Michael Chessum

On Politics Live today, I pointed out to Conservative peer Mark Harper that the combination of his hostility to wealth tax and insistence that benefits should be even further restricted showed clearly that raw class interest still underpins politics. Watch our rather robust…

There's a lot of pressure on the Greens to form an electoral alliance with a new left party. And I strongly support one. That cause is not made easier by the seeming inability of leading lights of the new left party seem to even acknowledge the Greens' existence.

It is simply remarkable how much the recent pivots to condemning Israel are premised on fabricating a recent watershed, on summoning a new history of events. Hind Rajab was killed a year and a half ago. The ICJ case was filed in 2023.

The people running Labour have entertained a fantasy that, as in the 1990s, they could crush the left. The problem with fantasies is they dissolve on contact with reality. All they've done is externalise the left. Labour's century-long monopoly on left of centre politics is over

This is genuinely very good - a cut above anything I've seen from a UK politician in years. And it could not be further from where Starmer is - politically, strategically and in quality of comms. I don't think we've seen the start of the Green surge, if @ZackPolanski wins.

Choose your warrior.

Strange to hear Steve Reed simultaneously bemoan "soaring water bills straining family finances" and celebrate "£104 billion pounds of private sector investment" when the latter is FROM those rising bills

If the government wants us to save more for retirement, they could try: 💩 Reversing austerity and pay cuts 👎 Rent controls to stop landlords taking half our pay 🚫 Nationalising utilities so they aren't run by parasites Instead they are going to: 🤩 Make us work until we die

Good. Though I can't help feeling that if Orgreave happened now, Keir Starmer would have called for harsher jail sentences for the striking miners, and then proscribed the NUM as a terrorist organisation.

It is an absolute indictment of the state of British journalism that we are being told - as if it is a fact - that water nationalisation would cost £100bn. This figure is taken from a 2018 report commissioned by private water companies to make the case against public ownership.

For someone to refer to myself and my other suspended colleagues actions as “persistent knobheadery” is disappointing. It really highlights the very real issue that some people have a serious lack of patter.

The unspeakable obscenity of a Prime Minister who knowingly echoes Enoch Powell suspending @HackneyAbbott for being insufficiently alive to sensitivities around racism is a true moment of wonder for our politics. Future generations will marvel at it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm very in favour of votes at 16. But it takes a special kind of strategic genius to, one day, create a news cycle alienating left wing voters and, the next, create millions of new left wing voters. Not a bad outcome if you're @ZackPolanski or @zarahsultana.

This makes a good diagnosis and asks some important questions.

If you want to understand what's happening today, this paragraph in the Times is the only thing you need to read. The Labour Party, and the country, is being run by over-excited lads who think this is an effective way to brief a newspaper.

It's nice, isn't it. The quiet.

Abdi, I think you've got these two lines mixed up.

This is apparently a real convesation from inside Number 10: "So, Keir, last time we suspended a load of MPs, they went on to form a party that polled level with us before it was even set up. So I think we should do it again, only on a bigger scale." "OK Morgan, let's do it."

Astonishingly stupid. Labour have suspended three MPs for their rebellion over welfare cuts: Brian Leishman, Chris Hinchliff and Neil Duncan Jordan. More chaos, more briefings, more doubling down on austerity. These people have no idea how to do politics.