Pity they didn’t do anything when claims emerged of Russia interfering with the Brexit vote.

Yes, even if they never hit these “heights” again, the example of Europe is going to make electoral reform a real uphill fight.

I’m hoping more sensible thinking prevails - with PR, you’d likely have a majority Labour government for most of the time, backed by Greens and Lib Dems. Gordon Brown seems to be driving a lot of the ideas for improving our democracy but his focus seems to currently be the House of Lords, which is an easier one to implement (although likely not in a way that suits me - it’s sortition all the way for me), but I could see him chewing this one over afterwards. Realistically, Labour won’t do anything now but if their support collapses they may need other parties to prop them up after the next election and PR is likely to be the price for it.

It’s a concern of mine too. Next election we may have an incumbent Labour party that has done little to improve people’s lives (potentially despite their best efforts because the economy and national infrastructure is wrecked) and a Tory party wrecked for a generation and Reform could emerge as the protest vote or, worse, Reform merge with the Tories and Farage leads a BNP-lite party to victory. The latter might doom the Conservatives forever but after BoJo and Trump getting elected, and the rise of the right across Europe Farage worming his way to PM is not something we should dismiss too quickly.

It’s not too difficult to stick to that because here it’d be largely the Mail and a few tabloids, which tend not to be used in the serious news sections here anyway unless it’s a piss-take of the Mail.

That’s like shooting fish in a barrel. A harder challenge would be to find someone in Reform who isn’t awful.

Is Sunak really so stupid

Yes.

They are never going to say to vote tactically but resources will be targeted at constituencies where they stand a good chance of winning, which will have a similar effect. I’d respect them more if they said “we aren’t going to win in X, so vote Lib Dem/Green/SNP to really stick the boot in” as it might make all the difference.

The thing about Clacton is polling suggests Labour are in second, with Farage well ahead. So an argument could be made for Labour to step it up a gear there because if Farage messes up (perhaps by continuing to be a Putin stooge) they could sneak between a split Tory/Reform vote and get a cheeky win. Anything to keep Farage out of Parliament as his influence is corrosive. They may be calculating that Farage as an MP might be the nail in the Tory’s coffin for a generation but it may bite them in the arse.

It would have been difficult for him to deny as he was filmed doing it.

I bet Tennant is worried now as Sunak gives him both barrels and even Starmer is sticking the boot in, or whatever that half-arsed nonsense is all about.

That’s him.

Weird coincidence that this happened as four men were trespassing on his home in Yorkshire but it doesn’t seem like a coordinated thing.

Do not let the bigots and bullies win

Said one of the worst bigots and bullies in a party largely made up of some pretty terrible people.

It is also understood that the party will return £100,000 in donations to the businessman that he has made since Sir Keir Starmer took charge of Labour.

…

Posting on X, Mr Craig said he had “enjoyed the odd bet for fun” throughout his life, adding: "A few weeks ago when I thought I would never win this seat I put a bet on the Tories to win here with the intention of giving any winnings to local charities.

He clearly has more than enough cash, just donate straight to charity.

That would be the dream scenario and a decade back I’d be fine with rolling those dice but then BoJo and Trump got elected and I worry that an “outsider” populist candidate could pull off the same trick.

Seems perfect.

Brilliant!

That’s the right wing media for you. I don’t have them blocked in my newsfeed so I can see what they are up to and it is a completely different world - pretty much anything green gets hammered.

Does he want to destroy the Conservative party and rebuild it in his image[?]

This is my worry - his sudden U-turn suggests someone has had serious words with him about how this is the best time to strike as the stars have aligned to show a route for him to get into power. He doesn’t need to win (m)any seats, he just needs to wreck the Tories chances in a number of seats, dragging them to historic lows and then propose some kind of merger as the best way to remove the threat. With so few MPs left and a desperation in the party, he can pitch himself as the best candidate to beat Starmer and, he may well be.

It would make the Tory party into the National Front Lite but they’re already most of the way there:

all these policies would be at home in a Thatcher-era National Front manifesto, and they are all now promoted by the Conservative party.

It Can’t Happen Here?

Indeed:

We have a traditional compact with voters. They might suspect that we are self-promoting posh boys and money-grabbing wotsits, in politics for no good reasons. But if we are bstards, at least we have been competent bstards, ritually elected to clean up after Labour’s habitually profligate compassion. The last few years have ruined that. Without competency, we are just b*stards.

Quite an amazing thing to see coming from a Tory. It’s like arguing “at least the trains ran on time”, except the Tories can’t manage that.

And “Labour’s habitually profligate compassion”? Things like reducing hospital waiting times? I suppose they did work hard to reverse that.

George Monbiot wrote a piece about them a couple if years ago: Welcome to the freeport, where turbocapitalism tramples over British democracy:

Their objectives were set by an advisory panel chaired by the two most ardent supporters of freeports in the government: Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. The panel was composed of two public officials, two economists, five industry lobbyists, one cities advocate, one venture capitalist and two members of dark-money thinktanks (lobby groups that refuse to reveal who funds them). No trade unions, political rights, environmental or public interest groups were represented.

…

There is a further, extraordinary aspect, which is beginning to come to public attention. While the “tax sites” and “customs sites” in a freeport cover a maximum of a few hundred hectares, the operators are allowed to set an “outer boundary” with a diameter of up to 45km (28 miles). Where a “very strong case”, with a “clear economic rationale”, is made, the area can be even wider. There must have been some very strong cases, because some of these zones are 75km from point to point. The Plymouth and South Devon freeport incorporates the whole of Dartmoor and the entire South Hams region. The Southampton freeport includes the New Forest and the Isle of Wight. The East Midlands zone extends from Nottingham to Leicester and Burton upon Trent to Upper Broughton. In Suffolk and Essex, everywhere from Sudbury to Felixstowe and Needham Market to Clacton-on-Sea is included. The Humber freeport boundary extends from Spurn Head to Howden; Teesside’s from Peterlee to Staithes and Redcar to Dinsdale; East London’s from Barking to London Gateway, and Liverpool’s from Birkenhead to Urmston.

What these boundaries mean is, as always, clear as mud. When I asked the government to show me the “very strong cases”, its spokesperson told me “we don’t publish that information”, then refused to elaborate. Perhaps it’s because the government has told private operators that the information contained in their bids is “commercially sensitive”. This is another way in which they’re protected from democracy: they are not subject to the transparency and accountability required of public bodies.

The Department for Levelling Up tells me: “It is categorically not the case that the entire area has been earmarked for development or has special planning status.” But if there is one thing we’ve learned in recent years, it’s to attend to what the written policy says, not to what the government says it says. I think I have now read every public official document on freeports in the United Kingdom, and I have found no such assurance. On the contrary, one of them states: “Outside of customs and tax sites, wider Freeport levers, including planning freedoms … should be targeted within the Freeport Outer Boundary.”

Understandably, all this opacity is beginning to cause alarm. Some people have proposed an even more sinister agenda: the government wants to turn these places into “charter cities”, corporate fiefs in which environmental and workplace protections are almost entirely stripped away. There is, as yet, no evidence of this. But if any senior politician is biddable and extreme enough to extend the stupidities of freeports, it is Liz Truss. Last month she started promoting the idea of low-tax, low-regulation “investment zones”. As usual, she seemed to have little idea what she meant by this: the line was probably fed to her by some unaccountable thinktank. Is it a repackaging of freeports, or something else?