Tom Clarke

Prison situation 'worse than thought', says Starmerwww.bbc.com The prime minister says the last government was "reckless" to allow severe overcrowding in prisons.

What I love about Labour's 'wow, you've had some right cowboys in here' routine is that despite being incredibly transparent, for some reason, a lot of Conservative MPs are merrily going 'Well, actually, it's been *OBVIOUS* that we fucked it on prisons for some time!!'

Prison situation 'worse than thought', says Starmer

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Best case scenario: you berate an old man in public until he quits and the confusion makes a trump victory almost inevitable, and you look bad. Worst case scenario: pretty much the exact same thing just without the quitting. You're just choosing this one bad thing.

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I can already feel that the Tory leadership race is gonna give me an ulcer, because of the number of people on the centre and left who have neither read a history book nor the news saying things like “hopefully the Tory party will move to the right”.

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For those who don't know: this is James Timpson of Timpson key cutters/shoe repairs/dry cleaners. His company employs ex-convicts and even runs work training programmes in prisons. Genuinely inspired choice.

Oh, now that *is* interesting - James Timpson as minister for prisons, parole and probation. Dare we actually hope for something that might reduce recidivism?

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Dear respected Ms Cooper I have always loved and respected you and any insinuation that I thought you were "rubbish really" and they should "get rid" was probably from another big foreigner who was here but ran away

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(The cynicism arises IMO because parties more regularly break their implicit promises: the Liberal Democrats implemented most of their manifesto 2010 to 2015, but they had spent a decade implying they were to the left of Labour, so people felt betrayed.)

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If I had a pound for every time the Labour party entered office with a majority while winning less votes than in the crushing defeat it got in the election before, I’d have two nickels, which is not a lot, but it’s weird that it’s happened twice.

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John Bull

No. Everyone doesn't "hate" Starmer. They just don't see him as inspiring. But all the above is why Labour will need to DELIVER over this term in order to keep the votes of these who just want shit to work. And they'll need to be WAY better on trans rights, gaza and climate to shore up the base.

Watching a very elderly man get turned away at a polling station for not having the right ID. Sort of emblematic of everything the Conservatives have achieved, really.

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“Do nothing, twiddle your fingers while drawing increasingly farcical and cynical dividing lines, overseeing fiscal events you know to be harmful, seeing everything you do as an outgrowth of the polls” needs to get a worse result than “govern to the last hour, don’t lay traps for your successor”.

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The wild thing about this is that Starmer, once the top lawyer in the UK, is just plain wrong about this. The equality act is clear about this and there are multiple examples of case law stating exactly that trans women have the right to use single-sex spaces aligning with their gender identity.

I’m losing human rights Ned

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I would feel better if those who are supposed to be political experts didn't beclown themselves this way. The choice is: 1) Biden 2) Harris 3) Total chaos / royal rumble, serious risk of coalition crack up. Leading an anti-fascist coalition is very hard. There is no Aaron Sorkin solution here.

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Keir: more than just a lucky general | Tom Hamilton | The Critic Magazinethecritic.co.uk Neither Left nor Right can accept that Starmer’s impressive focus and strategic sense is responsible for transforming Labour’s prospects…

I wrote about Keir Starmer and whether Labour’s imminent victory is anything to do with him. thecritic.co.uk/keir-more-th...

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So much of, e.g. anti-fraud is going to become easier and more effective the more of it we can automate it (a lot of it is just 'we got this bit of the state to talk to this bit of a bank which talked to this mobile phone company' which obviously takes a lot more time the less automated it is.

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I think probably it was Andrew Mitchell’s long and serious commitment in and out of office to international development, Bob Geldof’s one big political issue.

Former punk(ish) firebrand and Live Aid big mouth Bob Geldof has endorsed Tory MP Andrew Mitchell. Amazing what getting a knighthood will do,

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There are a lot of reasons (some to do with the underlying condition of the UK, some to do with race) that Rishi Sunak’s lies land worse with the public than Boris Johnson, but one of them is that Johnson lies like someone who wants to fuck you, and Sunak lies like someone who wants you to fuck off.

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Election-betting scandal further ties the Tories up in knotswww.ft.com Sunak’s futile handling of the incident highlights the deceit at the centre of his campaign

Rishi Sunak's response to the betting scandal is the problem with his campaign in microcosm: the things he is saying about it are obviously not true, everyone watching knows it is not true, and the obvious contempt that shows for his audience further aggravates people:

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Sorry, but no. You can’t do that sort of protest and then cry foul when it’s taken at face value. Just Stop Oil are a liability. All they do is position climate change as a preoccupation of self righteous assholes.

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The Conservatives deserve to be taught a lesson | Robert Hutton | The Critic Magazinethecritic.co.uk It would, Grant Shapps says, be bad news for British democracy if Labour won too large a majority next month. For a moment I wondered whether his words reflected a realisation that his own party had…

“It would be very good for our democracy for the Conservative Party to suffer a crushing defeat. The Conservatives have behaved terribly in government, and politicians, like children, need to know that their actions have consequences.” @roberthutton.bsky.social:

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"Sped up this lengthy process, still needs to be checked by a human" is the actual use case for generative AI. But that's not what the hype would have you believe.

One of the most fascinating things about generative AI is the businesses and states that are using it are largely doing “we’ve sped up this lengthy process”, whereas the tech companies’ largely seem to be going “we made this thing you like worse”.

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Banger of a comedy news story in today’s Times. It gets funnier and funnier with every paragraph until the punchline of “it’s all Apple’s fault that I [a man who visited prostitutes for several years] was divorced by my wife when she found out.”

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The Lib Dem strategy to restore their third party statuswww.ft.com Holding the line on taxes and zany photo opportunities are bolstering the party’s campaign

I genuinely do not understand why every election some lobby journalists rediscover this. We are four weeks away from “my father was a toolmaker” shifting from “WHY are they doing this?” to “genius political gambit” just like Sadiq Khan’s dad being a bus driver, longterm economic plan, etc.

Most people will hear it for the first time after today. It’s the Alastair Campbell dictum that it’s only when people who are interested in politics are sick of hearing something that it cuts through with normal people. More true now than then.

"After his manifesto launch he managed to combine both, being interviewed by LBC about the Lib Dem policy of taking the UK back into the single market while on the spinning teacups at Thorpe Park." I was going to vote Labour, but honestly, this is genuinely pulling me round. Shouldn't, but is.

Today’s newsletter: on the Liberal Democrats’ strategy, and why Ed Davey loves fairground rides and LBC:

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Tade Thompson

Adjacent to your point, but I quite like Robin D Laws' split between Iconic heroes and dramatic heroes, and how much of modern "good" culture (pop and otherwise) is based around a belief that the latter is the only one that should exist. Sherlock holmes doesn't need to learn jack.

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@samfr.bsky.social has been hacked in the other place. Easily one of the best independent UK political commentators. A must follow for anyone interested in UK politics - let’s get everyone here following him.

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I think it’s one of those stories where, the longer you sit with it, the more you realise what the only explanation for “he didn’t realise what a big deal missing it was” IS, and there is no coming back from that.

Luke Tryl of More in Common pollsters on the fallout for the Tories of PM’s D-Day snub: “It’s as bad as it can get and unless things turn around we could well be heading for their worst electoral result, certainly in the last century.”

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John Bull

Jordan sheepishly asked Todd what his motivations had been on that day. Was he thinking about the enormity of what they were doing? Todd replied. "Not really. Mostly it was a lot of running around and trying not to get shot."

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