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'Ah, Kamala, my old friend. Do you know the MAGA proverb that tells us cats and dogs are a dish that is best served cold? It is very cold in space.'

Imagine the queue to see Larry lying in state.

No, Russian bots lack physical form and hence aren't able to turn up in person to in-person events. So there was probably one genuine radicalised thug in attendance.

I'm so supportive of this. Lime bikes are an absolute menace.

Round my neighborhood, I constantly find them just lying on the floor blocking the whole pavement. Especially at this time of year, I find them literally every time I walk to the shops and back, every time I go for a run, every time I walk to the Tube station, etc. I regularly find myself picking them and moving them off the pavement because we have lots of families with push chairs in the area, my elderly neighbour uses a mobility scooter, etc.

It really pisses me off that the people using these bikes are so selfish. The designated parking pay solution seems like a fair compromise to support use of these bikes but only when used in a responsible way - you just don't see this problem with the Santander bikes.

You can't just say 'austerity' every time a Chancellor decides not to spend even more money...

Government spending in the UK today accounts for 45% of GDP. The state that the Tories have bequeathed to Labour represents a significantly larger share of the UK economy than it did at any point in Gordon Brown's decade as Chancellor. The state today is bigger than it was when the Atlee government left office. In fact the only post-WW2 years in which the state has been bigger than in the Sunak years were very briefly for a couple of years in the mid-1970s and then in 2009-11. The only people in this country for whom a state of today's size is normal relative to most of their life experiences are toddlers who were born in the Johnson/Truss/Sunak era.

By all means argue for a more massive state if you like. But we're not living in austere times.

Good. It's bonkers we were handing out non-means-tested fuel benefits to pensioners living in million pound homes, while young people and families in genuine need were struggling.

Pure Tory pork-barrel politics to bribe the one generation that most reliably voted for them. Now let's get rid of the pension triple lock next please.

Parliament could reduce annual illegal immigration to zero with a one-line piece of legislation: 'All immigration is legalised'...

I'm not suggesting we quite go that far. But any attempt to address the problem of illegal immigration needs to start off with a recognition of how 14 years of Tory home secretaries and 13 years of authoritarian New Labour home secretaries before home (the choice of home secretaries were always the worst thing about the Blair and Brown governments) have conspired to ramp up the barriers and hurdles to a regular hardworking immigrant - someone who wants to work and pay taxes and obey the law - actually being able to legally enter the UK and work.

What a pathetic frog-faced snowflake.

What's astonishing here is that Priti Patel is only about the third or fourth most lunatic extremist of the current set of candidates...

It depends what you’re looking for. As a TV drama, it’s timeless. The characters are great, the humour and wit is great.

But the politics is very much of its time - it came out relatively early in the era in which extreme partisanship in the US (and wider Western world) was taking hold, and so often hearkened back to an earlier halcyon era of bipartisan cooperation - from a modern perspective, in the age of Trump, Brexit, etc, that attitude will look quite naive.

We will ensure labour stick to their promise not to raise taxes. (paraphrased)

Labour will not increase income tax, national insurance or VAT. (cut and paste from labour.org.uk)

It is insane to me that you expect that a) a Tory spokesperson, speaking colloquially, should have to literally word-for-word quote the Labour manifesto every time they talk about Labour's policies, b) you think that from the perspective of the average voter the quotes aren't pretty similar anyway, and c) the BBC should be wasting its and our time obsessing over things like this in an off-the-cuff quote instead of focusing on substance.

At a time of rising prices and cost of living pressures, I like my local £5 hand car wash and I'm not particularly curious about the immigration status of the guys that work there.

The solution to illegal immigration is to create far easier routes for legal immigration, so that the service sector can recruit the workers it needs to provide the services the public want at the prices we expect - not headlining-obsessed political clampdowns that just drive migrants even further into the arms of criminal gangs and drive up prices.

There are people who want to come to Britain and work, there are businesses that want to employ them, and there are customers who want to pay affordable prices - Nigel Farage and the Sun are nowhere in that triangle so the government really shouldn't be kowtowing to their opinions.

Well done Starmer and Reeves! Wait...

There is an enormous difference between the far-right being part of a coalition under a fair electoral system (for completeness, this rarely happens anyway) - in which the far-right lack a parliamentary majority and can't do all the awful things they desire - and the far-right having a parliamentary majority on a minority of the vote under a FPTP system.

We have seen that, under FPTP, it's possible to win a large majority on a 35% vote share - as Labour have done twice this century (2005 and 2024). The Tories + Reform just won a 38% vote share between them, so what do you think happens under FPTP if a Suella Braverman or Priti Patel led Tory party decides to fight the next election in an electoral pact with Reform?

This is the inoculation I am talking about. If the far right get 38% of the votes, I damn well don't want them getting >50% of the seats as tends to happen in FPTP.

He's pathological. He's spent 20+ years telling us ID cards are the solution to whatever the problem of the day happens to be - benefit fraud, terrorism, illegal immigration, whatever people happen to be talking about that week. Meanwhile, he's yet to give any convincing argument as to what we're all supposed to do when his ID card database - containing all our biometric information and all the government's data on us, centralised into one convenient place - inevitably gets hacked. Does he have a contract with an ID card company or something?

One of the key elements of the boundary reform that went through between the 2019 and 2023 elections was to ensure that constituencies have broadly equal numbers of electors. Prior to this there had been more variation (and a few big anomalies), whereas the boundary reform means that all seats now have an electorate of 73,393 +/-5%. (I think this was a pretty uncontroversial change but had been held up for years because the Tories kept trying to accompany it with a change to the number of MPs, which was a lot more controversial.)

I haven't bothered doing the calculation on a seat-by-seat basis, but the electorate distribution would have to skew really badly in favour of the +5%s being Lab/Con and the -5%s being non-Lab/Con for your concern to come to fruition.

I was saying exactly this to someone the other day. It's striking how many of his stunts took place in/on/next-to water and that was very deliberately linked to how much the Lib Dems were talking locally about water quality and sewage, which their polling had already identified as a resonant issue in their target seats some time ago.

Davey's campaign was so impressive - the Lib Dems usually struggle at the 'air war' during an election, but he found exactly the strategy to garner media attention in a way that coordinated perfectly with the ground campaign Lib Dem activists were running in their target seats - effectively the electoral version of a blitzkrieg. It's going to be the textbook model campaign for how a third party should fight elections under FPTP in future - literally the best third party campaign we've seen in over a century.

The 99 seats where the Lib Dems are top-two are the really interesting ones here because a) most of these seats are now ones they actually hold rather than ones where they're runners up, and b) their main challenger in these (typically middle-class Southern) seats is almost always the Tories. The Lib Dems winning 72 seats this time is an enormous part of why the Tories had a record-breaking bad night as opposed to just a regular bad one, and their ability to sustain this next time will be key to keeping the Tories out of government in future.

For the other parties (e.g. Greens are top-two in 43, mostly in big cities; Reform in 103, mostly white working-class Brexit areas), they're almost always the runner-up party (usually by quite a big margin) behind Labour.

That's so short-sighted. FPTP is hugely majoritarian. The risk we all should be worried about is that Reform either now supplant the Tories as the main party of the right, or the Tories effectively become Reform to head off the threat, or the two merge or fight elections in an alliance where they don't stand against each other (as Boris and Farage did in 2019) - which means that next time Labour loses power, it's going to be to a majority Reform/Reform-like government. Labour's current majority is illusory - they benefited from the Tory/Reform vote splitting in many of their seats - and so this reality could come to pass as quickly as five years from now if the political right get their act together and reunite.

Electoral reform today is the only way to truly vaccinate our political system against the threat of Farage or a Farage-alike in Number Ten in the future.