Politically, this is magnificent. The Lib Dems have target seats throughout Surrey where they’re typically the main challenger, they’ve been campaigning hard locally on water quality through most of this parliament (hasn’t always got national attention but they worked out a while ago it’s a very resonant issue in their target seats) and then just in time for the election Thames Water start warning people the water isn’t drinkable…

Non-paywall link: https://archive.is/JCp2k

Calling the government’s reforms a “grubby concession” to backbenchers who want to block housing development, Matthew Pennycook, shadow housing minister, has pledged that Labour would enact “mandatory targets that bite on individual local planning authorities” if it came to power.

The issue of housing and planning is set to be a point of contention in this year’s general election, with the Centre for Cities think-tank estimating that the UK has a historical backlog of 4mn unbuilt homes, with an average house in England now costing more than 10 times the average salary.

I can’t find the SNP and PC breakdowns, but assuming 4% and 0.5% respectively then Flavible projects this as: Lab 451, Con 75, SNP 53, Lib Dems 45, PC 3, Green 1, Reform 0. And if the Tories dropped another two points, it would leave them as the 4th party in Parliament…

I’m a hard no.

I think people should vote, and voting is generally pretty easy in this country - including easy access to postal and proxy voting. So anyone who fails to do the basic bare minimum in a democratic society (of turning out to vote in a general election every five years) is someone who is clearly so disengaged from politics that I really wouldn’t want them casting their uninformed RNG vote and deciding the future of this country.

This is what happened at the EU referendum. There had long been an assumption that a higher turnout was good for Remain (Leavers were more motivated, so higher turnout meant it was more likely that moderate Remain voters were turning out). But what actually happened was turnout went so high that it blew past them and into a load of nihilists who didn’t give a shit about anything and voted Leave just for the fuck of it. These are not the people who should be deciding our future.

I would prefer that voter turnout was higher than it is, but that’s because I think political engagement should be higher. That’s the thing we should be targeting; voter turnout is the symptom, not the cause. If you force people who aren’t evenly barely politically engaged to cast a vote, you’re asking for a shitshow.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_25th_Anniversary_(computer_game)

I hate the Tories, but I have limited sympathy with this.

Usually a general election comes about only once every five years and is costless to vote in. If somehow you don’t expect to be able to make it to a polling station at any point on polling day, you can also easily apply for a postal or proxy vote. Voting in this country is extremely easy for the vast majority of people, even accounting for the nonsense voter ID requirements brought in last year.

You can’t complain that politicians don’t represent your views and interests if you’re not prepared to do the bare fucking minimum thing needed to make your views actually count in a representative democracy.

At this early stage, the incident is not being treated as terrorism

The UK legal definition of terrorism:

The Terrorism Act 2006 uses the definition of terrorism contained in the Terrorism Act 2000. Section 34 amends that definition slightly, to include specific types of actions against international governmental organisations, such as the UN. The definition in the Terrorism Act 2000 (as amended) states:

(1) In this Act “terrorism” means the use or threat of action where:
the action falls within subsection (2)
the use or threat is designed to influence the government or an international governmental >organisation or to intimidate the public or a section of the public
the use or threat is made for the purpose of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause.

(2) Action falls within this subsection if it:
involves serious violence against a person
involves serious damage to property
endangers a person’s life, other than that of the person committing the action
creates a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public
is designed seriously to interfere with or seriously to disrupt an electronic system

I cannot see how this is not domestic terrorism.

These Tories are fucking monsters.

Do you not looking at polling when you make statements like that? Labour have for some time been polling in the 40s, and the Tories polling in the 20s, and FPTP is brutal when you get that sort of polling differential.

If you take this week’s latest YouGov poll (Lab 45%, Con 22%, Lib Dem 9%, etc) and plug it into Flavible, it gives a result of Lab 423 seats, Con 107, SNP 54, Lib Dem 40. This would represent a considerably worse defeat for the Conservatives than even 1997.

2019 EU elections

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-48403131

This is what prompted Labour to finally endorse the People’s Vote campaign in their 2019 general election manifesto.

They’ve been polling around 20pts clear of the Tories for a long time. The Tories’ numbers are hovering around the mid-20s, which is a level at which FPTP can lead to some really lop-sided outcomes. Some of the polls over the last year have even implied the Tories ending up the 3rd or 4th party in Westminster.

My personal opinion is that Labour do not want to talk about Brexit until they can stop the Tory media telling lies on the subject. We will only get one shot at reversing this fiasco, so they want to get it right.

Labour don’t want to talk about Brexit because they’re already on course to win the election by a landslide, so why do anything different to exactly what they’re already doing? It’s not about only getting one shot to get this right, it’s just profound risk aversion. Labour’s preferred outcome is for literally nothing to change in the political debate between today and election day.

Remember though that polling has shown for some time that, if a Rejoin referendum was held tomorrow, Rejoin would win comfortably. So Labour will be forced to change their approach on this when (probably sometime during the next parliament) the Lib Dems start getting more vocal on Rejoin, causing Labour to start bleeding votes to them - at which point the risk averse thing for Labour to do will now be to start talking about the issues that matter to the moderate pro-EU majority.

It’ll be a repeat of what happened with the People’s Vote campaign, where Labour failed to entertain the idea right up until the 2019 EU elections, where they finished 3rd behind the Lib Dems, losing even in solid-red Labour heartlands like Islington, which forced Labour to have to catch up with where Labour voters already were on this issue.

The reason the board have given is - if true - a very reasonable reason to fire a CEO. The job of the board is to oversee, scrutinise and challenge the management, and if the management were lying to or withholding information from the board then that’s an obvious reason for the management to go.

American corporate governance standards are really hit-and-miss, and in a lot of these tech firms you often end up with situations of CEOs doubling up as chairs of their boards - e.g. Musk, Zuckerberg , Bezos -something that structurally neuters the ability of the board to do its basic job of challenging the CEO! So when I see an American board standing up to a CEO that’s trying to evade scrutiny, I feel that’s something that should be applauded.

I always preferred Suella De Vil.

Fun fact: her name isn’t actually Suella, it’s Sue Ellen Braverman. Suella was a choice. She chooses to self-identify as a name that rhymes with Cruella.

About fucking time.

Great result, but winning back a seat they last held in the 2017-19 parliament (and whose predecessor seats were Labour from 1964 and 1970 respectively until 2015) is not really seismic.