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@paulhutcheon

Confirmed: Douglas Alexander is the new Scotland Secretary.

It is also an incredible comeback. He was in the Cabinet in the last Labour Government and was Scotland Sec under Tony Blair.

Yes that's a real bridge back to those heady days. Oasis reunion and now this.

Loved the 90s.

It was a glorious time. We didn’t realise how unnaturally, and artificially, lucky a time it was. All the way up until 11 September 2001. What followed was 24 years (and counting) of disaster after disaster, financial crisis after financial crisis, and political and economic stagnation.

In the mid to late 1990s we had low energy prices, a post Cold War peace dividend, golden demographics with a very low dependency ratio, affordable but buoyant housing market, naff but energetic popular culture, windfalls from bank demutualisations, a soaring stockmarket, and a string of very good summers peaking in 1995.

The England cricket team was shit though.

As we mentiomed a few weeks ago, it's notable that in yougov surveys the generations that were in their teens and ' twenties in the 60s and 90s are more nostalgic about those decades than other generations are of their respective youth decades.

I can't imagine a Farage or a Trump in the '90s. There was still an overwhelming sense that things would continue to improve, more carefully expressed than in earlier decades, but still definitely there.

Surprisingly big Cabinet reshuffle after Rayner resigned. Big hitters given big posts like Cooper to Foreign Secretary and Mahmood (rewarded after good work on prison reform and sentencing at Justice) to Home Secretary.

Lammy becomes DPM and will be a popular figure with Labour members as Rayner was but he no longer holds a great Office of State leaving the Foreign Office to replace Mahmood at Justice. The reshuffle means all the holders of a Great Office of State in the Cabinet and the PM have Oxbridge degrees, something which has not been the case in any Labour government before. Starmer going on an intellectually more heavyweight Cabinet then to contrast with Reform, none of whose MPs have Oxbridge degrees and to a lesser extent the Tories, of whom the party leader Kemi Badenoch and Shadow Foreign Secretary Priti Patel are non Oxbridge

It's not UNinteresting - but you seem a little obsessed with which universities people went to. Which is fine, but not a thing I think anyone bases their vote on.

Snobs might, especially some of the middle class voters in London and the South who lent their votes to Starmer last year but refused to vote for Corbyn and think Farage a populist lightweight

You don't need to be a snob to think Farage is a populist lightweight. You just need to be in possession of a functioning brain.

Surprisingly big Cabinet reshuffle after Rayner resigned. Big hitters given big posts like Cooper to Foreign Secretary and Mahmood (rewarded after good work on prison reform and sentencing at Justice) to Home Secretary.

Lammy becomes DPM and will be a popular figure with Labour members as Rayner was but he no longer holds a great Office of State leaving the Foreign Office to replace Mahmood at Justice. The reshuffle means all the holders of a Great Office of State in the Cabinet and the PM have Oxbridge degrees, something which has not been the case in any Labour government before. Starmer going on an intellectually more heavyweight Cabinet then to contrast with Reform, none of whose MPs have Oxbridge degrees and to a lesser extent the Tories, of whom the party leader Kemi Badenoch and Shadow Foreign Secretary Priti Patel are non Oxbridge

It's not UNinteresting - but you seem a little obsessed with which universities people went to. Which is fine, but not a thing I think anyone bases their vote on.

Snobs might, especially some of the middle class voters in London and the South who lent their votes to Starmer last year but refused to vote for Corbyn and think Farage a populist lightweight

You don't need to be a snob to think Farage is a populist lightweight. You just need to be in possession of a functioning brain.

So the third of voters now voting for Farage on your logic don't have a functioning brain?