Badenoch says the Conservatives would want fewer “low value degrees” and many more apprenticeships. As ever with such announcements I will perhaps take it more seriously when the kids of government ministers and MPs are routinely doing apprenticeships and not degrees.

That YouTube clip of Sir Nicholas Winton, but at the end of it the audience gets put on a bus?

British politics was doomed from the day that Gordon Brown was forced by the media to apologize for calling a bigoted woman a bigot *in private*.

Labour had 9.7 million voters in July 2024.

2 million (20%) now don't know, but haven't chosen a rival. These prefer Lab & centre-left to right

2.6 million to centre/left (27%)
900k Labour to LD (9%)
800k Labour to Green (8%)
900k across others (9%)

800k Lab 2024 to Reform (8%)
A sliver to Cons

At some point Labour is going to have to deal with its base being urban, multicultural, and in many cases educated. If they solve the current graduate unemployment crisis and the dearth of entry level jobs there would be political dividends for years but the party is incapable of considering this.

Trump is an imbecile but he has the basic cunning of every successful bully and every successful fascist: he knows who is weak and who is strong. He will not send his thugs to attack the groups who are popular, but the groups who are vulnerable. Your choice is whether to defend them or not.

Twitter was like a zoo where both sides thought they were the visitors.

If you accept that non-citizens have no right to due process, you are accepting that citizens have no right to due process. All the government has to do is claim that you are not a citizen; without due process you have no chance to prove the contrary.

So much of British political strategy seems to rest on the notion that the median elector is a temporarily-embarrassed Reform voter, who we must continue to hoodwink out of their natural preference of voting for Nigel Farage

I'm uncomfortable with the inevitable "his work was always crap" because it seems to say "you can tell who the predators are by how well they write" and ... no no you absolutely cannot, that's the whole point.

We as teachers simply can't repeat the point enough that examinable outputs (essays etc) are actually the means not the end. They're tools we use to get people to intelligently process information. AI completely defeats the points of not just the essay... but being in education *as a whole*.

What strikes me about the CEO killer is not his specific beliefs but the fact that he was a very recognizable type of young male ideology tourist. He was a This Explains Everything addict, whether the "this" was as benign as Michael Pollan or as malignant as Peter Thiel and the Unabomber. >

The people saying this are broadly just addicted the drama of recent years and only understand politics through the prism of the Tory party. The Labour Party mechanism doesn’t work in the same way and even if it did there’s no equivalent discontent or political split in the current Labour party.

So many other ways Starmer could hit Cons record of tripling net migration to 720-900k without inaccurate hyperbole of open borders (echoing Robert Jenrick). His chaotic inheritance of an asylum hotel backlog is from a botched fantasy attempt to ban asylum, obvs not from an "open borders" experiment

not seen it mentioned elsewhere so: my theory is that Elon has become obsessed with Britain because he's essentially stopped sleeping due to drugs and/or madness but for like six hours of his nights Americans are sleeping so Brits are the one English-speaking timezone awake and posting

A feathered visitor left a calling card - hopefully not too hard a bang, happy to say that he flew straight off afterwards

My policy on fireworks:

Nov 5th - laudable, subsidised; cherubic youngsters eating municipal hotdogs & waving free sparklers

Other Dates - 2-3yr stretch in the salt mines, depending on how the 5 Year Plan is looking

The most important question in British politics is this:

There are 120 Labour MPs holding government positions. There are 121 Tory MPs. Assuming the Tories appoint a shadow for each government officeholder, which one Tory MP will be the backbencher?