FishFace

I haven't seen those polls. It just doesn't seem plausible to me that all these Reform voters - most of whom haven't yet voted for Reform, what with their popularity being low at the last election are so beguiled by Farage that they don't believe any Labour proposal on reducing immigration. Those that are so beguiled... presumably believed Farage's praise of the proposals.

Remember what has driven the increase in Reform's popularity - it's high levels of overall migration, conspicuity of small boat crossings, and conspicuity of asylum hotels. These things have all got worse, and Reform's popularity rose on the back of it. We're not talking about dyed-in-the-wool cult followers here, but people who believe (wrongly in my view) that immigration is a massive deal.

To back this up with real data, this Ipsos poll has 2024 Labour voters saying 64% to 4% (yes, four percent) that immigration is too high versus too low. (23% "about right", rest "don't know"). That's 64% of people who voted Labour at the last election primed to like this announcement and clearly not so enamoured of Farage that they don't trust Labour to implement it. Yeah, some of them may have been holding their noses to vote Labour for other reasons, but nose-holders exist in all camps, so I think this is strong reason to believe that the policy is likely overall to be very popular.

They could have called it Timey McTimeFace...

I would love a genuine answer to this question with a proper analysis of costs, subsidies and profit margins, but this article ain't it. I would guess - but don't know - that the difference is mainly because the fixed infrastructure of a rail network consists of far more stuff that needs to be built, paid for and maintained than does an airline.

Also the emissions figure ("double") is way off - a domestic flight is something like 250g of CO2(e) per kilometre (per passenger) whereas a train is about 35g. Source.

gutting trans peoples' rights

Are you referring to the supreme court case? It wasn't Starmer, and it didn't gut trans rights; it said that it was legal to designate a space for biological women. Maybe there's something I forgot about though. I don't think this is making him unpopular though, as Starmer's views on the issue are pretty mainstream.

pandering to reform bigots

Is very popular and cannot be an explanation for his unpopularity.

ID cards

A sensible policy but yes, everyone knows it's unpopular so this was an unforced error

Authoritarian bullying of pro-Palestinian activists and protestors

Palestine Action should never have been banned. But Yvette Cooper did that, and let me remind you of the past home secretaries, PMs and governments who gradually made the law on protest more and more repressive, who oversaw much worse anti-immigration pandering, who said more definitive things about trans issues, and so on and so on.

I'm not saying that Starmer would be some wonder-kid in other circumstances, I'm saying that his unpopularity is absurd and utterly disconnected from his actual performance.

Yes. And then someone pointed out that 6×9 = 42 in base 13. To which DNA replied, "I may be a sorry case, but I don't write jokes in base 13."

No I get they're racist fucks, but do they express disapproval when others go to court over defamation like this? Because the line above was not "the SVP are racist" but "they can't take a joke."

Actually Frankenstein is the Bell; the clock tower is called Mary Shelley.

Or something.

From etymonline:

The slang sense of "hit, sock" is 1941, originally Australian, probably from earlier slang clock (n.) "face" (1923).

So probably not.

It's a pretty safe bet that whoever came up with the term "clock" (the part of an electronic circuit) and "clock rate" (the rate it ticks at) had in mind the current common meaning of "clock", not an obsolete meaning.

Yeah we have a combined COVID and Ukraine inflation bomb after 14 years of underinvestment...

I mean look at Starmer's missteps compared to the missteps of all the Tory PMs. Somehow Starmer is less popular than all of them. I think it's therefore safe to say that his unpopularity is not mostly due to things he's doing wrong, because in spite of it all, he's still doing better than any recent Tory leader.

Hmm. Do you know that party in question has been doing that, or are you just assuming that they do based on association with those right-wing figures you know of who do?

Because the latter is... pretty bad.

No, that's why the Labour Left don't like him, which is a pretty small segment of the population. His unpopularity is unprecedented and reaches swathes of people who never heard what he pledged during the leadership election, don't care about "trans" and want fewer refugees.

You're right he's done little about the cost of living. But no-one would have; the only way to fix it is to "grow the economy" (as the mantra goes but which the government has little control over anyway) and wait for wages to catch up, which was always going to take years.

Services are crumbling because of 14 years of the Tories slashing investment into them due to a slavish adherence to austerity ideology at a time when balancing the books didn't bring us any benefits. Now when interest rates are high and borrowing expensive, we are fucked. Labour can't go back in time and un-fuck us, and they can't run an increased deficit without spiralling interest payments. What are they supposed to do? People talk about a wealth tax - in its most common form raising about 25 billion. An extra 25 billion would be great, but it would not fix the cost of living crisis, and it's the tip of the iceberg when it comes to reversing underinvestment and it is not possible to implement immediately (you'd need to set up a lot of apparatus to assess and collect the tax) so they'd still be woefully unpopular next year when everything is still shit and the wealth tax has never yet been collected.

That leaves them with broad-base taxes like income tax and VAT. Putting them up will genuinely help their finances and public services now but... is phenomenally unpopular.

I said ever since they came to power that they were screwed before they started. They've contributed to it with needless mistakes and U-turns they've pretended weren't, but none of that is more than a skin of mould over the turd of a situation we're in anyway. To round it off, the right-wing press won't print any of their successes (and there have been a few) and screams about everything that they can't fix.