Yes the current system is messy, but there are literally no votes in this, just an awful lot of grief. The political strategising in Number 10 seems seriously awry.

Having already picked unnecessary fights with pensioners, farmers, and businesses wanting to employ more people, I find it scarcely believable that the Govt now wants to have a fight about the structure of local government.

Whether the sale goes through or not there has clearly been a massive breakdown in trust between management and editorial staff on The Guardian and it is hard to see how that can be repaired.

Primarily yes, but with a bit of an undercurrent of anti-Christian sentiment.

By all means hold his feet to the fire on his policies but I do hope we will never become the kind of country where people are barred from holding public office because of their religious affiliations. We saw this with the rather ugly treatment of Kate Forbes in the previous SNP leadership vote.

Incredibly shabby behaviour by the supposedly whiter-than-white Scott Trust to agree to sell the Observer while its journalists were on strike over the plan
www.theguardian.com/media/2024/d...

You're probably right, but maybe Starmer wants to get away from these longwinded, mostly insincere thankyou letters that PMs are supposed to send resigning ministers.

She was also trying to get the govt to commit to resurrecting the HS2 connection from Birmingham to Manchester, or a version of it. A great shame she has gone and I suspect the mobile phone 'story' is a mere pretext.

As a long-standing Observer reader I am sympathetic to the cause but 'democracy dies behind paywalls' is a seriously bad slogan. Journalism has to be paid for and paywalled websites are just a digital incarnation of paid-for print titles.

Correct. There should first be a Royal Commission, then if that recommends go ahead, it should be in Labour's next election manifesto so the electorate as a whole gets a say. Then if Labour is re-elected, govt legislation in the next Parliament.

Yes I think on the whole I agree with you. The current system is a mess, but any attempt to make sense of it is almost bound to end up making an even bigger mess.

A flawed giant who was ahead of his time. Some further thoughts on the legacy of John Prescott paullinford.substack.com/p/a-flawed-g...

He wasn't entirely successful in the latter enterprise, mainly because 1) he didn't always get the backing from Blair, and 2) because the Regional Development Agencies he set up in 1999 were abolished by the Tories just 12 years later. But he deserves great credit for trying. RIP.

John Prescott was undoubtedly a somewhat flawed individual - indeed that was part of his charm - but politically he was ahead of his time in two key respects: awareness of the need to tackle climate change, and his determination to address regional disparities long before 'levelling-up' was a thing.

In my view the best thing they could do to ensure this place doesn't go the way of Twitter is to ensure that those posting on it are actual, real people. Not easy I know, but it's the far-right bots, rather than the right-wing media folk, who really ruined the Twitter experience.

Still on X, but also looking to build some sort of presence over here in anticipation of X's seemingly inevitable implosion into a right-wing echo chamber. Also like the ad free experience, tbh.