The Joy of Six 1578"In the days that followed RNLI crew members found pictures of themselves strewn across social media. Online posts described the search and rescue workers as 'traitors', falsely alleging that they had housed asylum seekers and were moving them to secret locations. Some posts included volunteer's addresses and phone numbers, putting them and their families at heightened risk."Nicola Kelly says the RNLI are heroes, not traitors. Sian Norris brings us a shocking story: "Domestic abuse victims in England and Wales are facing arrest when calling the emergency services for help, according to new data published by Women in Prison. The charity ... (more) |
A different story of hope for Liberalism in the 21st CenturyThe failures are plain to see. Rivers are treated as drains. Homes are left exposed to floods and heat. Public services are forced to pay tomorrow for damage that should have been prevented today. Families face higher bills, weaker services and a natural world in retreat, while Westminster still asks its narrowest question. Has GDP gone up? GDP is not the enemy. It measures economic activity, and that still has value. The mistake is treating this narrow measure as the test of national success. A business would not sell its factory roof to flatter this year's accounts while exposing its ... (more) |
Latest voting intention and leadership ratings opinion pollsWelcome to my summary of the latest national voting intention polls for the next general election, along with the latest MRP projections and party leadership ratings. If you'd like to find out more about how polls work, how reliable they are and how to make sense of them, check out my book, Polling UnPacked: the History, Uses and Abuses of Political Opinion Polls, or sign up for my weekly email, The Week in Polls: General election voting intention polls PollsterConLabLDGrnRefLab leadFieldwork Find Out Now 18% (nc) 25% (-1) 11% (-1) 12% (nc) 23% (nc) 2% (vs Ref) 16/9 GB YouGov ... (more) |
A Week in Politics #6An RNLI lifeboat (Photo: Liverpool Echo) Ahead of the Lib Dem conference in Brighton, may I wish all my friends and fellow party members a productive and enjoyable conference. I love conference and used to attend annually, but things have changed since children started school. It can be challenging to be both a parent and a political activist, and spending four days in Brighton isn't realistic. Anyway, I am returning to me weekly political updates, which I started earlier in the year. I aim to ensure this becomes a regular feature and will certainly appear on most weekends going forward. ... (more) |
Victoria Collins MP writes.. The ask that changes everythingThere's a moment every candidate remembers. Not the selection meeting, not the count on election night but the moment before when someone else believed in you, when someone asked you to stand. For most of us, we'd never have got there on our own. Someone else saw it first. That's the thread I kept coming back to recently, when the Joint Candidates Sub Committee brought together our Diversity Affiliated Organisations and Campaign Groups to talk about candidates. We heard a lot of honest, thoughtful feedback about our approvals and selection process – what's working well, and where we must keep ... (more) |
Fifty yearsOn a random afternoon, one Saturday we took the tube and blinked into the light, through cash turnstiles and up steep steps to concrete terracing and unexpected levels in among the best of crowds; a step, little enough, that opened doors onto an avenue of decades with twists and turns and not a few dead-ends – but gathering new lives and shaping, being shaped by, them in endless reinvention, while the cycles turn and VCC delivers us, sometimes. On and on and always there we travel. Up the Gun!! (more) |
The Independent View: To get Britain growing again, we must cut the cost of doing businessAs the Liberal Democrats gather in Brighton, some of the discussion will focus on how to build a stronger, more productive and increasingly inclusive economy. The Director General of the British Chambers of Commerce argues that at a key component of this debate should be consideration of how to cut the costs of doing business. On a recent visit to Lancashire, I met some incredible businesses from the manufacturing, construction, retail, and hospitality sectors. They all told me how squeezed they felt by rising cost pressures. But the picture that emerged from our conversations, wasn't just of the pain businesses ... (more) |
Is "Let Bartlet Be Bartlet" good advice or not?The latest edition of the email newsletter for my podcast, Political Fictions, is out and you can also read it in full below. But if you'd like to get future editions emailed direct to you as soon as they are published, sign up now: Get the books As well as covering some books in the podcast, we also mention others in the newsletter's bonus content. You can browse all the books mentioned and get them for yourself via my Bookshop.org page (affiliate link). The West Wing: Let Bartlet Be Bartlet [IMG: A handwritten note from the TV episode: Let Barlet ... (more) |
Why Liberals must take power away from the media billionairesIn a guest post for Liberal England, Donnachadh McCarthy argues that its time for another Reform Act - one that would remove the power of the billionaire owners who dominate our media. Radical liberalism has always been in the vanguard of the centuries long march from rule by aristocratic elites toward greater democracy. Whether that was the great Reform Acts of the 19th century or the Universal Suffrage Acts of the 20th century. But the final transfer of real power to the people has yet to be completed. Because for as long as the billionaire class own our media, they ... (more) |
Can Britain build a sovereign military AI?On Monday evening, during our APPG AI meeting in the House of Lords, we discussed whether Britain could develop its own sovereign artificial-intelligence language models for military use. One speaker with expertise in military AI suggested that this would not be feasible, at least initially, given the cost involved. The Chief of the Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, said that Project ASGARD is helping British soldiers make faster decisions and save time in combat operations through AI agents and targeted large language models (LLMs), with the capability being developed and tested by soldiers in Estonia. The Army ... (more) |