Here is the News.

It's straight out of the Trump playbook. Just list a load of populist items that your voter base will lap up - absolutely no need to deliver on any of it, or even have a plan.

Farage was at it yesterday when talking about the Durham victory. Bloated council? Check. Workshy staff? Check. Ban working from home? Check? Inclusivity and diversity schemes? Check. Repairing potholes? Check.

Then just a 'we'll fix all of this' message without explaining how the actual fixing will happen. It's very simple messaging but becomes harder the more local authorities that you've actually got to run on behalf of local people. It's going to end badly.

You may want to check how many terms of office they won.

I'd argue that the 2010-15 version was pretty competent and mostly did what they said they would. However much you and I don't like it. Then they rose the cult of Brexit for a decade until its contradictions tore them apart.

The winter fuel payment stuff is confusing for me.

What Labour have done is say we should only pay people who need it.

I don't get why anyone can disagree with that principle.

Is the uproar because the mechanism for proving you need it is complex? Because for me that is a different issue with a different solution once you've agreed on the principle of folks who can already afford to pay their bills don't need extra help.

I'm thinking more Boris and Theresa than Cameron.
But also Cameron 2.

1. People don’t like having money taken off them.
2. There’s still a perception that most pensioners are frail and stuck at home shivering around a one bar heater, rather than the globe trotting millionaires that many are.

This is my old man in a nutshell. Retired early around 20 years ago aged 55 on a final-salary teacher's pension and, while not in any way a millionaire, he's still managing at 74 to get abroad three or four times a year, drives a nice car and leads a very comfortable lifestyle.

I don't begrudge him any of that because he worked bloody hard in a tough profession for 35 years (including second jobs in the holidays when I was a kid), but the constant moaning now about the winter fuel payment is irritating. As is the 'I paid in all my life so I'm now taking as much out as I can' attitude to the NHS.

That pisses me off. It's not an insurance scheme and you constantly bothering your GP with every minor ailment is blocking appointments for the rest of us. He's the first one to moan, too, when he can't get through on the phone. Very little self-awareness in some regards unfortunately.

If you count the value of his pension, he is (or at least was) a millionaire to retire at 55 with that kind of lifestyle.

My mum, a lone pensioner on £12k max state pension per year and no more, isn't entitled to winter fuel payment. My aunt, on less than max state pension, so gets pension credits to top her up to just below, does get it, and all other benefits paid only to people on benefits. My mum literally would have been better off working less

This is it in a nutshell. Starmer, Reeves etc are absolutely terrible communicators. They haven’t picked up on the need for punchy messaging and both ramble on.

They don’t explain their “controversial” policies (winter fuel, farmers inheritance tax, VAT on school fees, 2 child policy etc) very well at all and, possible worse than that, they don’t explain any of their successes (public sector strikes, rail franchises, planning, renters rights, workers rights, deportations, etc). They are not helped by a press pack that seems to love to fellate Farage and rarely asks him a question.

Where's the success on rail franchises?

Trains are shit still so I don't think you can shout about that yet.

The success is the policy of taking them into public ownership. The process has only just started so you can’t judge the outcome but you should celebrate the idea. The PR is “trains have been getting shitter and more expensive so we’re taking them all back into public ownership. Yay!” Most people will see that as a good thing.

Instead, they fired Louise Haigh over a mobile phone issue (which they should have brazened out). Keir’s issue is that he’s trying to please all the people who would never vote for him (reformers, Nazis, right wing press, cunts) and alienates all the people that would. It’s the opposite of playing to your base.

@noodle @Todd @Mangetout

This sounds slightly promising, no?

www.cnn.com/2025/05/02/australia/polling-young-voters-australia-election-intl-hnk

Possibly. Hopefully. Dutton is an unusually unpleasant character, though. The media was forced to run articles about how he isn't really a deeply vile piece of shit, despite all the evidence.
Not that Albanese is great, but Dutton really is awful.

In AoNZ, we've got a business incompetent who clearly doesn't give a damn about anything beyond personal puff, but because we have proportional representation (which I do prefer to FPP) he's given control to a younger Farage-alike and an even older RFK. And the polls suggest that our Starmer proxy is still not interesting enough to win.

I dunno I think the obvious response is you've done nothing yet it's still shit.

Also with a side serving of LNER have been publicly owned for a while now and they are still shit and expensive. The 'simplification' of their fares in reality has made them more expensive.