Best Of

Dan Hodges agrees with Kemi. Six weeks ago no tariffs on UK trade to USA, today 10%

Bit harsh to blame Starmer for damage done by the leader of another country.

Yea but the whiney old twat deserves every bit of opprobrium that can be poured on his boring freeby-grabbing head, even if it isn't his fault.

Quite the opposite. He's a diligent dedicated man and deserves your support. By all means vote against Labour come the election but in the meantime get behind your Labour PM.

Face up to it, he is a dud with no charisma, a poor communicator and has no discernable plan or vision other than crisis management. His crisis management being particularly problematic as he is the instigator of many of the government's crises, not least through having the equally poor Reeves as his sidekick.

That's harsh but it's fair in two respects. He does lack charisma and he's a manager not a visionary. However a charismatic persona and a grand vision are imo overrated in politics compared to competence and good intentions. I'd always take the latter. And it's what we need. We're a free and prosperous country which could be better in many respects, not a broken shithole of a place.

I agree on that. Britain is a lovely place to be on a day like this.

I think the doom and gloom is heavily overdone by those plastic patriots determined to talk down the country.

I've noticed a tendency among the kind of people who like to complain about misinformation to stubbornly cling to an idea of the way things are that is based purely on the way they would like things to be, or the way they imagine things to be, or even the way they remember that things used to be. They are impervious to anything that contradicts this, even if it is meticulously factual and supported by evidence from sources that they would normally regard as authoritative.

Very true. The shoplifting argument was vivid evidence of this

The blinkered centrist Dads insisting it's "always been like this", "I worked in retail a decade ago, nothing has changed"

This despite PBers offering personal lived experience

Even when we showed the Centrist Dads the actual hard evidence - a ten fold increase in shoplifting in ten years, according to the Economist - they then claimed they'd always accepted this, or they pretended that it was some statistical anomaly

Same with immigration; centrist Dads are defending numbers they’d never have believed possible a decade ago, and calling people who want a return to coalition style figures of 250k ‘Fascists’

Are they? I have genuinely no idea why the Tories (hardly centrist dads) presided over such a huge rise in net migration and I've literally not heard anyone on the centre left say that it was great. Indeed, most have simply pointed out the irony that it was Brexit that seems to have facilitated the surge. I mean, it is pretty funny.
Personally I don't have strong feelings about immigration. I would just like to have a system that is fair and humane and balances competing imperatives of the labour market, fairness for existing workers, pressure on housing and infrastructure, allowing universities to meet global demand from students, and international obligations to help refugees. People on here bang on about it too much though, it's getting boring.

What's happened is that a load of PB Tories, who voted for the government which delivered the last few years' immigration figures, just worked out that if they didn't blame everyone else, they'd have to blame themselves.

As for Brexit, I've given up trying to understand the shifting justifications of that vote, which is now close to as unpopular is it's ever been.

Any guesses who reportedly just said this?

“You have to understand that we won a massive majority and we have absolute, ultimate control.”

Palpatine?

The new Reform UK leader of Kent council.

https://www.kentonline.co.uk/kent/news/new-kcc-reform-uk-leader-reveals-plan-for-council-324062/

'She said: “You have to understand that we won a massive majority and we have absolute, ultimate control.”
Mrs Kemkaran vowed to remove the Ukraine flag from the chamber, open the council’s books to auditors and review working practices across the authority.
Later she emerged and said: “This is my first day in a brand new job and you wouldn’t expect me to have all the answers.

“We are going to get the auditors to come in and take a leaf out of Elon Musk’s book and appoint some sort of DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) to go through everything in detail and find out where the money is being spent and whether we can make any changes and make life better for the residents.”

The new KCC leader then suggests her Reform administration will lead Kent in a similar way to Trump is leading the US'

She’s going to be disappointed when she discovers it’s mainly spent on social care for elderly reform voters

The whole article is both depressing (because it seems to confirm the worst assumptions about Reform in office) and also encouraging (because it seems to confirm the worst assumptions about Reform in office).

Does she really think they got voted into the county council by people who share JD Vance’s views on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Elon Musk’s views on slashing public spending? Maybe she does. But it does look like a case of spotting that voters like some aspects of the MAGA playbook and assuming they like the whole package.

FPT:

"@ALDC
BY ELECTION RESULT

Calderdale MBC, Skircoat

➡️ RefUK: 1392 - 36.8% (new)
🌹 Lab: 1059 - 28% (-23.11)
🟢 Grn: 566 - 14.96 (+0.2)
🔶 LD: 411 - 10.9% (+2.7)
🔵 Con: 355 - 9.4% (-15.7)

Reform GAIN from Labour"

https://x.com/ALDC/status/1920621345034862616

That is an utterly terrible result for Labour - I don't think they'd have even lost it last week.

And not only no Green squeeze but no LD squeeze either.

I know the housing types across most of this ward and looking at the EC map, and I'm struggling to think of the Reform demographic in this Halifax ward at all - a couple of terraces east of the A629, some less grand houses on the main road through Copley village, it doesn't even extend to the town centre terraces.

It is substantially the sort of mock Tudor around parkland that wouldn't be out of place in Surrey, but which has trended left over the last couple of decades. Can only think it is a remnant of old Tory votes.

I knew the housing in Longdendale ward in Tameside where Reform prevailed by 20% last month. This is a far worse result than that.

We are entering the era of peak Reform?

Depends which bit of the Reform demographic you're thinking of. From Andrew Teale:

The middle-class nature of Skircoat ward - which increasingly extends to its Asian community - can be seen in its election results, which we can trace over an unusually long length of time because Calderdale's ward boundaries haven't changed since 2004. Skircoat was strongly Conservative in the 2004 election, but it then developed into a close fight between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats: the Lib Dems won the ward twice, in 2007 and 2010. The Lib Dem vote then faded away over the next decade and Labour moved into second place in 2014; Labour then gained all three seats in Skircoat ward from the Conservatives in 2018-21 and they have pulled away further since then. At the last Calderdale elections in 2024, Skircoat ward remained part of the Labour majority on Calderdale council with vote shares of 52% for Labour, 25% for the Conservatives and 15% for the Green Party. The ward gave 17% to UKIP back in 2014, which might give Reform UK - who are standing here for the first time - something to build on.

https://andrewspreviews.substack.com/p/previewing-the-calderdale-and-eastleigh

Pissed off middle class people with a bit of memory of voting Conservative is textbook Reform; it's not far off as a description of Farage.

Let me try for one of our pissed-off demographics.

Around here (Ashfield), this street had the most Reform decals of any I saw. These are late 1960s / 1970s type housing, quite modest 3 bed ~900-1000sqft with a through lounge typically lived in by people who have dogs they walk on the rec at the back, and perhaps allotments on the big plot across the road. People stay a long time, and may have local family. These will mainly your middle aged -> retired skilled workers, lowish end professionals (nurses, teachers, LA employees), small business. Comfortable but not wealthy - those will be eg in detached bungalows. Note the campervans / caravans.

Current prices for these are approx £220k or so, so modestly above the local average price for a semi.

I think it was the New Statesman podcast that noted that Red Wall type places which still have a functioning housing market and new builds on the outskirts where new people come in (around here often East European migrants buying their 1st or 2nd house), have had their comfort zone made tighter by £££ more on the mortgage payments. They are generally politically grumpy, and politically homeless for some time - swinging perhaps from Ashfield Independent to Reform.

Wasn't it Geoff Hoon who was leafletting in Ashfield many years ago and said he could not believe the number of shiny new cars on every drive?

I still don't understand the car market. It used to be that when you drove through the, er, rougher areas of town, the quality of cars dropped - visibly older and rustier and less shiny. No longer the case - if you ignore the housing and just look at the cars, you can no longer tell whether you're in Altrincham or Wythenshawe. How have cars got so affordable?

There are several sides to that afaics.

1 - New cars bought on finance have gone from about half to 80-90% since the millennium.
2 - Cars last a lot longer, and don't rust anything like as much. Average age is up from about 6.5 years to about 9.5 years over 20 years.
3 - Mileage driven has fallen, by about 20% over 20 years (regardless of COVID), so condition should be better (?).
4 - The cost of running has not increased, except perhaps marginally, in real terms, over the last 15 years.

Kemi keeps dropping words & phrases such as ‘shafted’, ‘half-arsed’ into the discourse, as well as telling Sir Keir ‘he doesn’t have the balls’ . Is it going to establish a view of her as straight talking, or rude? John Rentoul has noted his displeasure with it a couple of times

Labour has blocked every single measure we’ve put forward to cut immigration and stop abuse of the system.

Now they’re pushing one half-arsed proposal — it’s weak, it won’t work. It’s time they stopped playing games and backed our Deportation bill.

https://x.com/kemibadenoch/status/1920739530862186504?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q

Personally, I think it demeans her, makes it harder to take her seriously, and displays a lack of gravitas. There's plenty of ways to make a forceful point without slipping into rudeness.

Bollocks.

FPT @Luckyguy1983

Net Zero is starting to now run into economic reality with electric cars and deindustrialisation in a way it wasn't in the 2010s.

To go further, we will have to accept real economic damage being done now, with the hope that our global leadership on it galvanises a faster transition to Net Zero worldwide.

Will we?

To put the actual argument to one side, it was interesting to find that even Reform voters aren't that fussed about Net Zero - only 9% picked it as an issue. It's very much an internet meme.

Yet Farage considers this the "next Brexit". That feels like a fumble to me. They should stick to national identity and immigration.

https://www.ft.com/content/ecb81e0e-11f6-469b-86ef-8e29996b9019
https://www.moreincommon.org.uk/media/2cyg5l1m/more-in-common-post-election-briefing-4.pdf

I'd say that Lincs is the one to watch, again. The new Reform Mayor Andrea Jenkins, and also her boss (?) Zia Yusuf, have been leading with green-bashing, and Lincs is the only place where they have both Mayor and control of the Council.

Yes Lincs is reported to now have 12k green jobs and a green economy worth £1.2bn, according to the Local Enterprise Partnership.

The low carbon and energy economy, already worth £1.2bn per annum to Greater Lincolnshire, holds exceptional potential offering an unprecedented level of private investment of £60bn over the next fifteen years.
https://www.greaterlincolnshirelep.co.uk/priorities-and-plans/game-changers/green-energy/

If they want to recreate the 1970s or 1950s, that might not be the place to start.

Apparently net zero costs a bomb, right, so we're going to scrap that woke lefty nonsense, right, and go back to the good old days with British power stations burning British coal, right, who wants wind turbines or pylons anyway, right.

I know that "Net Zero" is completely the wrong messaging, but the goal of energy independence is a good one. The environment needs to be tret as a bonus rather than the objective. Green energy is how we regain our place of power, no longer at the whim of Putin or money markets, we not only generate free energy but we can design build and export the technology.

It should be a no-brainer. But "investment" is seen to be "subsidy" and thus "who will pay for it"

Told you all, cash is pretty much only used by dodgy people to conduct crimes.

Revealed: Oliver Oakes resigned days after brother arrested with ‘large amount of cash’

Exclusive: William Oakes charged with ‘transferring criminal property’ and remanded in custody

Oliver Oakes, who resigned abruptly as Alpine Formula One team principal this week, did so just days after his brother William, a fellow director at Hitech Grand Prix, was arrested.

The Telegraph can reveal that William Oakes, 31, who is listed as a director of Hitech Grand Prix on Companies House, was arrested in the Silverstone Park area last Thursday, and charged with “transferring criminal property” last Friday. He was in possession of a large amount of cash, according to police. He has been remanded in custody.

A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police said: “William Oakes, 31, of Rugby was charged with transferring criminal property on Friday, May 2 after he was stopped in the Silverstone Park area in Northamptonshire on Thursday, May 1, 2025 in possession of a large amount of cash. He appeared before Northampton Magistrates’ Court on Saturday, May 3, and remanded in custody.”

Oliver Oakes, who was at the Miami Grand Prix at the time, declined to comment when approached by The Telegraph. He handed in his resignation earlier this week. His whereabouts are currently unknown. He is understood to have flown to Dubai following Sunday’s Miami Grand Prix.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/formula-1/2025/05/08/oliver-oakes-alpine-resigned-days-police-raid-silverstone/

If it was all in coins, think how many children he could have choked!