Alex

@ATRightMovies 2001 by a mile

@Keir_Starmer @RachelReevesMP @Ed_Miliband You fool

If fuel companies try to rip off customers, my government will step in. @RachelReevesMP and @Ed_Miliband are bringing the bosses of the fuel companies in today, to make sure that customers aren’t losing out because of the conflict in the Middle East.

@ATRightMovies Bedknobs and Broomsticks

@Peston Seriously? If a party can get further to the left of Labour, then I'm terrified. "He allowed the Greens to flourish and grow, in fact he encouraged it, by positioning Labour to the right"

It is not unusual for governing parties to be humiliated in by-elections and to subsequently recover. But the trouncing of Labour in Gorton and Denton is something special. And it is especially damaging to the career prospects of the prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer.  The electoral facts are astonishing, Despite all the talk of it being a close three way race, the Greens won with a comfortable margin of 4,402 and secured 41% of the vote, compared with Reform on 29% and Labour on 26%. Remember that Labour secured 50.8% of the vote in the 2024 general election and had a margin over its rivals of 36.7%, on a voter turnout almost identical to yesterday's. Gorton and Denton was, on that arithmetic, one of the 10% of the seats that it took that should have been easiest to retain.  Or to put it in the jargon, it has lost one of its safest seats. And having lost Gorton, Labour could lose almost anywhere. There are three reasons why this is deeply problematic for Starmer personally. First, and perhaps of least importance, the campaign it fought in the constituency now looks ridiculous. It constantly made the claim that the Greens were an irrelevance in the contest and that the only way to beat Reform was to vote Labour.  Well it got one part of the analysis right: a majority in Gorton and Denton did not want a Reform MP. But they chose Zack Polanski's Greens as the vehicle to achieve that, so disillusioned are they with Starmer's government. Second, Starmer himself - through a committee of Labour's ruling National Executive Committee - vetoed the strongest potential candidate, Andy Burnham, mayor of Greater Manchester. We'll never know whether Burnham's personal local popularity would have reversed the anti-Labour tide, and would have secured the seat. That's at Starmer's door. Finally the victory of the Greens is devastating to Starmer's positioning of the party, under the powerful influence of his former chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney. He allowed the Greens to flourish and grow, in fact he encouraged it, by positioning Labour to the right, on everything from immigration, to the EU to the economy, because he and McSweeney saw the main challenge as from Farage and Reform.  From election night onward, this always seemed eccentric at best, since one of the conspicuous trends in that election was how well parties of the left performed. If Starmer wanted to be in power for the ten years he said was necessary to change the country, he always needed to position Labour as part of a loose informal grouping that would include the LibDems and the Greens.  Instead he set those parties up in many voters' minds as the principled alternatives to both Reform and Labour. He could have taken the oxygen away from the Greens and the LibDems. Instead he fed them. Starmer's Labour will also have been hurt in Gorton and Denton, with its significant muslim and student communities, by his cautious approach to criticising the Israeli government's strikes on Gaza and by taking his pragmatic, friendly approach to Trump. Some Labour MPs will give him the benefit of the doubt in those respects. But most will just be frantically worried about their career prospects. So what follows from Labour's Gorton catastrophe? First, the pressure for a massive overhaul of Labour's political positioning and policies will become irresistible. Second, Starmer's own credibility is now so damaged that he will struggle to recover.  If he has another roll of the dice before the local and national elections on 7 May, it's only because no credible alternative candidate to be leader is ready to launch a campaign yet. But even members of his cabinet say that the consensus among Labour MPs is he won't lead them into the next election. And when they say that so casually, it's difficult to see how even Starmer - who prides himself on never giving up - will keep on keeping on.

@DanielJHannan Train drivers

@jamiemd31 @ZiaYusufUK Why not?

@ZiaYusufUK Why shouldn't Netflix be regulated? They broadcast onto our screens the same as everyone else ...and they're all regulated. Noone should be free to broadcast anything they like without limit

Starmer promised to “tread lightly on your lives”. Now he wants to regulate Netflix. It’s a matter of time before he comes for Youtube and Facebook. He wants total control over what you see and hear online. He is an authoritarian, election-cancelling, fraction of a man who will go down in history as one of the worst politicians in British history.

@RobertPicardo @WilliamShatner @startrekcruise Total legend

⁦@WilliamShatner⁩ it's just about to take the stage as we boldly engage ⁦@startrekcruise⁩

@Keir_Starmer A stagnating, debt-ridden, unproductive, over-taxed, over-regulated economy causes child poverty, Mr. Starmer.

Shameful. I’m incredibly proud that this government has scrapped the cruel two child limit. Reform wants to push hundreds of thousands of children into poverty. thesun.co.uk/news/38258787/…

@JamesMelville Ommadawn

@ATRightMovies The Terminator

@benonwine Starmer second term

Three words or Less? 👻 😱

@JVMonte2 Mike Oldfield: Tubular Bells Hergest Ridge Ommadawn All masterpieces

What is the best run of three or more consecutive albums by a band or artist?

@GavinBarwell @maw6785 You are not a Conservative

@maw6785 Gavin thinks the Conservative Party should always give Conservative voters a Conservative candidate to vote for (And if the Conservatives can't win, Gavin would prefer pretty much anyone to Reform)

Gavin thinks the Conservatives can win Gorton and Denton. I worry for him

@BasilTheGreat @grok Which other countries have blocked or restricted VPN use?

🚨VPN BAN TO GO AHEAD IN UK 🚨 VPN's for under 18's will be banned in the UK under new legislation But this has draconian consequences for adults ANYONE using a VPN will be required under UK law to provide proof of I.D Removing anonymity entirely Dark days ahead

@JamesMelville This is my favourite: I’ve been invited to a party to celebrate both the Chinese New Year and Burn’s Night - it’s called Chinese Burns night. I didn’t want to go but they twisted my arm.

The best Burns Night joke of them all: An English doctor is being shown around a Scottish hospital. At the end of his visit, he's shown into a ward with a number of patients who show no obvious signs of injury. He goes to examine the first man he sees, and the man proclaims:- "Fair fa' yer honest sonsie face,
Great chieftain o'the puddin' race!
Aboon them a' ye tak your place, painch tripe or thairm:
Weel are ye worthy o' a grace as lang's my arm...." The doctor, being somewhat taken aback, goes to the next patient, who immediately launches into:- "Some hae meat, and canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it,
But we hae meat and we can eat,
And sae the Lord be thankit." This continues with the next patient:- "Wee sleekit cow'rin tim'rous beastie,
O what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty, wi bickering brattle
I wad be laith to run and chase thee, wi murdering prattle!" "Well," said the Englishman to his Scottish colleague, "I see you saved the psychiatric ward for last." "No, no, no," the Scottish doctor corrected him, "this is the Serious Burns Unit."

@SW_Help Hi, I'm looking at trains from Witley to Waterloo for tomorrow, and all options require changing at Guildford. Why are there no direct trains?