Yes, but even at Shadow Justice he had his bizarre authoritarian obsessions (e.g. naming and shaming drug users), which was perhaps an indication of his lack of seriousness

Idk, it feels more Blairite to me!

Lib Dems, especially the more left-wing ones, are generally quite uncomfortable with a top-down agenda.

It comes back to the split within the liberal Labour right between the Crosland/Gaitskell tendency and the Jenkins/Marquand SDP tendency.

There are people in the Lib Dems I have a lot of time for.

The key here is not to think in terms of 'either...or' but instead to think in terms of 'both...and'.

There are only two Lib-Lab (or rather Lab-Lib) seats left anyway, so on the national level our parties aren't in direct competition.

There isn't one person pulling the strings centrally, but that's almost beside the point. You have to understand it as a whole ideological system.

I'd be happy to point you to lots of detailed policy briefings on transgender people's participation in sports if you're interested

I mean this is the thing: they can't be managed, because the people advocating them are not reasonable good-faith actors who are willing to compromise

They're not unconnected though, they're all part of a global anti-liberal, anti-human rights agenda that's being funded by the same networks of people.

Not really, because the Orange Book was a manifesto for small-state liberalism, localism and anti-welfarism. What I'm proposing is closer to the big-state welfarist liberalism of Blair and Brown, albeit updated for the present context.

That said, I think what we *can* learn from Australia is the importance of making sure the machinery of government is robust, well-designed and well-resourced – as well as the value of extensive democratic participation in building a more cohesive society and obtaining consent for reform.

The other place where the centre-left is doing well is Australia, and it's clear that Albanese's Labour is held up as an example by Starmer's Labour.

But Australia is very odd among rich democracies, because it's dependent on resource extraction. It's not a diversified service-led economy at all.

It's not an issue of left and right in the traditional sense.

One can imagine an alternative Labour platform: firmly in the centre ground economically, defiantly liberal, clear that our national geopolitical interest lies with Europe and not the US, proactive in its appointments to public bodies.

He had also been a Labour MP!

The combination of the minimum wage rise and the NIC changes hasn't helped either, and probably explains why the non-NIMBY part of the Greens' coalition is people in insecure work + young graduates frustrated by the lack of opportunities for career progression

I think it’s more complex than that, a lot of it comes from fear, uncertainty and sloppiness but it’s not a grand conspiracy across the org. Plus it’s well worth defending and fixing because if it dies, what replaces it will be far worse.

They could have learnt more from Sánchez, or even from Trudeau, who for all his faults did win three elections and serve as PM for 9 and a half years

It was bad in many ways, but I don't really see how it's corrupt?

The party that was elected in 2019 stayed in power for the duration of its term and then an election was held when it was supposed to be held (6 months before the cut-off, in fact)

I mean, why would they have had an election? They knew when Johnson resigned that they were going to lose the next election anyway, and they still had a healthy parliamentary majority with two years left to run.

(The crucial point here is that in parliamentary systems the head of government has no electoral mandate of their own – aside from the mandate from their constituents to be an individual legislator – so they are beholden to their party for their power)