Partner at @PortlandComms. Research. Strategy. In Number 10 and ran comms at two UK gov depts. Bristol City.
Jul 18, 2023 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
I don't think there is one iota of evidence that being a graduate *causes* whatever wokeness is. I think the imbalance in Tory VI among the under-30s is wholly rational and based on the fact that the current Conservative Party has shown zero interest in appealing to that group.
If you go quite a long way into turning their country into a gigantic retirement home with the housing market, the pension system and public services configured at super-serving the over 60s then eventually those voters will get the message.
Jul 30, 2022 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
'The poll of more than 4,000 voters found that 64 per cent of Conservatives agree that “academically able children should be given the opportunity to apply to a school that better suits their needs, even if children who do not get in do less well as a result”.'
Humbly, there's not a great future for a country willing to see most of its young people be *less* well educated than they currently are.
Jul 30, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Coda to this. Non-Tories who quite like the Tory that non-Tories quite like are inevitably disappointed when that Tory is revealed to be a massive Tory.
Lawyers will know whether diplomatic immunity covers various offences of incitement.
Jul 9, 2022 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
Seeing as there's quite a bit of chat going around the Tories choosing someone from a visible ethnic minority as their new leader, here are some quick thoughts from focus groups where I've asked Tory *voters* - not members - this question in focus groups recently...
These are Leave-inclined working class and lower middle class people in places like Stoke-on-Trent and Crawley who voted Tory in 2019 and Labour at least once before that. And the answer is...
Apr 22, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Interesting and provocative, as ever, from Ed. What people are, however, getting wrong about public opinion, immigration and Brexit is that much/most of the opposition post-2004 was rooted in economics. Not culture.
Xenophobia is the wrong way to describe it. It was about the objective conditions caused in the labour market, with a side helping of unhappiness about non-contributory benefits. For new arrivals, but even more so for native Brits who allegedly chose to claim rather than work.
Apr 5, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I suggest that @jrschlosberg's journalism students at Birkbeck ignore everything he has to say and listen instead to actual reporters.
There are one or two decent journalism academics. But most of them are worthless - knowing nothing about journalism and producing scholarship that has no value. Neither respected practitioners or critics with anything interesting to say.
Apr 2, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
The UN, the ICC, OSCE, or just the UK on its own, should be dispatching investigators to work with Ukrainian authorities to assess and preserve evidence of alleged crimes like this immediately.
For the #HMD202 theme of "one day" I am choosing 17 December 1942. The day of the Allied Declaration that it was actually taking place - and that Jews were being murdered in their hundreds of thousands. The world knew then.
