suggest David Cameron’s old target of “tens of thousands” could be met. ukandeu.ac.uk/the-coming-c...

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Can those in Commons and media holding govt to account please keep asking this Q until we get a clear answer?

Not sure "can't tell you, its a hypothetical" is going to be much use to an MP with a pregnant refugee in their surgery, asking if they and their baby is going to be deported.