Interesting. I do think The West Wing has encouraged that among American liberals, although I don't think it originated it.

For 6 out of Bill Clinton's 8 years as President, the Republicans controlled the House of Representatives. And for the entire 12 years of Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush, the Democrats controlled the House. The notion that politicians need to work across party boundaries to pass legislation used to be normal in America.

The West Wing's issue is that it prominently espoused this view just as things were changing and giving way to the modern American political culture of division and extreme partisanship on the right - and you obviously can't cooperate with extremists who see any form of cooperation as a betrayal.

I think there are actually two distinct factors going on here.

The first is that the traditional rightward shift as you age has broken down among millennials, as you note.

The second - and I actually think this is as if not more important - is that the Tories have abandoned the field on left/right 'economic-based' politics anyway. Sunak presided over the highest tax burden in 70 years. The Tories' post-2016 pitch to the electorate has always been about cultural conservativism - Brexit, immigrants, toilets for trans people, etc - not right-wing economics. And unlike left/right issues, there was never a trend for people to become more culturally conservative as they age. People just form their cultural norms and values when they're young, and then carry these values with them through life, reacting against things that diverge from their norms.

By abandoning economics for culture wars, the Tories have built their electoral castle out of demographic sand. As the people who grew up in an overwhelming white and insular 1950s and 60s Britain give way to Millennials and Gen Zs who grew up in a ethnically diverse EU member state, the Tories have increasingly set themselves up in opposition to the cultural norms of the British electorate - and that is a stench it's going to be hard for them to shift.

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.

Any government of any party would consider it to be a major breakdown in party discipline for one or more of its MPs to vote against its own Kings Speech.

That's why they've been suspended. If this amendment had been tagged on to a piece of legislation then this would have just been a regular rebellion, of the sort that happens all the time in Parliament. Rebelling on your own party's Kings Speech is an altogether different matter.

I'm sorry, were you under the impression that RuPaul's Drag Race belongs to the sci-fi and fantasy genre...?

The reason I specified our genre is that sci-fi and fantasy audiences skew whiter and maler than the general public, and a vocal minority of online sci-fi and fantasy fans (who are deeply unrepresentative of the wider fanbases) make it their business to be vocally abusive about any online content that they consider not to be white and male enough for their liking.

I liked The Acolyte. It was not at the level of Andor or The Mandalorian, though it was dramatically better than The Book of Boba Fett. It was a solid enjoyable show and I particularly enjoyed how it expanded the canon universe by giving some love and attention to non-Jedi Force traditions (the Sith and the witches). Anecdotally that's broadly what I hear from the Star Wars fans I know in real life too.

The attention people give to online 'fan' review scores always baffles me. Everyone knows these are meaningless. It's a sad reality that most high-profile shows in our genre with prominent women, non-white and/or LGBT+ leads get review-bombed to death - we all know this. And I expect all shows will get review-boosted, because why on earth wouldn't you do this if you were in charge of the marketing operation when it's practically free marketing? So the 'fan' scores on Rotten Tomatoes etc are just the balance of a meaningless positive number against a meaningless negative number.

I don’t see where they are kowtowing to Frog Faced Farage.

Then you missed the part where she's prattling on about illegal immigration and directing Immigration Enforcement to go harass a bunch of small businesses, instead of just making legal immigration easier. We've had 14 years of Tory home secretaries creating an insane mess of red tape and bureaucracy as obstacles to an act that ought to be quite simple and practical - Labour need to correct this, not lean into it.

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.

She's super racist towards Pakistani people herself, and she's too dumb to know that most of her co-racists don't draw a distinction between where on the subcontinent someone's ancestors are from when they use such language.

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...

This isn't really about fiscal conservatives and social conservatives. Fiscal conservatism in Britain died with Brexit - the fiscal conservatives all backed Remain and got forced out of their party, and never really found a new home. Under Rishi, the tax burden hit its highest level in 70 years.

All the Tories have left is social conservatism, but Reform's whole pitch has been to out-culture-war the culture warriors.

It's a sitcom and the title is clearly a joke. Maybe they should call it Snowflakelets?

Brown is a very hot take. He was PM for three years, tell me what you think was his legacy that makes him a top-3 PM?

The main thing you can praise him for was his efforts to manage the financial crisis and the recession that followed - on which I'd say he did a great job. But that comes with the enormous caveat that, having been Chancellor for the previous ten years, he's one of the people most responsible for Britain being in that position in the first place. He was the cabinet member ultimately responsible for economic policy and banking regulation over the decade in which he permitted a massive property and financial bubble to develop in the UK, all while he pronouncing that he had ended 'Tory boom and bust' - and it turns out he believed his own hype.

Labour commentators went to great lengths afterwards to try to blame the crash in the UK on global factors and arcane financial jargon - often hamming up that the initial spark of the crisis was on US sub-prime debt. But that (deliberately) conflates the proximate trigger and the underlying cause. The vast majority of British banks that need bailouts or rescues - Lloyds, HBOS, Northern Rock, Bradford and Bingley, Alliance and Leicester - were bog-standard UK mortgage lenders who had simply lent too much money to people who couldn't afford to repay them and secured on over-inflated UK property values, funded through unstable wholesale borrowing, and without holding the financial buffers needed to cope with these risks. Brown and his Treasury team should have supported a stronger regulatory approach, and recognised that we were in a massive bubble and acted to deflate it - instead, they were already running a budget deficit at the height of the boom, pouring fuel into the fire, in complete contravention of Keynesian economics - a key reason why the UK public finances were in such a state when the bubble then burst (in contrast to better managed economies like Germany).

Without Brown's negligence as Chancellor, the crash in Britain would have been less severe, the public finances would have been more resilient going in to the crisis, no austerity, as a result of which probably no Brexit and no Farage skulking around working-class constituencies stirring up resentment...

FWIW - my number three would be David Lloyd George. Between his time as Chancellor and PM, he's responsible for establishing the state pension, unemployment benefits, the first (pre-NHS) state-funded healthcare provision, progressive taxation, the primacy of the elected Commons over the unelected Lords, and he won the First World War - a dramatically more impressive legacy than someone like Brown.

We're getting our country back.

The lowest Lib Dem vote share in the country was recorded in Ynys Mon, where Leena Farhat got 439 votes or 1.4% - the most 'paper' of paper candidates the Lib Dems will have put up. I typed her name into Google and it took me seconds to find her Twitter, her LinkedIn, her local campaign page, and many photos of her.

It's a bit unusual for any adult in 2024 to have no online presence, but especially when a party that appears to have won the third largest vote in a UK-wide election appears to have multiple people among their purported candidates who all have no online presence...

How dare you suggest that Comrade Online Reform-Supporter is not a real human being! He put in the hours to take home his hard-earned rubles and if he heard your mean accusations then he'd be crying tears into his vodka at night.

Right, but it's unusual to have masses of candidates that have no online presence, no address, no email address, don't even show up to the count, etc.

Think of every seat declaration you saw on election night: the Lib Dem candidate was standing right there on stage, even in Leave-voting Red Wall seats where centrist moderate liberalism is a deposit-losing proposition.

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?