Study suggests telling people how burdensome or restrictive migration controls are does more to shift their views on migration than trying to persuade them of the benefits of migration
Immigration salience - by local area
Most affluent: 43%
2nd most affluent: 44%
Middle fifth: 41%
Second most deprived: 41%
Most deprived: 38%
Ipsos issues index, Feb 2026
Time will tell if this is the beginning of bolder action to follow, to move beyond a national framework to action that addresses risks of economic pessimism, declining trust, polarised politics and a more febrile online ecosystem
Overall, its a big step forward and responds to the call for a national plan raised in our State of Us research last year with @belongnetwork.bsky.social
www.britishfuture.org/wp-content/u...
Social media is recognised as a driver of division, yet the commitments to increase accountability + educate against misinformation also fail to reflect the scale of challenge as amplify dangerous conspiracies + explicit hate
Parallel govt announcements to make settlement harder for migrants and refugees will also create significant new barriers to the new proposals for integration, who face less certainty and potential barriers to jobs + housing from prolonged 'unsettlement'
The strategy contains new commitments to tackling anti-Muslim hate & anti-Semitism, much needed after recent events globally + at home. As
@sundersays.bsky.social
notes, a prominent gap still remains on what govt can do to stem rising racist hate from an emboldened, ethnonationalist far right
A strategy that recognises the overlap between broad cohesion and targeted counter-extremism to reduce threats to society also untangles the knots these areas have faced before, sometimes unhelpfully conflating Prevent with community schemes; sometimes treating cohesion + CE in rigid siloes
The Pride in Place programme offers useful people-powered funding, although as we have written this is likely to centre on high streets and job creation over cohesion. It is positive to see more dedicated funding toward community spaces and initiatives
www.britishfuture.org/the-pride-in...
Cohesion finally gets cross- department government focus. So often in the past govt action was reactive and crisis-led. It is a step-forward to see the strategy think long-term about preventing flashpoints, identifying threats faster and improve measuring of what action makes a difference
Pleased to see the government launch a national strategy for community cohesion today. Some initial thoughts on its strengths and gaps 🧵
www.gov.uk/government/p...
GB News is both broadcasting + clipping "there is a genocide happening in this island" due to immigration and demographic change, by Thomas Corbett-Dillon, a former digital campaign adviser to Johnson's Conservatives.
"A full impact assessment has not been produced for this instrument as no, or no significant, impact on the private, voluntary or public sector is foreseen." Just off the top of my head the potential interaction with local authority homelessness and social care duties feels significant?
Those first few responses got a chuckle out of me.
NEW: After Gorton & Denton, how should we understand the threat to Labour's left?
Big new @persuasionuk.bsky.social report out with @38degrees.bsky.social on 'progressive defectors' - Lab 2024 switchers to Greens, Plaid, SNP, Lib Dems.
Who are they, who are they not & what's moving them? 🧵
Really good @bunkerpod.bsky.social podcast on Reform’s ICE plans and how to fight the narrative, with the excellent @sundersays.bsky.social and @zoegrunewald.bsky.social
podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/t...
Greens now in second place ahead of Labour for the first time in a new YouGov poll, and just two points behind Reform.
Lowest ever rating for Keir Starmer's party
REF: 23% (-1)
GRN 21% (+4)
LAB 16%(-2)
CON 16%(-2)
LDEM 14%(nc)
This policy is bad for community cohesion.
You don’t build confident, contributing neighbours on rolling 30 month visas. The current 5‑year route is how people plan for the future and fully join our communities.
The Danish model won’t work here.
www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...
They preach sovereignty then demand vassalage
This is not a reasoned political response. Labour has spent two years making all the voting groups who backed the Greens feel unwelcome and unheard, and now attacks them for daring to back someone else. They believe Labour isn’t listening and Starmer seems determined to prove them right
An independent commission of inquiry into the 2022 Leicester violence has published its report here. The panel, chaired by Professor Juan E Mendez, was supported by SOAS, LSE and the Monitoring Group. [A seperate govt-commissioned inquiry has yet to publish its findings]
www.leicesterinquiry.org
Chart showing Reform voters are far more obsessed with immigration than supporters of far right parties in mainland Europe.
Fascinating. Reform UK voters are way more obsessed with immigration that those who support their populist radical right and extreme right counterparts in continental Europe.
(Source: news.gallup.com/poll/701990/...)
This is a massive shift which would upend the lives of millions - not just the nearly half million directly threatened but their families. It would abandon a basic principle of law that changes are not retrospectively applied.
I've been meaning to run this analysis for a while: the probability of voting Labour at GE2024 in seats *gained* by Labour was higher for people who were younger, more liberal, on the left economically, more likely to favour immigration, do not think immigration is the most important issue, etc.
The political effects of X's feed algorithm https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10098-2 Received: 16 December 2024 Accepted: 4 January 2026 Published online: 18 February 2026 Open access • Check for updates Germain Gauthier,5, Roland Hodler?5, Philine Widmer35 & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya3,4,5 m Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects'. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk's platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users' feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X's algorithm has persistent effects on users' current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.
A new paper shows that less than 2 months of exposure to Twitter’s algorithmic feed significantly shifts people’s political views to the right.
Moving from chronological feed to the algorithmic feed also increases engagement.
This is one of the most concerning papers I’ve read in awhile.
Column: why the government should rethink its major settlement reforms, which if rushed through, would harm integration and undermine progress on child poverty, gender equality + workplace protections against exploitation.
(Even the politics doesn't work either)
www.easterneye.biz/keir-starmer...
wealth concentration is already 200% as bad at is was in 2020. think about that
Admissions that the UK government knows that Israel has committed war crimes. It needs now to publish its full assessment and then be held to account for its support for Israel.
I wrote for the Guardian about why Jim Ratcliffe's talk of Britain being "colonised" by immigrants crosses the line between legitimate debate and inflammatory rhetoric. It fuses echoes of Powellism with great replacement conspiracies of "civilisational erasure"
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
We’re not in Kansas anymore latest:
Green + Reform 57%
Labour + Conservative 38.6%
In 2024 (18 months ago!) Lab + Con was 81.6%
