Barry Smith 🔶

That Green by-election bounce didn't last long.

Nice work!

There are some Labour MPs who see it as the only chance of keeping their seats.

If it was in their DNA they wouldn't have abandoned it so easily.

Nigel Farage takes significant stake in Kwasi Kwarteng’s Bitcoin company Farage’s investment in crypto company Stack, headed by executive chairman Kwasi Kwarteng, comes after Labour asked the Electoral Commission to investigate crypto donations to Reform UK

One of the biggest factors holding back British productivity is a lack of capital available for investment, and Farage thinks he doing something good by freezing money in Bitcoin which produces nothing and does nothing. God help us if he ever runs the economy.
www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/poli...

I've just seen Reform's local election leaflets. It's all immigration and net zero - stuff local authorities have no control over.

I pity any area that elects people who have no interest in running local services to their Council.

The Greens, like the LibDems face the 'wasted vote' perception. You need to be making a lot of contacts and delivering a lot of literature to overcome that.

The vibes, and tens of thousands of doorstep contacts in G&D. It remains to be seen whether that still works if they're not making the contacts.

Are they doing enough to actually win local elections though? We're not seeing much local activity. We're not even hearing of much in the one ward we know they're supposedly targeting.

It takes more than just vibes to win elections.

I mean, it's a rephrasing of something Orwell wrote. What it isn't is applicable to any of the dumb stuff Trump is doing.

Just watched the Newsnight interview with Zack Polanski. Even when he's being pushed to talk about climate issues he isn't interested. He only wants to talk about his unworkable populist economics. It's clear the Green party is no longer a green party under his leadership.

It needed air-quotes.

The Greens will need to significantly up their ground game to have any chance of coming close to this. Right now, there is no sign of their new members doing any actual campaining.

At the possibility of ten million Iranian refugees on the move, yeah, they're probably concerned.

We can't read too much into one by-election, but it is further evidence that Labour's electoral coalition has shattered. Parties don't win under FPTP by representing a narrow group, but Starmer has purged the left from Labour, and a significant proportion of Labour's vote has gone with it.

Frankly, British politics is in a very worrying place. Both sides are being seduced by populists who offer no real solutions, but just badly thought out ideas which will make things even worse.

Zack Polanski (real name David Paulden) is just a Boris Johnson (real name Alexander de Pfeffel) of the left. He's a character invented by a man whose only goal is self advancement.

A garden snail could cross the entire width of Ukraine from the Russian border near Luhansk to Slovakia in around 3 years. A pace Vladimir Putin can only watch with envy.

In Soviet Russia fire extinguishers start fires.

There could well be a case for a new election in the case of a narrow Reform win.

Still good for some 'LibDems win by-election!' headlines on Friday though.

But surely there's no one other than right-wing nuts still on Twitter these days anyway?

It's funny because, right now, we actually have a way to achieve every politician's fantasy of increasing public spending while reducing taxes. It's called rejoining the European Union. Yet oddly, other than the LibDems, no-one is calling for this.

Damn, I put a bet on when it was 5-1, not that I want Labour to win but I thought that was good odds.

In July 2024 in Wimbledon an awful lot of voters moved from the Tories to the LibDems. In canvassing for the locals we've not seen any sign that any of them have moved back. Strangely, the Tories don't seem remotely interested in this.

It's been pointed out that Russia now cannot stop the war without crashing their economy. Less often mentioned is that the USA has pretty much the same problem with AI datacentre construction.

This stuff about A1-B1 lines indicating future Bitcoin pricing is such garbage. You can find patterns in any finite amount of random data but that pattern will not continue. Just get out of #Bitcoin - save your money and save the climate.

At a screening of 'Melania' the other day half the audience walked out. British Airways said they won't be showing the film again.