This is a fun question. I already came up with two completely different answers

Uh guys. Uhhhh. Uhhh oh my god. Holy shit

They can work better in print than in broadcast ime but they’re not worthless, depending on how they’re done and what lessons are drawn from the messages that come back. eg is it useful to discover that people are now much happier to say racist/conspiratorial theories to a stranger? I’d say so

I think vox pops - like many things in life - are fine in moderation and when appropriately caveated. The problems with them come from the selection process, which inevitably puts the spotlight on people who are easily accessible in a high street or market in middle of day

They could call it ChangeUK: The Independent Group

just so weird that people think that if you need to borrow a lot of money, the lender somehow doesn't set the terms

assuming a lifespan of 80 years, the length of the entire human civilization is only about 70 people old. The US Civil War was two people ago and the Ottomans sacked Constantinople seven people ago. Not very long!

You know what we don't talk enough about? Queen & Annie Lennox/David Bowie rehearsing 'Under Pressure' in 1992. So much going on! Everyone's clothes, Bowie with a lit cig throughout, where Annie PROPER GOES FOR IT, George Michael singing along in the background. The amazing vocals. Yes, please!

We find this across studies, tasks, countries, and issues. A concerning implication of our analysis is that politicians misperceive public opinion the most when it is lopsided, which entails that policy responsiveness would be undersupplied precisely when citizens demand it most. More in the paper!

We show that politicians' perceptual errors are primarily an expression of "midpoint hedging", a well-known cognitive quirk, leading them to skew their estimations towards 50% even when real public opinion is far from being evenly split. Hedging accounts for two thirds (!) of politicians' errors./2

Lung cancer deaths trace the rise and fall of smoking— Lung cancer kills more than two million people every year, making it the most fatal cancer globally. While a number of factors increase the risk, the 20th century brought one like no other: smoking.

Would replacing Starmer make Labour more popular? Recent research suggests a new prime minister may enjoy a polling bounce However, whoever is next through the door of No 10 will face the same public pressure for instant results, meaning any bounce would be fragile, writes @anandmenon.bsky.social

NEW: Labour's housing benefit cuts have hit a million of the poorest renters, often costing them more than £1,000 a year Greater Manchester and the West Midlands have been worst hit My new substack on the cost of living measure the next PM must take chamindajayanetti.substack.com/p/how-labour...

Burnham is absolutely right that much of the asylum contract provision in the north west has been a mess (came through loud and clear when I spent a lot of time looking at the state of the metropole in Blackpool last year). But www.thetimes.com/article/d9e8...

*taps Greater Manchester Spatial Framework sign* as.ft.com/r/38396f0e-a...

Also totally know that this is a local political pitch to people concerned about green belt dev. But I have no idea how it would be squared with policy, genuinely

Clearly, if he was PM he could try to change housing targets. But that would then conflict with all the messages from literally a week ago about housing costs being the key example of broken Britain

I hadn’t realised Andy Burnham had done a Tik Tok about not building on fields. He is mayor of Makerfield and his own policy prescribes building on fields, because it isn’t possible to hit housing targets any other way

This is brilliant. Jen’s pieces on Manchester should be required reading for anyone following Burnham’s progress in Makerfield and beyond

We're stuck in "a situation in which, to put it in very broad terms, we have a country which ‘knows’ it has made a mistake and regrets it, and yet has a politics which can barely acknowledge that and certainly can’t address it." Spot-on by @chrisgrey.bsky.social

"The figures suggest that if Xinjiang were a country, it would have the highest incarceration rate in the world, at 1,944 per 100,000 people. China’s nationwide rate is 119 per 100,000 people". www.ft.com/content/119d...

I increasingly suspect that cutting air pollution is going to be a huge sleeper benefit of electrification. The kind of thing we look back on in a few decades and link a lot of positive social changes too - like the Bazalgette sewers or taking lead out of petrol

Wall-E origin story looks terrific.

Behold the by-election catechism: “Only x can win here” “Two horse race” Bar chart (often misleading) - “can’t win here” “Only (our candidate) can beat (candidate you don’t like)” “Vote (our party)” (under breath: don’t waste your time on splitters from (similar party”)

Good piece by @saschaosullivan.bsky.social this. Crazy just how frequently the Conservative position is literally 'our plan is working. We just need magic to happen when our enemies Inevitably Implode'.

I sometimes wonder whether this too is a function of the leadership's oppositional defiant disorder towards its own side. Liberal or left people say "Elon Musk wants you dead, you should get off X", so the Starmer lot cross their arms like the Pingu meme

If I were the government, I simply would not be directing eyeballs and the political conversation to a website run by a guy who has explicitly said he opposes the PM and is visibly fighting an information war against me.

Such an excellent and withering piece. The massive chilling effect that Starmer and Mahmood have had on high skill / high pay migration needed calling out.

This is perhaps the thing that's annoyed me most about this government. They have had an opportunity to do something important AND in their political self-interest and instead chose to ignore it.

"Good news, boss: the dodgy money stories aren't cutting through!"

100%. Farage is getting more and more unpopular and Reform is doing worse than last year. And this is while Labour has been struggling badly and the Tories largely absent. They are very very beatable.

We are pleased to share that the report from our 2026 Local Elections event is now available The report brings together key insights and discussion points from the event, focusing on the evolving dynamics of local elections and their broader implications See the report here: poal.co.uk/events/

Also an unelected prime minsiter changes the electoral system. The Lords would have very right to resist it. In fact there's not much point in the Lords if they didn't.

A lot of this on my feed, but you actually can’t just do it - would not clear the Lords in time to implement. (Could change to AV though, as would not have to do a boundary review.)

Last week I asked him if he'd back SV as an interim measure for the coming election, to bring a bit more plurality, and he said not, but he did definitely say PR - not just "electoral reform" – as what he would want in a manifesto.

Potentially a very big deal. Changing the Westminster electoral system would fundamentally change our politics. Lesson from other countries is also that once FPP has been ditched it is unlikely to be brought back.

Another Green-led council in London on its way after the party struck a coalition deal with Lib Dems in Southwark. Assume this means James McAsh, who was elected Labour leader of the council last summer, then deposed in factional row, then defected, and is now Green leader, is council boss.

Juventus, Sampdoria and AC Milan winning all three European trophies in 1990 is the only time that clubs from one country have done that www.planetfootball.com/lists-and-ra...

Good thing nobody covered Trump’s 2024 win as a mandate for dramatic policy change & a right-wing vision of America’s future — instead of, say, a close win driven mainly by the price of eggs and gas going up (then back down!) in 2022-23. That would have been irresponsible. Good thing nobody did that

Donald Trump's approval rating is the lowest of any president since our poll with YouGov started in 2009 www.economist.com/interactive/...

A decade ago, analysts were calling Spain a cautionary tale. Too much solar, too fast! Today, Spain is rapidly on its way to having the cheapest power in Europe. Maybe this time, solar naysayers will learn... haha, jk, they'll just move the goalposts.

Ok this is a truly great tweet

Except it isn't what he did in government! He raised spending massively, raised taxes, increased welfare spending, increased immigration and was pro-EU integration. Now he's against all those things.

Say what you will (you already have...) about Blair's intervention but if did at least force me to finish my long promised piece on Pardogatto Progressivism, and the risks for progressives of becoming the parties of stasis not change. benansell.substack.com/p/pardogatto...

This is a fascinating read about the life and times of Roly Gregoire www.bbc.co.uk/sport/footba...

Oh it's much, much funnier than that...

The reactions to this are mainly focused on the move to the right, but what's really striking in reading Blair's essay in full, is how little Labour's most electorally successful politician understands the current electorate. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...