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Mark Pack @markpackuk.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

What still always surprises me is that the NFL - in the US, home of capitalism and to the victor the spoils - has a similar levelling mechanism.

Mark Pack @markpackuk.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Happy Thames Water Level Question On Reddit day!

reddit.com

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Although the journalists in this drama make use of phone hacking and illegally accessing persona data!

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.. which would make the film version a war movie?

PS As it has a former soldier in it, perhaps it counts as a war drama...

Yes, that's very much better treated as a plot McGuffin rather than an attempt to write a real political plot trigger!

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And the trend has continued for another year, making 2024 looking like a turning point in attitudes. What happened to change views then?

Should the tradition of the bride wearing white be kept or dropped?

I took the government to mean that their other text overrides the copyright information next to individual photos, but yes, that's not exactly the clearest way of doing things!

Now you make me feel old 😂 There are more recent examples too, though you are right to have that doubt as when opportunity has neared, enthusiasm has faded. Hence my Q on whether this time will be different.

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Two examples to illustrate the point - the Plant Review in Kinnock's time and the Jenkins Commission in Blair's.

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(As someone who follows polls more closely than economic statistics, I do wonder if the basic rule of polling - the more surprising the result, the more you should doubt the data - may have some utility in being applied more to surprising economic data?)

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If you have time for a question, given the other recent economic news - "those bad stats we kept on failing to explain turned out to be wrong" - how confident are you that the unexpected more positive news will turn out to be real rather than end up with a similar explanation?

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Russia's spy agency opens criminal case against Lib Dem councillor

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"PR" is generally taken to include systems like STV, and that's the sense in which I was using it (and I think also the PM).

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Because in a democracy the way we elect our politicians is pretty important?

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After all Labour's previous dalliances with PR for the Commons, let's hope they see this through - first past the post cannot cope with the modern state of politics.

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It's notable how similar the seat tallies are in the latest MRP polls, and although there's quite a variation on the right, the Conservative plus Reform total is also similar across them all. More analysis here: theweekinpolls.substack.com/p/the-same-b...

Graph of how MRP seat tallies vary between pollsters.

Are free breakfasts ok instead?

... shouldn't only think about the former, but I'm struck when reading pieces calling for tax reform how the former is all-but-never mentioned as a desirable attribute or how a reform can be broken down into stage 1 that passes the midnight test ahead of stage 2 etc.

Or to give a current practical example - the politics of tax changes are rather different if a reform is something a Chancellor can announce in a budget is coming into force at midnight or if it requires a piece of primary legislation to spend 9 months going through Parliament. We certainly...

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... But we have designed this policy idea to start showing benefits before the end of the Parliament so you have a chance to ride out the unpopularity.'

The flip side of this is that in my experience many people with policy ideas feel that politics is not something to sully themselves with and so don't try to design policies that do their best to cater for political realities. E.g. It is so rare to hear someone say 'yes, this will be unpopular...

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("All" here excludes Stonehaven's as they didn't have a traditional set of fieldwork dates and on a Sunday evening I decided to pass on imputing dates to include them. Sorry Stonehaven!)

And a little bonus for those interested in the Lib Dems: here's the Lib Dem seat tally in all the MRPs in the last Parliament.

Note that it's not until very close to polling day that even the better performing ones started to get close to the actual result.

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The same but also different: the picture from five MRPs

There's bad news for one of the blocs in modern British politics when you look at the combined picture across the five (five!) MRPs recently released: buff.ly/6joHaYs

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Five MRPs have recently been published. What do they tell us, where do they agree and where do they disagree?

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