Best Of

Have we done the Tories in fourth place with YouGov?

Ref 23 (-2)

Lab 19 (+2)

GRN 18 (-1)

Con 17 (=)

LD 13 (-1)

I reckon it is the war that is behind a lot of this.

Hearing the focus groups are sympathetic to Starmer re Trump & the war.

Albeit Tories only 1% behind the Greens and only 6% separates them from top placed Reform with Yougov now.

If those are the voteshares in the NEV after the local and devolved elections in May and the Tories are 4th behind Reform, Labour and even the Greens though Kemi will be gone, there will be a VONC in her leadership from Tory MPs and she will then be replaced by Cleverly. So Kemi needs to get a better result than that, on the plus side for her Yougov have the Greens higher than most pollsters do

A £50 charity bet that Kemi either does not face a VONC by 1st September - or if she does, she survives it.

Interested?

Putting as much distance as possible between himself and Trump/Netanyahu is the gift that will keep on giving.

Badenoch had her chance but backed the wrong horse and Farage will always be seen as Trumps best buddy

Zack and Davey too but the market leader always benefits disproportionately and that can only be Starmer. Is it possible Labour could take the lead? I wouldn't rule it out. Trump is way beyond insane and Netanyahu is genuinely evil.

https://x.com/joecguinan/status/2036248591111438748

The British media have entirely invented a stand-his-ground Keir Starmer that bears zero relation to reality. He tried to give Trump access to the bases, the cabinet blocked him, then he invented a legal fig leaf and access was granted. This stuff is professional malpractice.

Book banning in Manchester: https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2026/03/school-book-banning-escalates-in-the-uk-as-greater-manchester-secondary-school-censors-scores-of-books/

That story is insane.
Sounds like something out of Trump's America.

Truer than (perhaps) you think

In the story, “AI” was used to create the list of books to ban.

Probably ChatGPT.

“AI” is actually just a really fancy way of guessing an output, based on the input. The guess is based on a vast amount of examples, which are used to create the model.

The vast majority of reports of “problematic books” and sites about problematic books, in English, are from Christian Right types on the US.

The training data for most AIs consists of scraping the internet.

So if you give a list of books to an “AI”, it will list as “problematic” those that offended MAGA type Americans.

A very good clue is that the list of banned stuff included Terry Pratchett and various Goth Vampire juvenile books - both are disliked, by such people, for writing about magic and monsters as if they aren’t super evil.

Yes, that occurred to me too.
But what is most disturbing is that there's no justification for any of this, and we seem to be importing a completely alien version of far right cultural warfare.
In the US, school boards have hijacked legal procedures to impose censorship; here, they're just making it up wholesale.

..“The fact it’s gone through safeguarding means Emily will never be able to work in a school again,” Roche from the SLG said.
During their investigations, the school referred to their statutory obligations under the government’s Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) and Keeping Children Safe in Education guidance documents and said that materials in the school should align to them.
There is in fact no statutory guidance for school libraries because there is no obligation in law to have either a school library or a school librarian. Following Index’s investigation into school library censorship in 2024, many librarians and supporting bodies have spoken to Index about the confusion this causes, with support for librarians and their books left to the whim of their schools’ senior teams...
..When Emily first started at the school, books like Heartstopper and Black Flamingo were in the library, but there wasn’t much in the way of an LGBTQ+ offering. On an open evening, she put those two books on a table. She says a parent complained to the school that he “didn’t want his son exposed to gender bending”.
“The school defended me and defended those books and their right to be in there, and then two years later, completely forgot about it and changed their mind and said they’re inappropriate,” she said.
Index believes this story is of huge public interest. It is an unprecedented attack on the freedom to read and intellectual freedom, where important safeguarding measures have been misused to threaten and target a school librarian. This librarian is no longer able to do her job. Without this story being surfaced and changes being made, the risk is that it will happen again...

A major feature of The Process State is that the Process is the Punishment.

“You have done nothing wrong. But under section 13.1.3.4 (b) we have to fuck your entire life.”

Another major feature is that it provides an opportunity for people of certain mindsets. Those that love ever more rules. Perhaps most of all, those who love using ever extending rules to tell people what to do. And those that adore using rules to inflict pain.

C.S. Lewis was exactly on the button on this. See “That Hideous Strength”

Book banning in Manchester: https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2026/03/school-book-banning-escalates-in-the-uk-as-greater-manchester-secondary-school-censors-scores-of-books/

That story is insane.
Sounds like something out of Trump's America.

Truer than (perhaps) you think

In the story, “AI” was used to create the list of books to ban.

Probably ChatGPT.

“AI” is actually just a really fancy way of guessing an output, based on the input. The guess is based on a vast amount of examples, which are used to create the model.

The vast majority of reports of “problematic books” and sites about problematic books, in English, are from Christian Right types on the US.

The training data for most AIs consists of scraping the internet.

So if you give a list of books to an “AI”, it will list as “problematic” those that offended MAGA type Americans.

A very good clue is that the list of banned stuff included Terry Pratchett and various Goth Vampire juvenile books - both are disliked, by such people, for writing about magic and monsters as if they aren’t super evil.

Yes, that occurred to me too.
But what is most disturbing is that there's no justification for any of this, and we seem to be importing a completely alien version of far right cultural warfare.
In the US, school boards have hijacked legal procedures to impose censorship; here, they're just making it up wholesale.

..“The fact it’s gone through safeguarding means Emily will never be able to work in a school again,” Roche from the SLG said.
During their investigations, the school referred to their statutory obligations under the government’s Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) and Keeping Children Safe in Education guidance documents and said that materials in the school should align to them.
There is in fact no statutory guidance for school libraries because there is no obligation in law to have either a school library or a school librarian. Following Index’s investigation into school library censorship in 2024, many librarians and supporting bodies have spoken to Index about the confusion this causes, with support for librarians and their books left to the whim of their schools’ senior teams...
..When Emily first started at the school, books like Heartstopper and Black Flamingo were in the library, but there wasn’t much in the way of an LGBTQ+ offering. On an open evening, she put those two books on a table. She says a parent complained to the school that he “didn’t want his son exposed to gender bending”.
“The school defended me and defended those books and their right to be in there, and then two years later, completely forgot about it and changed their mind and said they’re inappropriate,” she said.
Index believes this story is of huge public interest. It is an unprecedented attack on the freedom to read and intellectual freedom, where important safeguarding measures have been misused to threaten and target a school librarian. This librarian is no longer able to do her job. Without this story being surfaced and changes being made, the risk is that it will happen again...

Without knowing more about the school (State or indie? LEA, freestanding academy or chain?), it's hard to say what has gone wrong.

But one of the problems with the Academy model in general, and the Gove-inspired "Academies for all" model in particular, is that it requires more and wiser managers than most schools have available.

My guess is that some American-brained mad parent sent a scary letter to the school and they panicked because there was nobody more senior who could sit with them and say "don't worry, this is nonsense."

Yes the Polanski Greens are basically Corbyn lite attracting the same type of voters, mainly under 40 burdened by student debt and not owning a house and feeling capitalism does not work for them and willing to give tax and spend socialism a go. They are no longer the party of posh middle class environmentalists like Jonathan Porritt.

Green voters do though have some similarity with Reform voters though in that they are less likely to be financially comfortable than average

Isn't the reason that Green voters don't feel like capitalism is working for them that, in many cases, it isn't particularly? Not exclusively because it's so hard to escape the rental trap, but that being a very large factor. And that, in turn being linked to a change in small-c-conservatism from "pass a better life on to the next generation/enough evolution to prevent revolution" to "après moi le déluge".

And that's just another form of nihlism- that of the powerful, rather than the powerless.

Yes they are socialist as they don't have any capital mainly

Which raises the question: why did the Tories (2010-2024) shaft the young, rather than make little capitalists out of them?