A country where Sadiq Khan can lead London, Humza Yousaf can lead Scotland, and Rishi Sunak can lead Britain is a country where the racists had *lost*. So much of this vicious bile has come directly after that and almost no one seems to draw the connection

Likewise you'll get arguments like "well a good admin assistant is worth £13+ per hour" which is absolutely true but then you realise at that price places won't hire any administrators! So admin tasks have to be done by busy, ill-suited senior staff & people miss out on crucial development roles

Oh yeah. I've had the worse one of being the other side of the black country to the room full of people expecting me to train them, and I was about to go into a meeting I couldn't cancel when the phone call came!

Exactly! Only way I can organise myself lol

My trick is always to insist people send me an outlook appointment. That means I can't make a mistake and they can't forget they've booked me in

"But surely Keir and Rachel should have known if the public took Labour back in, they'd expect all the cool, free stuff Labour had promised them. They surely didn't think the private schools and non-doms more would pay for it all!?!"

So tempted to get the new collections for Christmas

Socialism/Progressiveness/Human Decency/Good Old Fashioned Common Sense/Hard-Headed Realism is what the labour government does

Yeah between that podcast & Stephen's newsletters/Patrick's columns, I feel bad for telling that monkey's paw I really enjoyed it when the NS Podcast Gang was giving a failing, reactionary government a good kicking and wanted that level of journalism back

True but there's a world of difference between the Greens should be better and that they're worse than pre-2024 Labour

Ah come on James, they're a minor party hoping to get a parliamentary party bigger than what would fit into a single taxi. Them being unserious is not the same as labour refusing to plan properly for what came after an election they were almost certain to win

Don't think this is right to be honest. "Illegal Immigrant" has always been the go-to expression for people jumping across the channel, right back to the original camps in France at the turn of the century.

You just couldn't plan properly, because that exposes that taxes would have to go way up

Ailbhe Rea tipped me over into actually hating Reeves with the anecdote that when she was warned the draft manifesto was boxing in a future Labour Government she responded; "that'd be a nice problem to have"

The distinction is that not since the 1960s has a government explicitly linked migration policy with how preexisting ethnic minority residents are treated. Instead it was about managing migration numbers so new migrants would be welcomed & could be properly supported & integrated

To add to Marios's thread, a genuine issue we're hitting is that where people want to build really does require infrastructure investment before its viable, particularly access to water and transport. Local government to push through these projects