Rob Ford

These are my right wing principles, if you don’t like them I have others

I've been involved in several citizens' assemblies inc. parliament's Climate Assembly UK & adult social care assembly

This is the first UK government CA...they can be excellent sources of evidence to inform policy making but the design, engagement, and what happens afterwards right really matters!

Citizens' assemblies | Institute for Government What are citizens' assemblies and how do they work?

Darren Jones is due to announce a citizens' assembly as part of the government's consultation on digital ID cards

What is a citizens' assembly and how have they been used before?

See our handy @instituteforgovernment.org.uk explainer ⬇️

Ah ok - I sympathise with a lot of these points - am between teaching classes now but will return to this when I have more time to think

Feels…bold to claim French system represents a solution to fragmentation, volatility and polarisation given French politics right now!

Brevity's got soul.

🌍 Why do not all immigrant groups support progressive parties?

➡️ @korinlind.bsky.social & @antvalentim.bsky.social show immigrants from established democracies are more likely to back green parties than those from (post-)authoritarian regimes www.cambridge.org/core/journal... #FirstView

The death of deliverism And what comes next

Some characteristically thoughtful engagement with my deliverism essay here from @aveek18.bsky.social, who I think does an excellent job of pushing beyond the debates I discuss to set out what needs investigating and how we should think about the potential implications of different findings

As an IR professor, it's depressing that this is outperforming all others as the best theory of US foreign policy

'Farage lost and blamed Muslims. The data doesn't support his suspicion' - LabourList Labour’s third-place finish in Gorton and Denton was a sobering result for Sir Keir Starmer. But Nigel Farage’s…

"Reform does not need to win diverse urban seats outright to reshape the political landscape. It only needs to normalise the idea that losses there are somehow suspect. Once that logic takes hold, any unfavourable result can be reframed as a problem with the electorate rather than the message."

The impact of Brexit on immigration to the UK A new analysis finds that Brexit raised the number of foreign-born workers in the UK by about 200,000, but resulted in a more dramatic shift in the countries of origin.

The impact of Brexit on UK immigration - new research by @johnspringford.bsky.social & me for @centreeuropeanref.bsky.social & @ukandeu.bsky.social

Brexit

a) reduced EU-origin employees by 785K (2.3% of workforce)
b) increased non-EU origin employees by 992K (2.95%)

www.cer.eu/insights/imp...

Cem Özdemir: Das Auto der Zukunft YouTube video by GrueneBW

Another way in which an Özdemir win would matter: in an age of greenlash, Germany's car-making homeland would have voted in a minister-president who champions electric cars while his CDU opponent worships the internal combustion engine.

www.youtube.com/shorts/_BsIt...

An Özdemir win would matter in another sense too. 7 decades after the first "guest workers" came to the federal republic, he would be the first minister-president of a German state to have Turkish roots. It wasn't a big factor in the campaign - people just like him (⬇️) - but is a moment nonetheless.

Polls have closed in the first of this year's five German state elections, in prosperous Baden-Württemberg. It's looking like a remarkable win-from-behind by the Greens under @oezdemir.de. Full results over the course of the evening.

‘Why the hell am I doing this?’ The man navigating Manchester’s biggest job Students cheating via AI and international applications ‘tanking’ – Duncan Ivison is at the helm of a big ship in stormy waters

Over the past few months, I've been meeting Duncan Ivison, who in my view has the most important job in Manchester. I wanted to ask the vice chancellor of @officialuom.bsky.social about its reliance on China, the threat of AI and its relationship to the city.

manchestermill.co.uk/why-the-hell...

Start of the story: It has been twenty-five years since a report of original research was last submitted to our editors for publication, making this an appropriate time to revisit the question that was so widely debated then: What is the role of human scientists in an age when the frontiers of scientific inquiry have moved beyond the comprehension of humans? No doubt many of our subscribers remember reading papers whose authors were the first individuals ever to obtain the results they described. But as metahumans began to dom-nate experimental research, they increasingly made their findings available only via DNT (digital neural transfer), leaving journals to publish second-hand accounts translated into human language. Without DNT humans could not fully grasp prior developments nor effectively utilize the new tools needed to conduct research, while metahumans continued to improve DNT and rely on it even more. Journals for human audiences were reduced to vehicles of popularization, and poor ones at that, as even the most brilliant humans found themselves puzzled by translations of the latest findings.

In 2000, Ted Chiag published a short story in Nature that started like this.

It’s been on my mind a lot these days.

Definitely recommend it and Chiang’s science fiction if you don’t know it already.

Over and over:

Either the ridiculously reckless Trump gamble kind of works out, in which case they learn they are unstoppable God-kings immune to consequences, or it doesn't and there are terrible ramifications for... mostly other people.

So utterly bleak.

The Two Deprivations Are poorer constituencies going green of turquoise?

10/ Thanks a lot for reading. The full article is here: parables.substack.com/p/the-two-de...
May be of interest to @sundersays.bsky.social @benansell.bsky.social @emmaburnell.bsky.social @christabelcoops.bsky.social @anandmenon.bsky.social

Intense Partridge vibes on display here

Between all the “cat ladies” and “angry Muslims” in Gorton and Denton you have to wonder why Goodwin ever wanted to represent this group of voters?

The problem for the govt is it is the govt. The truth will out: savings won’t arrive, costs will. And then the electorate will be angry at the betrayal, and rightly so. All of this is grimly predictable yet here we are with the most senior people in politics playing a dangerous game of make believe

We’ve heard a lot of pious talk from the PM an senior colleagues about populists who offer false solutions and ignore real problems. Yet here we have the Home Secretary offering a false solution while she and her Treasury colleagues ignore real problems.

Right now govt is making up an obviously false “saving” to justify its imm, while ignoring the obviously true cost of that policy (treasury projections assume a level of net migration Home Sec opposes and which is unlikely to happen). And these ppl wonder why trust in politics is declining.

'Starmerism' is being unbothered by such trivial concerns as 'is that even true, though?' or even follow-up questions like 'is this lie even a useful one for us to tell?'

No 10, Treasury, the Home Secretary's own team and the perm secretary should not let senior ministers make up stats.

Its a breach of the code to do it deliberately. Some of those involved may not realise this wasn't just sleight of hand on a 30 year lifetime cost, but a false claim about the policy

This was policy-based evidence-making used to give the backbenchers a soundbite & a challenge (where are you getting the £10 billion from) on the hope they won't spot it is both in 30 years + just made-up

But 2026 immig policy does seem to cost about £7-14 billion by eliminating net migration

The government is willing - as a political choice - to pay significant fiscal costs to get immigration down

But it can not fabricate fiscal savings of its settlement policy by presenting numbers which don't reflect its policy at all.

bsky.app/profile/sund...

Estimated lifetime net fiscal costs for care workers and their adult dependants

Document - which gets to £9.5 bn LIFETIME, then rounds it up to £10 billion - does not pretend it is trying to compare government policy to delay with not delaying.

Home Secretary's speech, "if not, we will see a £10 billion drain on public finances" pretends it did

www.gov.uk/government/p...