Whether he wins or loses, I still cannot fathom how a candidate like this can poll 45%+ in a country purporting to be a modern democracy.

In a hypothetical conflict with a future far-right US administration, Pakistan's most formidable defence is that no Republican can actually find it on a map. It's like Wakanda to them.

He didn't 'appear' to justify the rioting.

He literally said 'of course it’s politically justified!' There's no ambiguity here.

Never heard of him. Do you mean Stephen Yaxley-Lennon?

What a pathetic frog-faced snowflake.

But the tribunal heard neither Ms Jones nor the customer was interviewed, no notes were produced by Mrs Smith and no written account of the decision was made.

[...]

The judge said: "The disciplinary process and the dismissal were a sham designed to placate the customer.

What I know about HR is that the employer actually has a tonne of leeway to get rid of people as long as they can demonstrate they have followed a proper process with an audit trail.

The reason this person was fired that's mentioned in the headline (which I think isn't unreasonable - of course you can't call the customer a twat!) is kind of irrelevant here, it's the fact the employer didn't run a true process to back up the decision that has got them.

This isn't a problem with bikes that individuals own. This isn't a problem with the Santander bikes either. This is a specific problem with Lime bikes and the likes, because the Lime bike system is set up to encourage people to dump their bikes anywhere and Lime does nothing to discourage this. Lime is a multi-million pound private enterprise that is profiting on what is effectively the littering of our public spaces.

Personally I'd favour using punitive market-based mechanisms to solve this - fine Lime £100 or £200 for every mis-parked bike, which would align their incentives with society's and quickly lead them to being a lot more discerning about who they rent their bikes out to and how they enforce against misuse of the bikes. But I suspect this would destroy their business model anyway - the overwhelming majority of Lime bikes I see out and about are not parked in an orderly way, so what you're calling a public disorder problem must account for the vast majority of their customer base - it's a business model set up to cater to hooligans. So maybe just banning the product outright is the better option. The Santander bikes are very widely available for anyone who needs them and they operate with a system that overwhelmingly enforces orderly parking.

I'm still annoyed that the Daily Star keeps getting credit for this joke.

The joke about Truss's premiership having the shelf life of a lettuce was from the Economist. And it wasn't about the 49 days she was PM - it was referencing the seven days or so that Truss was actually in the driving seat, once you take away the mourning period around the Queen's death when nothing could happen, and then the period after the mini-budget when Jeremy Hunt and the grown-ups took charge.

What the Star did was just riff on the Economist's joke by setting up a webcam.

They can clearly enforce that more

Or, you know, at all...

I see far more Lime bikes sitting in the middle of the pavement than I do parked appropriately. Lime clearly has no incentive to punish bad parkers as all it does is lose them business for zero benefit.

The way to make the cost-benefit analysis work - and therefore to make Lime enforce against bad parkers - is for Lime to face a cost when their riders park badly. Local councils should just drive a van round and impound any Lime bikes thrown in the middle of the pavement and charge Lime £200 a pop to recover them - that would quickly get them to stop renting bikes out to hooligans.

Good. It's bonkers we were handing out non-means-tested fuel benefits to pensioners living in million pound homes, while young people and families in genuine need were struggling.

Pure Tory pork-barrel politics to bribe the one generation that most reliably voted for them. Now let's get rid of the pension triple lock next please.

My days of not taking the American far-right seriously are certainly coming to a middle. What a fucking moron.

That's so short-sighted. FPTP is hugely majoritarian. The risk we all should be worried about is that Reform either now supplant the Tories as the main party of the right, or the Tories effectively become Reform to head off the threat, or the two merge or fight elections in an alliance where they don't stand against each other (as Boris and Farage did in 2019) - which means that next time Labour loses power, it's going to be to a majority Reform/Reform-like government. Labour's current majority is illusory - they benefited from the Tory/Reform vote splitting in many of their seats - and so this reality could come to pass as quickly as five years from now if the political right get their act together and reunite.

Electoral reform today is the only way to truly vaccinate our political system against the threat of Farage or a Farage-alike in Number Ten in the future.

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.

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...

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.

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.

The 99 seats where the Lib Dems are top-two are the really interesting ones here because a) most of these seats are now ones they actually hold rather than ones where they're runners up, and b) their main challenger in these (typically middle-class Southern) seats is almost always the Tories. The Lib Dems winning 72 seats this time is an enormous part of why the Tories had a record-breaking bad night as opposed to just a regular bad one, and their ability to sustain this next time will be key to keeping the Tories out of government in future.

For the other parties (e.g. Greens are top-two in 43, mostly in big cities; Reform in 103, mostly white working-class Brexit areas), they're almost always the runner-up party (usually by quite a big margin) behind Labour.

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

This is exactly my issue. I'm not against 20mph in urban areas, but 20mph limits on roads that are clearly designed for 30mph (or more) are a lazy solution. Every subconscious instinct of an experienced driver on these roads will be telling them to drive at 30 so they have to consciously focus on the speedometer to stay within the lower limit for prolonged periods, particularly with the proliferation of speed cameras we have in the UK - my fear in a 20 zone is often now that I'm going to cause an accident because I'm so focused on the speedometer and not the road.

The right solution is to actually turn these roads into 20mph roads (not 30mph with 20mph limits) through simple road design measures that will align drivers' subconscious perception of the road with the speed the government wants them to drive at. I recognise that this can't happen overnight but I see no effort by local or national government to even start investing in the set of changes needed to make 20mph sustainable. If these roads just felt like 20mph roads then people would be a lot less annoyed at driving within the speed limit and the government wouldn't just be stoking up a massive political backlash that will end up returning them all to 30mph and abandoning all the road safety and air quality benefits that these policies are supposed to deliver for us.

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?