Best Of

Well done to Plaid.

But 0% to 36% in one election cycle is pretty impressive too. Or should that be pretty worrying?

Good morning, everybody.

Adonis has told Guardian he thinks it shows how a group of voters will get behind whoever seems strongest/likeliest at the time to block Reform.

Seems to me there's a strong echo here of the exercise we went through which ultimately led to Brexit. No worries, chaps, we can block out all the concerns that these stupid people are expressing.

Until it was too late.

As with Brexit, the thing - I think - is to actually address the reasons large groups of people are unhappy with the existing parties.

Leaving the EU and whatever Reform claim to stand for are symptoms of more general discontent and could be addressed in other ways that actually solve some of the problems.

The next general election is going to be all about tactical voting. Britons are very good at tactical voting and centre-left Britons are especially good at it. One thing that I am a little more sure about today is that there is a majority of us who really hate Reform and its dishonest and divisive approach to politics, and I think that this majority may be more effective than people expect at locking Reform out of power.

Rather a shame, though, that there's unlikely to be any interest from that present majority to address the issues that motivate others to become Reform voters.

I don't think that is right at all. Labour is absolutely focused on fixing the asylum system so that those without a valid claim can be deported quickly, it is focused on cutting the huge backlog it inherited in the NHS, it is focused on housebuilding to deal with the massive housing shortage it inherited... but all of these things take time and so we will only see the results in coming years. To deal with the country's problems we need competence and steady progress, not populist slogans, scaremongering and scapegoating.

Lets consider housebuilding

The problem with housebuilding is that it's all very fine to say "We are committed to building more homes"

But on one side, the government is piling on more regulations and costs - see landfill pricing and the conflicts between safety, environmental and density. At another, local political NIMBYism is alive and well in the Labour Party.

So home building has collapsed in some areas. We see the latest band-aid policy is abandoning targets for affordable homes, in London.

For example, the rules about "No active air con in domestic" ignores modern air source heat pumps and the fact that electricity is decarbonising at steep rate. The lack of air con then leads to complicated geometries for flats - which then bumps into the desire for dual staircases in larger buildings. Result - less density, and a more complicated layout. Oh, and natural ventilation doesn't help much above 25c - which is why A/C is universal in modern homes being built in many European countries.

A rational approach to the problem is to look at all the oppositional factors and see which ones can be reduced rationally. A holistic plan.

Instead we get random efforts.

Well done to Plaid.

But 0% to 36% in one election cycle is pretty impressive too. Or should that be pretty worrying?

Good morning, everybody.

Adonis has told Guardian he thinks it shows how a group of voters will get behind whoever seems strongest/likeliest at the time to block Reform.

Would be interesting to see if Labour and Lib Dem supporters would vote Tory if the Tories are the best chance to stop Reform or is that going too far? Has there been any polling on this?

There has been some private polling which says yes but there's a huge caveat, the focus groups have picked up Robert Jenrick's and Katie Lam's recent comments and those tactical voters have said no now as they see nothing that distinguishes the Tories from Reform.

The thought of deporting people who are here lawfully is particularly repugnant to voters, see the Windrush scandal.

Marr: I thought Labour would fix everything. I was wrong
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7jA3PLbBYM

Starmer has to go bandwagon getting going again.

I had a great respect for Andrew Marr when he used to write for The Economist. Not so much, since then. But I'd have expected he would have enough contacts inside the Labour party to know there wasn't any plan for government, in which case he wouldn't have expected them to fix everything.

Unless he was another who thought just being Labour was the silver bullet.

I think lots of the media bought into every problem was down to the Tories being useless and all their drama of constantly changing the manager, and that even just a return to Blair or Cameron type technocratic middle ground management will little more will do the trick....the problem as John Gray said in his NS interview the world has changed a lot, the technocrats solutions to everything aren't working across the West and so you need well thought out change of direction and desire to go all in on it, get rid of the blockers, etc.

Your joking...not another one....

Meet Copilot Mode in Edge.
https://x.com/MicrosoftEdge/status/1981390159292629352

I found copilot gets in my way big-time. Or bigly, as I believe it's said nowadays.

The other day I asked Google a question about Pope Leo. Gemini informed me that there was no Pope Leo and in fact the Pope was still Francis.

Now admittedly I do make some very niche and nerdy queries when using Google, but even so it's amazing how frequently the AI summary is wrong. And if it's wrong about the sort of things I know about I assume it has similar levels of error with things I don't know. i.e. It's practically useless.

Hundreds of billions of dollars invested, driving up the price of electricity, diverting the computer industry away from a whole load of other problems that need work, and for what? Making up nonsense. Social media already produces a more than adequate supply of nonsense, we didn't need to get computers in on the act.

O/T but this will interest some of us (partly because of the possible reasons - and that it may be yet another enshittification).

https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/
https://about.biodiversitylibrary.org/about/future-of-bhl/

The way the world is going. There is something called Biodiversity Heritage Library which is a brilliant cooperative scheme to make as much natural science information and publications accessible online for free globally as possible, focussing on biodiversity but with lots of spinoffs e.g. whole runs of journals. It's enormously useful. "The world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives." So for instance if you want to find an 1839 dinosaur paper published in the British Association Annual Report, they're your helpers. LIkewise a 1906 paper on Dorset spiders (and in the same journal the Cerne Cartulary). For taxonomists without access to university libraries, and many with access, it's great.

It was based at the Smithsonian Institution. A small staff and the servers. Supported also by Internet Archive and AWS. A major way for the Smithsonian to fulfil its mission, one would think.

Now the Smithsonian some months back decided to pull the plug. Gave a year's notice, wef 1 January 2026, to be fair. BHL don't say what reaons if any were given. But it is having to leave, and to set up a new and independent arrangement, based more on private donations. I've just sent them something.