Someone was arrested by police at a demonstration the other day for holding a sign which only stated facts about what was or wasn't illegal. It actually was a joke from Private Eye.
466 people were arrested today for holding signs, this government has shown multiple times that it just escalates in such scenarios, people really need to be writing to their Labour MPs and asking them politely how the situation is to be resolved. The numbers protesting are probably going to increase, so what does AN Local MP see as the end point? Thousands imprisoned? Escalation to force?
Yesterday a man was arrested for holding a cardboard sign supporting a prescribed terrorist organisation. This morning he was on the BBC national radio repeating the phrase and explaining again his support of it.
So my question now is whether somehow the BBC will be in trouble.
There's a piece in the Statesman about the takeover of the wider party by the Labour Right and the impact this is having on - especially - younger cohorts of membership:
There's a piece in the Statesman about the takeover of the wider party by the Labour Right and the impact this is having on - especially - younger cohorts of membership:
It's particularly telling that it's Labour Students objecting - they've traditionally been heavily tied to Labour Friends of Israel and the (overwhelmingly Zionist) Union of Jewish Students, and to the right of the party more generally.
The wording of that article is poor. I assume that when it talks about "Warwick Labour Club" and "Warwick Labour Movement" it is talking about the University rather than the county or district.
The councillor mentioned is in Coventry city, which isn't in the Warwickshire county or Warwick district. I believe that Grace Lewis was formally a student at Warwick University.
Does this matter? Maybe not, but given that the article is specifically talking about youth affiliates of Labour, it might have been more helpful to clarify exactly what they are talking about.
Also Corbyn's co-lead in the party-with-no-name Zarah Sultana is MP for Coventry South. Which contains many of the places where students at Warwick University live (Westwood, Earlsdon, Canley). So not a great surprise that they are supportive.
There's a piece in the Statesman about the takeover of the wider party by the Labour Right and the impact this is having on - especially - younger cohorts of membership:
It's particularly telling that it's Labour Students objecting - they've traditionally been heavily tied to Labour Friends of Israel and the (overwhelmingly Zionist) Union of Jewish Students, and to the right of the party more generally.
Yes, and I note in that context the anecdote about the volunteer's employer being contacted by an MP and told to 'not trust them'.
The wording of that article is poor. I assume that when it talks about "Warwick Labour Club" and "Warwick Labour Movement" it is talking about the University rather than the county or district.
The CLP is the "Warwick and Leamington Labour Party"
The wording of that article is poor. I assume that when it talks about "Warwick Labour Club" and "Warwick Labour Movement" it is talking about the University rather than the county or district.
The CLP is the "Warwick and Leamington Labour Party"
Exactly - and to really confuse things, is Warwick university in Warwick (rhetorical)?
As shit as I thought Starmer was going to be, I didn't think banning Wikipedia would be part of that. The Wikimedia Foundation lost their court case today and have already said they will not bring in age verification on their sites.
As shit as I thought Starmer was going to be, I didn't think banning Wikipedia would be part of that. The Wikimedia Foundation lost their court case today and have already said they will not bring in age verification on their sites.
There has been some bleeting by MPs to the FT that the technology companies are being unfair by some form of malicious compliance:
"One senior government figure said ministers were frustrated by the “overzealous” application of the law by some platforms, amid suggestions that some companies are intentionally over-interpreting the legislation in order to undermine its credibility."
But of course if you are going to take a really loosely drafted piece of legislation and then make the penalties very large (potentially up to 10% of worldwide revenue), then companies are going to adopt a fairly risk averse approach.
And in this sense the fact that it's loosely drafted and thus malleable to interpretation comes out of the rather authoritarian bent of the Starmer cabinet and Starmer himself.
There's a piece in the Statesman about the takeover of the wider party by the Labour Right and the impact this is having on - especially - younger cohorts of membership:
It's particularly telling that it's Labour Students objecting - they've traditionally been heavily tied to Labour Friends of Israel and the (overwhelmingly Zionist) Union of Jewish Students, and to the right of the party more generally.
Yes, and I note in that context the anecdote about the volunteer's employer being contacted by an MP and told to 'not trust them'.
They discussed this on their podcast, starting at the bookmark. ISTM that if the MP identified themselves as such that would constitute abuse of public office:
And now people are being asked to delete photos from their devices to preserve water for the huge AI data centres that nobody asked for.
Not directly. But they voted by their actions for technology that required them.
But AI has been forced on people due to tech companies shoving it into everything, even when it makes things work worse.
I think the companies' view is "you can have it cheap and bad with AI, or expensive or good without". Then wait to see if people will open their wallets.
And now people are being asked to delete photos from their devices to preserve water for the huge AI data centres that nobody asked for.
Not directly. But they voted by their actions for technology that required them.
But AI has been forced on people due to tech companies shoving it into everything, even when it makes things work worse.
I think the companies' view is "you can have it cheap and bad with AI, or expensive or good without". Then wait to see if people will open their wallets.
It's capitalism that's ultimately to blame.
It's not even clear that AI is cheap - if it's using massive amounts of water and power, as seems to be the case, that will come at a cost. As far as I can see we're at a similar stage to early social media - rapid expansion and pushing it into every corner so that when the cost comes, either directly or through advertising and enshittification, people don't feel able to opt out. Part of the difficulty is that AI is pre-enshittified, so the pushing is much greater to force take-up.
And now people are being asked to delete photos from their devices to preserve water for the huge AI data centres that nobody asked for.
Not directly. But they voted by their actions for technology that required them.
But AI has been forced on people due to tech companies shoving it into everything, even when it makes things work worse.
I think the companies' view is "you can have it cheap and bad with AI, or expensive or good without". Then wait to see if people will open their wallets.
It's capitalism that's ultimately to blame.
It's not even clear that AI is cheap - if it's using massive amounts of water and power, as seems to be the case, that will come at a cost. As far as I can see we're at a similar stage to early social media - rapid expansion and pushing it into every corner so that when the cost comes, either directly or through advertising and enshittification, people don't feel able to opt out. Part of the difficulty is that AI is pre-enshittified, so the pushing is much greater to force take-up.
It's cheaper than paying people - that seems to be the main driver. But yes, it's definitely in the "let's try to put it everywhere" phase at the moment. There'll be some rolling back as it turns out that it's not sufficiently cheaper to make up for how much worse it is.
And now people are being asked to delete photos from their devices to preserve water for the huge AI data centres that nobody asked for.
Not directly. But they voted by their actions for technology that required them.
But AI has been forced on people due to tech companies shoving it into everything, even when it makes things work worse.
I think the companies' view is "you can have it cheap and bad with AI, or expensive or good without". Then wait to see if people will open their wallets.
It's capitalism that's ultimately to blame.
It's not even clear that AI is cheap - if it's using massive amounts of water and power, as seems to be the case, that will come at a cost.
I don't think AI is the primary driver here; I think this is all downstream of 'the cloud' in various forms being the only concrete idea tech (and by extension the wider economy) has for innovation, and so it keeps being re-purposed / re-badged. What we are actually seeing is an overbuild of datacentres - and an associated series of tech bubbles (helped along by massive concentrations of wealth looking for places to invest).
Most of the time 'AI enabled' is just a marketing badge rather than anything even vaguely concrete - and if LLMs, Agentic AI et al turn out to be expensive this will eventually be reflected in the cost of the services.
Unfortunately the current government have a very credulous and naive approach to these things, to the point where they are sabotaging even the limited amount of good work that was being done:
And now people are being asked to delete photos from their devices to preserve water for the huge AI data centres that nobody asked for.
Not directly. But they voted by their actions for technology that required them.
But AI has been forced on people due to tech companies shoving it into everything, even when it makes things work worse.
I think the companies' view is "you can have it cheap and bad with AI, or expensive or good without". Then wait to see if people will open their wallets.
It's capitalism that's ultimately to blame.
It's not even clear that AI is cheap - if it's using massive amounts of water and power, as seems to be the case, that will come at a cost.
I don't think AI is the primary driver here; I think this is all downstream of 'the cloud' in various forms being the only concrete idea tech (and by extension the wider economy) has for innovation, and so it keeps being re-purposed / re-badged. What we are actually seeing is an overbuild of datacentres - and an associated series of tech bubbles (helped along by massive concentrations of wealth looking for places to invest).
My feeling is that cloud hosting is a pretty solid and useful technology. It's really only a logical extension of old-style web hosting. A lot of the features offered by cloud services, like scalability, redundancy, automated backups, DDOS protection etc are genuinely useful and only possible because of the sharing of hardware. Trying to implement these as on-premises features for mosts SMEs would be grotesquely expensive and in most cases not as good. I've seen some excellent educational platforms able to be spun up on cloud platforms by individual teachers with a creative impulse without them also needing to be a tech wizard to make it reasonably secure and reliable.
And now people are being asked to delete photos from their devices to preserve water for the huge AI data centres that nobody asked for.
Not directly. But they voted by their actions for technology that required them.
But AI has been forced on people due to tech companies shoving it into everything, even when it makes things work worse.
I think the companies' view is "you can have it cheap and bad with AI, or expensive or good without". Then wait to see if people will open their wallets.
It's capitalism that's ultimately to blame.
It's not even clear that AI is cheap - if it's using massive amounts of water and power, as seems to be the case, that will come at a cost.
I don't think AI is the primary driver here; I think this is all downstream of 'the cloud' in various forms being the only concrete idea tech (and by extension the wider economy) has for innovation, and so it keeps being re-purposed / re-badged. What we are actually seeing is an overbuild of datacentres - and an associated series of tech bubbles (helped along by massive concentrations of wealth looking for places to invest).
My feeling is that cloud hosting is a pretty solid and useful technology. It's really only a logical extension of old-style web hosting. A lot of the features offered by cloud services, like scalability, redundancy, automated backups, DDOS protection etc are genuinely useful and only possible because of the sharing of hardware.
I don't necessarily disagree, I just think we are at a point where datacenters are the only type of large infrastructure everyone can agree to build, and all that money swirling around has to go somewhere. The finite market in cloud services isn't really enough to sustain that kind of growth, which was why there were multiple attempts to create the next source of demand (blockchain! web3.0! the metaverse!) with AI being the latest and most successful form.
It's cheaper than paying people - that seems to be the main driver. But yes, it's definitely in the "let's try to put it everywhere" phase at the moment. There'll be some rolling back as it turns out that it's not sufficiently cheaper to make up for how much worse it is.
To be fair, a lot of the places where AI agents are used replaces first-tier customer support that is already enshittified. There are a lot of places where an AI agent is not worse than a human customer support agent working down a script.
Apparently a good number of student Labour clubs are turning away from the government. Local councillors are moving over to the new party. There is a growing feeling that Starmer’s days are numbered. If he does go they would be giving Farage a big stick to beat them with. He could say they are no better than the Cons. Lab really need to properly push the positives. They are at a disadvantage with the press there
They aren’t any better than the Cons, and in some ways they’re worse. UK politics is in a horrible situation where basically none of the parties are worth voting for.
They aren’t any better than the Cons, and in some ways they’re worse. UK politics is in a horrible situation where basically none of the parties are worth voting for.
Where, oh where, is The Monster Raving Loony Party when you need it?
They aren’t any better than the Cons, and in some ways they’re worse. UK politics is in a horrible situation where basically none of the parties are worth voting for.
Where, oh where, is The Monster Raving Loony Party when you need it?
Reform are taking g the loony part.
The truth is Labour have cut NHS waiting times. They have improved our relationship with the EU and other good things, plus they have had to cope with Trump.
They have made some massive mess ups which is all that people remember. Starmer wouldn’t know the truth if he fell over it. They are concerned about a small trickle to the right, when there is a massive leak to the left.
They aren’t any better than the Cons, and in some ways they’re worse. UK politics is in a horrible situation where basically none of the parties are worth voting for.
Where, oh where, is The Monster Raving Loony Party when you need it?
Reform are taking g the loony part.
The truth is Labour have cut NHS waiting times. They have improved our relationship with the EU and other good things, plus they have had to cope with Trump.
They have made some massive mess ups which is all that people remember.
They came in with a huge majority and the ability to pass transformative legislation. The choices they've made so far speak to their priorities.
They aren’t any better than the Cons, and in some ways they’re worse. UK politics is in a horrible situation where basically none of the parties are worth voting for.
Where, oh where, is The Monster Raving Loony Party when you need it?
Reform are taking g the loony part.
The truth is Labour have cut NHS waiting times. They have improved our relationship with the EU and other good things, plus they have had to cope with Trump.
They have made some massive mess ups which is all that people remember.
They came in with a huge majority and the ability to pass transformative legislation. The choices they've made so far speak to their priorities.
Though as ever, worth noting that their huge majority is about an inch deep, and they are the least popular government to take office in living memory in terms of vote share.
From that they have/had two options - try and be ‘safety first’ and not rock the boat in the hope that more people come to love them before they get booted out after one term, or go all out to do things they really believe in, whether or not they were in the manifesto, in the hope more people come to love them before etc….
What slightly worries me is that they are doing option 2, but not in the way their natural supporters would like!
However, it bears repeating that they are in shark infested water when it comes to doing much at all that they didn’t put in the manifesto, given the public mood. A more honest, transformative manifesto (with probably a smaller majority) is a challenge they ducked last year. And here we all are.
They aren’t any better than the Cons, and in some ways they’re worse. UK politics is in a horrible situation where basically none of the parties are worth voting for.
Where, oh where, is The Monster Raving Loony Party when you need it?
Reform are taking g the loony part.
The truth is Labour have cut NHS waiting times. They have improved our relationship with the EU and other good things, plus they have had to cope with Trump.
They have made some massive mess ups which is all that people remember.
They came in with a huge majority and the ability to pass transformative legislation. The choices they've made so far speak to their priorities.
Though as ever, worth noting that their huge majority is about an inch deep, and they are the least popular government to take office in living memory in terms of vote share.
.. and I'd be among the first to bring that up, equally the election was also 4/5 years away, there was no reason to continue to run like they were in opposition and the polls mattered on a rolling weekly basis - but that was the default choice given their thoughts on hero voters/immigration and so on.
From that they have/had two options - try and be ‘safety first’ and not rock the boat in the hope that more people come to love them before they get booted out after one term, or go all out to do things they really believe in, whether or not they were in the manifesto, in the hope more people come to love them before etc….
What slightly worries me is that they are doing option 2, but not in the way their natural supporters would like!
I think it's a mix of doing things that their natural voting coalition doesn't like, but also doing a bunch of stuff for which there isn't any constituency at all, but this was predictable to anyone who had paid attention to the public pronouncements of Mattinson etc. where it was clear that they had very few ideas.
They aren’t any better than the Cons, and in some ways they’re worse. UK politics is in a horrible situation where basically none of the parties are worth voting for.
Whilst much (but not all) of the criticism of the government on this thread is well grounded, this is simply nonsense. And dangerous nonsense at that.
I thought the Tories are plunging to the right, see Jenricks' escapades. To say that Labour are worse seems quixotic.
The Tories are only worse because they're trying very hard to be.
Someone on the radio had to row back from calling Jenrick xenophobic the other day. Quite right, it was observed - it was a wasted opportunity, given he's Mr Paint Over The Murals Lest Migrant Children Feel Welcome, to call him much worse things.
They aren’t any better than the Cons, and in some ways they’re worse. UK politics is in a horrible situation where basically none of the parties are worth voting for.
Whilst much (but not all) of the criticism of the government on this thread is well grounded, this is simply nonsense. And dangerous nonsense at that.
Equally, it is also true for certain groups that this government is worse than the previous *Conservative government* (ask any trans person or disabled person who is facing benefit cuts).
Labour are where the Cons would be if they had stayed centre right and not pushed further to the right.
The big question is will Starmer be leader at the next general election? He is not exactly Mr Popular. Corbyn and Sultana are causing him a big headache. He may have to tack left to survive
Labour are where the Cons would be if they had stayed centre right and not pushed further to the right.
The big question is will Starmer be leader at the next general election? He is not exactly Mr Popular. Corbyn and Sultana are causing him a big headache. He may have to tack left to survive
Tacking left in any way other than small c social conservative left will just hand even more votes to Reform though - ie the best he could hope for doing that is to lose less badly in 2029 than currently feels likely.
Even more than usual, the last general election was an emphatic vote against the Conservative Party, but coupled to an historic lack of popular support for the party that actually won.
It leaves the Labour Party in a totally unenviable, and basically (I suspect) historically unprecedented and completely unworkable position:
Are they in office? Yes
Do they have a huge majority (albeit composed of MPs with on average historically tiny personal majorities) ? Yes
Is there any threat at all to their majority this side of the next election? No
but simultaneously:
Are they popular? No
Do they have a plurality of public goodwill? No
Are they therefore practically able to get away with much that wasn’t in the world’s blandest manifesto? Probably not
Will their huge majority topple over like a load of skittles in the mildest electoral breeze on polling day? Eminently possible - the more so when millions of people on the right can vote for a viable right party that isn’t the Tories, and lots of people on the left can vote for the Greens or Corbyn.
Did anyone have ‘ruination of both the major British parties of the last century’ on their bingo card for this decade?
Labour are where the Cons would be if they had stayed centre right and not pushed further to the right.
The big question is will Starmer be leader at the next general election? He is not exactly Mr Popular. Corbyn and Sultana are causing him a big headache. He may have to tack left to survive
Tacking left in any way other than small c social conservative left will just hand even more votes to Reform though
The majority of votes lost to date have been to the Lib Dems, Greens and people staying at home/don't knows (low turnout also ends up boosting the Reform vote) - there are limits to the extent Labour can play the "reasonable concerns" game:
Labour are where the Cons would be if they had stayed centre right and not pushed further to the right.
The big question is will Starmer be leader at the next general election? He is not exactly Mr Popular. Corbyn and Sultana are causing him a big headache. He may have to tack left to survive
Tacking left in any way other than small c social conservative left will just hand even more votes to Reform though - ie the best he could hope for doing that is to lose less badly in 2029 than currently feels likely.
Is there any evidence that there are significant numbers of voters currently supporting Labour who might switch to Reform? As opposed to the millions who are looking elsewhere who Labour have lost with their right wing shit-fuckery, both before and after the 2024 election?
Is there any evidence that there are significant numbers of voters currently supporting Labour who might switch to Reform?
To be fair, most such voters probably switched between 2016 and 2019.
I think most are likely to have left Labour around 2005, actually, and variously floated around the BNP, Veritas, UKIP, Brexit Party, English Democrats, the tories and plain old abstention.
Is there any evidence that there are significant numbers of voters currently supporting Labour who might switch to Reform?
To be fair, most such voters probably switched between 2016 and 2019.
I think most are likely to have left Labour around 2005, actually, and variously floated around the BNP, Veritas, UKIP, Brexit Party, English Democrats, the tories and plain old abstention.
Is there any evidence that there are significant numbers of voters currently supporting Labour who might switch to Reform?
To be fair, most such voters probably switched between 2016 and 2019.
I think most are likely to have left Labour around 2005, actually, and variously floated around the BNP, Veritas, UKIP, Brexit Party, English Democrats, the tories and plain old abstention.
And they are 20 years older now
Which is supported by photos of gatherings of Reform supporters, which generally make a church congregation look young.
Labour are where the Cons would be if they had stayed centre right and not pushed further to the right.
The big question is will Starmer be leader at the next general election? He is not exactly Mr Popular. Corbyn and Sultana are causing him a big headache. He may have to tack left to survive
Tacking left in any way other than small c social conservative left will just hand even more votes to Reform though - ie the best he could hope for doing that is to lose less badly in 2029 than currently feels likely.
Is there any evidence that there are significant numbers of voters currently supporting Labour who might switch to Reform? As opposed to the millions who are looking elsewhere who Labour have lost with their right wing shit-fuckery, both before and after the 2024 election?
I was thinking more that Labour *might* win back some of the people who voted for them last year who now intend to vote Green/Your Party, etc. But at the price of that tacking left completing the uniting of the right.
So they will approach being able to stand still (maybe) in terms of vote share, while everyone on the right bar some die-in-a-ditch Tory remnant coalesce into voting for the best-placed non-Labour vehicle to beat Labour.
The numbers as they are at the moment suggest that do what Labour will, if the right get their act together (whether Tory or Reform) then it’s game over come the next election. With the usual caveat about a long way to go, etc.
My point was therefore that people aren’t go to peel off from Labour if Labour goes left, but that they’re also not the people to worry about.
Oh, the usual "only fascists are real voters" argument. How novel.
I’m not really sure how to respond to that to be honest, given it doesn’t seem to relate to my post, or what I was saying, or the polling. Labour won last year because everyone was heartily sick of the Tories, and the right was split.
We look to be well on the way to sorting out the second bit, and making the first irrelevant in the process.
It's the same nonsense as is charming Starmer into governing in a manner indistinguishable from Farage, at least on a policy level. Conduct in public office is a different matter. It asserts that only those who might otherwise vote for Farage matter. I'm really not sure how that works, because each lost vote is a lost vote. And if there is a serious alternative sitting to the left that can attract committed support capable of organising and mobilising support, as there is increasingly, then how can you possibly say that only those likely to shift from Labour to Reform are the problem for Starmer? Also, if the leftmost edge of Labour effectively becomes centre-right, how can they expect to attract votes from anyone to the left of that? Again, looking at their policies, this is where we are.
I'm not sure how else to say this. An effect which is focussed in a small number of traditional Labour seats is currently determining the whole course of national politics. Perhaps those who used to work in unionised jobs forty years ago but support policies which are more characteristic of Farage should actually have to vote for Farage in order to get those policies? If politics is about anything more profound that rosettes, then here has to be a meaningful difference between the parties. Otherwise, it's just a matter of picking your minutely different flavour of shit.
Comments
466 people were arrested today for holding signs, this government has shown multiple times that it just escalates in such scenarios, people really need to be writing to their Labour MPs and asking them politely how the situation is to be resolved. The numbers protesting are probably going to increase, so what does AN Local MP see as the end point? Thousands imprisoned? Escalation to force?
So my question now is whether somehow the BBC will be in trouble.
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-politics/2025/08/inside-labour-students-revolt-over-gaza
It's particularly telling that it's Labour Students objecting - they've traditionally been heavily tied to Labour Friends of Israel and the (overwhelmingly Zionist) Union of Jewish Students, and to the right of the party more generally.
The councillor mentioned is in Coventry city, which isn't in the Warwickshire county or Warwick district. I believe that Grace Lewis was formally a student at Warwick University.
Does this matter? Maybe not, but given that the article is specifically talking about youth affiliates of Labour, it might have been more helpful to clarify exactly what they are talking about.
Yes, and I note in that context the anecdote about the volunteer's employer being contacted by an MP and told to 'not trust them'.
The CLP is the "Warwick and Leamington Labour Party"
Exactly - and to really confuse things, is Warwick university in Warwick (rhetorical)?
No, it’s in Coventry…
There has been some bleeting by MPs to the FT that the technology companies are being unfair by some form of malicious compliance:
https://www.ft.com/content/09c88dde-687e-47c7-ba9d-7ad5048e2bc7
"One senior government figure said ministers were frustrated by the “overzealous” application of the law by some platforms, amid suggestions that some companies are intentionally over-interpreting the legislation in order to undermine its credibility."
But of course if you are going to take a really loosely drafted piece of legislation and then make the penalties very large (potentially up to 10% of worldwide revenue), then companies are going to adopt a fairly risk averse approach.
And in this sense the fact that it's loosely drafted and thus malleable to interpretation comes out of the rather authoritarian bent of the Starmer cabinet and Starmer himself.
They discussed this on their podcast, starting at the bookmark. ISTM that if the MP identified themselves as such that would constitute abuse of public office:
https://youtu.be/CnzHuySg2AA?t=360
Not directly. But they voted by their actions for technology that required them.
But AI has been forced on people due to tech companies shoving it into everything, even when it makes things work worse.
I think the companies' view is "you can have it cheap and bad with AI, or expensive or good without". Then wait to see if people will open their wallets.
It's capitalism that's ultimately to blame.
It's not even clear that AI is cheap - if it's using massive amounts of water and power, as seems to be the case, that will come at a cost. As far as I can see we're at a similar stage to early social media - rapid expansion and pushing it into every corner so that when the cost comes, either directly or through advertising and enshittification, people don't feel able to opt out. Part of the difficulty is that AI is pre-enshittified, so the pushing is much greater to force take-up.
It's cheaper than paying people - that seems to be the main driver. But yes, it's definitely in the "let's try to put it everywhere" phase at the moment. There'll be some rolling back as it turns out that it's not sufficiently cheaper to make up for how much worse it is.
I don't think AI is the primary driver here; I think this is all downstream of 'the cloud' in various forms being the only concrete idea tech (and by extension the wider economy) has for innovation, and so it keeps being re-purposed / re-badged. What we are actually seeing is an overbuild of datacentres - and an associated series of tech bubbles (helped along by massive concentrations of wealth looking for places to invest).
Most of the time 'AI enabled' is just a marketing badge rather than anything even vaguely concrete - and if LLMs, Agentic AI et al turn out to be expensive this will eventually be reflected in the cost of the services.
Unfortunately the current government have a very credulous and naive approach to these things, to the point where they are sabotaging even the limited amount of good work that was being done:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/10/staff-alan-turing-institute-ai-complain-watchdog
My feeling is that cloud hosting is a pretty solid and useful technology. It's really only a logical extension of old-style web hosting. A lot of the features offered by cloud services, like scalability, redundancy, automated backups, DDOS protection etc are genuinely useful and only possible because of the sharing of hardware. Trying to implement these as on-premises features for mosts SMEs would be grotesquely expensive and in most cases not as good. I've seen some excellent educational platforms able to be spun up on cloud platforms by individual teachers with a creative impulse without them also needing to be a tech wizard to make it reasonably secure and reliable.
I don't necessarily disagree, I just think we are at a point where datacenters are the only type of large infrastructure everyone can agree to build, and all that money swirling around has to go somewhere. The finite market in cloud services isn't really enough to sustain that kind of growth, which was why there were multiple attempts to create the next source of demand (blockchain! web3.0! the metaverse!) with AI being the latest and most successful form.
To be fair, a lot of the places where AI agents are used replaces first-tier customer support that is already enshittified. There are a lot of places where an AI agent is not worse than a human customer support agent working down a script.
Where, oh where, is The Monster Raving Loony Party when you need it?
Reform are taking g the loony part.
The truth is Labour have cut NHS waiting times. They have improved our relationship with the EU and other good things, plus they have had to cope with Trump.
They have made some massive mess ups which is all that people remember. Starmer wouldn’t know the truth if he fell over it. They are concerned about a small trickle to the right, when there is a massive leak to the left.
They came in with a huge majority and the ability to pass transformative legislation. The choices they've made so far speak to their priorities.
Though as ever, worth noting that their huge majority is about an inch deep, and they are the least popular government to take office in living memory in terms of vote share.
From that they have/had two options - try and be ‘safety first’ and not rock the boat in the hope that more people come to love them before they get booted out after one term, or go all out to do things they really believe in, whether or not they were in the manifesto, in the hope more people come to love them before etc….
What slightly worries me is that they are doing option 2, but not in the way their natural supporters would like!
However, it bears repeating that they are in shark infested water when it comes to doing much at all that they didn’t put in the manifesto, given the public mood. A more honest, transformative manifesto (with probably a smaller majority) is a challenge they ducked last year. And here we all are.
.. and I'd be among the first to bring that up, equally the election was also 4/5 years away, there was no reason to continue to run like they were in opposition and the polls mattered on a rolling weekly basis - but that was the default choice given their thoughts on hero voters/immigration and so on.
I think it's a mix of doing things that their natural voting coalition doesn't like, but also doing a bunch of stuff for which there isn't any constituency at all, but this was predictable to anyone who had paid attention to the public pronouncements of Mattinson etc. where it was clear that they had very few ideas.
Whilst much (but not all) of the criticism of the government on this thread is well grounded, this is simply nonsense. And dangerous nonsense at that.
The Tories are only worse because they're trying very hard to be.
Someone on the radio had to row back from calling Jenrick xenophobic the other day. Quite right, it was observed - it was a wasted opportunity, given he's Mr Paint Over The Murals Lest Migrant Children Feel Welcome, to call him much worse things.
Equally, it is also true for certain groups that this government is worse than the previous *Conservative government* (ask any trans person or disabled person who is facing benefit cuts).
The big question is will Starmer be leader at the next general election? He is not exactly Mr Popular. Corbyn and Sultana are causing him a big headache. He may have to tack left to survive
Tacking left in any way other than small c social conservative left will just hand even more votes to Reform though - ie the best he could hope for doing that is to lose less badly in 2029 than currently feels likely.
Even more than usual, the last general election was an emphatic vote against the Conservative Party, but coupled to an historic lack of popular support for the party that actually won.
It leaves the Labour Party in a totally unenviable, and basically (I suspect) historically unprecedented and completely unworkable position:
Are they in office? Yes
Do they have a huge majority (albeit composed of MPs with on average historically tiny personal majorities) ? Yes
Is there any threat at all to their majority this side of the next election? No
but simultaneously:
Are they popular? No
Do they have a plurality of public goodwill? No
Are they therefore practically able to get away with much that wasn’t in the world’s blandest manifesto? Probably not
Will their huge majority topple over like a load of skittles in the mildest electoral breeze on polling day? Eminently possible - the more so when millions of people on the right can vote for a viable right party that isn’t the Tories, and lots of people on the left can vote for the Greens or Corbyn.
Did anyone have ‘ruination of both the major British parties of the last century’ on their bingo card for this decade?
The majority of votes lost to date have been to the Lib Dems, Greens and people staying at home/don't knows (low turnout also ends up boosting the Reform vote) - there are limits to the extent Labour can play the "reasonable concerns" game:
https://x.com/YouGov/status/1937510709912289428
The various local elections since then have tended to bear this out.
Is there any evidence that there are significant numbers of voters currently supporting Labour who might switch to Reform? As opposed to the millions who are looking elsewhere who Labour have lost with their right wing shit-fuckery, both before and after the 2024 election?
To be fair, most such voters probably switched between 2016 and 2019.
I think most are likely to have left Labour around 2005, actually, and variously floated around the BNP, Veritas, UKIP, Brexit Party, English Democrats, the tories and plain old abstention.
And they are 20 years older now
Which is supported by photos of gatherings of Reform supporters, which generally make a church congregation look young.
I was thinking more that Labour *might* win back some of the people who voted for them last year who now intend to vote Green/Your Party, etc. But at the price of that tacking left completing the uniting of the right.
So they will approach being able to stand still (maybe) in terms of vote share, while everyone on the right bar some die-in-a-ditch Tory remnant coalesce into voting for the best-placed non-Labour vehicle to beat Labour.
The numbers as they are at the moment suggest that do what Labour will, if the right get their act together (whether Tory or Reform) then it’s game over come the next election. With the usual caveat about a long way to go, etc.
My point was therefore that people aren’t go to peel off from Labour if Labour goes left, but that they’re also not the people to worry about.
I’m not really sure how to respond to that to be honest, given it doesn’t seem to relate to my post, or what I was saying, or the polling. Labour won last year because everyone was heartily sick of the Tories, and the right was split.
We look to be well on the way to sorting out the second bit, and making the first irrelevant in the process.
I say that as a Liberal Democrat/Green voter.
But do carry on.
I'm not sure how else to say this. An effect which is focussed in a small number of traditional Labour seats is currently determining the whole course of national politics. Perhaps those who used to work in unionised jobs forty years ago but support policies which are more characteristic of Farage should actually have to vote for Farage in order to get those policies? If politics is about anything more profound that rosettes, then here has to be a meaningful difference between the parties. Otherwise, it's just a matter of picking your minutely different flavour of shit.