Alexander Voss
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vossaj.bsky.social
Alexander Voss
@vossaj.bsky.social
48 followers 180 following 130 posts
Master of Laws (LL.M).
Nerdy about politics, tech, and drugs.
Live with TR-D, GAD, and DPDR.
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vossaj.bsky.social
i just worked out that on yesterday’s wordle, you could guess 20 unique letters, across 4 words, without getting any yellows or greens.
October 27, 2025 at 1:17 AM
vossaj.bsky.social
Remember when people pretended to believe in this? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
What is bodily autonomy?
October 4, 2025 at 2:50 PM
vossaj.bsky.social
Most people with a mental illness are in work. The reason some people are out of work because of mental illness is because they’re too ill to work, as evidenced by thorough and invasive Capability Assessments conducted by qualified healthcare professionals.
‘Pat McFadden, the new Work and Pensions Secretary, has said he wants to get to the bottom of why so many people are off work and claiming sickness benefits as a result of mental ill health.’ - Rowena Mason, the Guardian’s Whitehall editor.
September 29, 2025 at 10:45 PM
vossaj.bsky.social
There has been a lot of contention on the British Left recently about who we should look to for leadership, and this poll has stirred it up again, so I figured I’d give my take. 🧵
June 27, 2025 at 12:04 AM
vossaj.bsky.social
I fear I will not have much luck.
May 14, 2025 at 4:00 AM
vossaj.bsky.social
Immigration did not even rank among the top five reasons people abandoned Labour at the local elections. Top of that list was voters’ opposition to the welfare cuts. Followed by Labour’s failure to act quickly and radically enough to improve public services and reduce poverty, and their unwillingness to take on the wealthy for the tax revenue to do so. This is where Labour’s focus must be. This anti-immigration messaging from the Prime Minister only energises Labour’s immigration-skeptical voters into finally making the switch to Reform; while pushing Labour’s leftwing voters to switch to the LibDems or Greens. If Labour continues down this path, of slashing spending and telling voters to blame migrants, they are going to haemorrhage votes on all sides. But it is a broader problem than just immigration. When Keir Starmer promised ‘Change’ last summer, we didn’t expect more welfare cuts, more austerity, more of the neoliberal economic model which has devestated communities, more of the concentration of wealth into London. The ineffectuality of this managerial, ‘boring’ centrism - its dearth of creativity and inability to radically tackle big problems - is the number-one cause of the apathy and resentment driving Reform UK. Voters just don’t like this kind of politics. It has grown stale, and it doesn’t deliver what people need. I realise that to respond to an insurgent far-right by pivoting more to the left sounds totally counter-intuitive, even absurd. But most voters are not intrinsically left- or right-wing. They just know that the current system does not work for them, and hasn’t for years. They’re desperate for a light at the end of the tunnel, for something bold and radical, and Farage is promising them that. Starmer could offer that too, and more effectively - but he has to go in that other direction to do it. I fear his current approach is fatal. I urge you and your colleagues to reconsider the Party’s strategy. It isn’t too late. Yours sincerely, Alexander Voss.
May 13, 2025 at 6:44 AM
vossaj.bsky.social
Voters across the political spectrum are so deeply sick of budget cuts; we’ve had 15 long years of them, they clearly don’t work, but depress our economy and subsequent tax revenue, begetting ever-more cuts. Our economy has been stuck in a cut-and-depress doom spiral ever since the 2008 recession - and voters are desperate for a different, bolder approach to break us out of it. The Labour Party needs to become much more radical, to speak to people’s frustration with the slow pace of change, and the stale neoliberal model which hasn’t delivered for them. You need to produce urgent, tangible change that people can feel. Take primary care, as just one example. If you want to speak to a GP, you have to phone their surgery at 7:59am, and wait in a queue behind 48 other patients, only to be told there are no appointments left and to call back tomorrow. People absolutely hate this. They’re spitting angry about it. If it is still the case in 2029, I am convinced Labour will lose. It’s the kind of thing the Party was specifically elected to fix. Fixing it will doubtless require pouring billions of pounds into primary care. I realise that. Reeves needs to raise those billions - and not through budget cuts - or again, I’m convinced the Party will lose the next election. Tax wealth, tax high salaries more, tax corporations more, force multinationals to declare profits made in the UK to HMRC, tax capital gains more, tax investment income more, tax big financial transactions - whatever it takes. I realise these are tough choices, but voters have run out of patience. They want quicker and easier GP appointments. Of course you can question whether it’s reasonable or realistic for voters to have such high expectations, so soon into a government, given the state of the inheritance. But that doesn’t alter the impatience and sheer desperation I have seen among the people I know; to the point they are increasingly willing to even let Farage take a swing at it. The Labour Party cannot avoid this difficult economic picture, these tough questions on tax, the desperation of voters for a true end to austerity and a tangible rebuilding of a hollowed-out Britain with lots of state investment, by shifting to the right and parroting Reform. That will only make things worse. How will Reeves get the economy growing, while Cooper constricts the flow of skilled workers? How will the construction sector hit the government’s house building target? How can we hope to solve the crisis in adult social care without staff? A failure to deliver on these key issues would give Farage an open goal; he can claim Labour are not going far enough in cutting immigration, and as evidence, he can point to the economic and labour consequences of Labour cutting immigration. This approach is unwinnable. Most Reform voters are not hostile to immigration for its own sake. They are hostile to immigration because they’ve been misled to believe a lower immigration rate would improve their access to healthcare and housing. Of course, it would actually worsen the problem, by contracting the workforce and economy. But if Labour actually improved their access, the appeal of Reform would evaporate. The only way to beat the far-right is to undermine their arguments with investment. Farage can’t win votes by saying “immigration is why you can’t get housing” if people can get housing. His lies wouldn’t sell. Resolve the material, and the cultural is much more flexible. I fully appreciate that these are incredibly difficult problems to fix, but I am not seeing nearly as much urgency and radicalism as we need. Again; you need to tax the wealthy a lot more, and spend a lot more money.
May 13, 2025 at 6:44 AM
vossaj.bsky.social
I got so angry I actually wrote to my MP 🥴
Dear Tonia Antoniazzi, I hope you’re keeping well, and I thank you for all the work you do for our community. I’m writing to you to express my deep concern about the direction the Labour Party is headed in, and the strategy the government are adopting to try and tackle the rise of Reform. Yesterday, the Prime Minister gave a press conference signalling a new, ‘tougher’ approach to immigration, in startlingly Powellian language. Respectfully, what Labour has just done, is shift the terms of debate in Reform’s favour. The way I see it is this. If we had a big party like Reform saying immigration is to blame for the problems people face, and a big party like Labour saying, for instance, that our broken economic model is to blame, the public debate would be, “which is to blame, immigration or the broken economic model?” This would be very advantageous for Labour - the economic model side is empirically correct, so it has a decent shot at winning. But instead, we have both parties agreeing that immigrants are to blame and we need to cut immigration. So this becomes consensus fact, and the public debate becomes, “who can cut immigration the best?” And Reform wins that debate, hands down, every single time, because they’re louder and meaner about it. Labour has wilfully oriented our politics around a fight it can’t win. In my view, Starmer has just used the pulpit of government to help Reform UK focus voters’ attention on immigration, and massively overstate its culpability for problems with housing, low pay and public services. That doesn’t persuade people to back Starmer; that persuades people to back Farage. Any voters convinced by the Prime Minister’s insinuation, that high legal migration is a threat to the integrity of the nation and cohesion of its culture, will obviously vote Reform to stop it. This has been the outcome every time a centre-ground party has tried to neutralise the far-right by adopting their rhetoric and policy. It doesn’t work. It strengthens support for the far-right. Indeed, a friend of mine who is not especially political, and has never bothered voting in an election before, but has been increasingly curious about Reform, said to me, after seeing the PM on television: “if even Labour are saying it, it must be true!” Labour have enticed him to the ballot box at the next election; but when he goes, it’s not Labour who’ll benefit. To be blunt, the government could lower the net migration figure by tens of thousands, even a hundred thousand, and I don’t think it would make any difference. In my experience, most people don’t vote based on statistics and official figures, or academic analysis of public policy outcomes. People vote based on stories. On narratives. Reform are winning votes with a compelling narrative, which captivates people’s hearts and imaginations. One which offers an explanation for why Britain is so broken, and a bold plan to fix it. Their explanation is wrong, and their plan won’t work; but that doesn’t really matter. It speaks to people’s overwhelming discontent with the status quo, and their burning desire for radical change. If Labour wants to beat them, it needs an even more compelling narrative. And it can’t just be the same story, or people won’t see the point - they’ll trust the man who’s been saying it for years, over the man who just started. You need to take the fight to Reform, with an alternative, competing narrative, which more adequately explains the problems we face. You need to refute the blame pinned on migrants for the state of public services, housing, and employment; so that people don’t blindly accept it as consensus fact. You need to highlight the real culprit - chronic underinvestment in our public services, and austerity starving our economy; and offer a bold plan to fix it - higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations, to fund economic stimulus and bigger budgets. You need to refocus people’s populist anger on who’s really responsible - not immigrants, or the ‘liberal establishment’, but the ultra-wealthy.
May 13, 2025 at 6:44 AM
vossaj.bsky.social
this account is for politics so i did the compass thing. i think i broke it.
my Political Compass test results, which place me in the leftmost, libertarianmost square on the grid.
November 15, 2024 at 2:40 AM
vossaj.bsky.social
heya Bluesky!

he/him

23 ♌️

bisexual 💅

Welsh 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

brought to you by trazodone & mirtazapine 🧠

overeducated NEET (Liz Kendall seething rn)

“one of those ‘postmodern neoMarxists’ Jordan warned me about”
a mirror selfie of me, in need of a shave, with bed hair and black nail vanish.
November 15, 2024 at 2:38 AM