Best Of

Been busy and now catching up.

1. Burnham has buggered it. Clearly has no better ideas for how he’d do the job, and doesn’t even seem to have worked out a coherent path to displacing Starmer anyway.

2. The hatred of Starmer, stirred up by right-wing media, and left-wing backbenchers, remains wholly out of proportion. Having said that, the ID cards “announcement” is another proof point of his inability to do any kind of retail politics. Whatever one’s option of ID cards, it’s really not obvious what the connect is with “out of control migration”.

2a. Involvement from Palantir? Ugh. Kill with fire.

3. Reform’s former Welsh leader being convicted of taking money from the Russians ought to be big news, as should Reform’s pathetic apeing of US anti-vax and anti-science memes. Reform would be an existential disaster for the country, beyond anything Burnham or even Corbyn could wreak.

4. Corbyn/Sultana have also buggered it. Wouldn’t be surprised to see Corbyn lose Islington North in 2029.

Great Britain is now the most dysfunctional country in the western world

Discuss

In many ways it has a distinct resemblance to the old USSR in about 1978

In the western world? We're middling on most measures; on things like HDI, happiness etc we're only bested by the Nordics, Australia etc.

I cannot think of a significant western nation which is worse run than Britain. Italy used to be our escape clause - "at least we're not as bad as Italy" - but they now have a stable government compared to ours, a more sensible foreign policy. and they have just taken over us by GDP in PPP

Greece, perhaps? But their economy is now doing notably better than ours

A rum do

If GDP per capita (even with PPP) were a good measure of human welfare then people in the US wouldn't be celebrating the assassination of a US healthcare CEO, or spending several days filling out their tax returns because of regulatory capture, or stabbing poor Ukrainian girls to death on public transport.

This is where the Reform narrative fails. We can all look at the wildly successful US economy and understand there is quite a bit more to life than the mess they find themselves in.

Very strong support..

@YouGov
SNAP POLL/ From what you have seen or heard, do you support or oppose the proposal to introduce a digital ID card system in Britain?

Support: 42%
Oppose: 45%

By 2024 vote
Lab: 51% support / 35% oppose
Con: 50% / 44%
Lib Dem: 49% / 39%
Reform: 22% / 69%

https://x.com/YouGov/status/1971600117544194105

https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/survey-results/daily/2025/09/26/aaac5/1?utm_source=daily_question&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=daily/2025/09/26_question_1

42% isn't very strong. It's lower than I was expecting.

We were told yesterday that "The thing is ID cards are very popular with the public"

Very strong support..

@YouGov
SNAP POLL/ From what you have seen or heard, do you support or oppose the proposal to introduce a digital ID card system in Britain?

Support: 42%
Oppose: 45%

By 2024 vote
Lab: 51% support / 35% oppose
Con: 50% / 44%
Lib Dem: 49% / 39%
Reform: 22% / 69%

https://x.com/YouGov/status/1971600117544194105

https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/survey-results/daily/2025/09/26/aaac5/1?utm_source=daily_question&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=daily/2025/09/26_question_1

42% isn't very strong. It's lower than I was expecting.

We were told yesterday that "The thing is ID cards are very popular with the public"

I suspected this would happen . Polling hypothetical scenarios often leads to big changes once a policy is announced. This wasn’t helped by another major fail of the No 10 comms team .

I am getting the feeling this wasn’t sufficiently stress tested/focus grouped. Indeed, I’m not even sure if it was. I think Mahmood and Starmer were desperate for some “tough on border security” announcements and signed up to whatever some Home Office mandarin put in front of them.

Starmer should have held a proper news conference. And they should have released detailed plans and how those without smartphones would get the ID . The policy should have clearly stated that the primary role was for work and people wouldn’t be forced to use it to access services .

He should have announced a consultation on this to the House of Commons. He has no electoral mandate for a policy which was not in the manifesto.

Maybe politicians ought to be asking themselves how they transformed a country in which you almost never had to show ID to do anything [unless you were going abroad from an airport or ferry terminal] into one in which apparently ID cards are needed. You could open a bank account with nothing more than a gas bill until relatively recently IIRC, and society didn't collapse as a result.

The really depressing bit of this is that the problems which all the pointless ID checking stuff portends to solve are not being solved, and indeed seem to be getting worse. It's basically a displacement activity in the "make it look like we are trying to look like we are doing something" category.

Meanwhile, my accountant tells me that an 75 year old trustee of a charity for whom they are doing the accounts has just resigned because he's unable to fulfil the ID requirements the accountant has to impose on them.

One of the big fallacies of modern politics is that laws like this don't really cost anything beyond a little bit of inconvenience; actually they are steadily strangling the country to death.