Jon Tonge

British & Irish politics professor, Univ. of Liverpool. Views mine NOT Univ’s. Retweets/likes NOT endorsements: made me think/laugh. [email protected]

[Scott Bryan @scottygb]

BBC cuts are clearly starting to bite.

[Suzanne Breen @SuzyJourno]

The damage to the UUP brand in the last 24 hours has been immeasurable. Divided parties don’t win elections. Doug Beattie may well not be the last MLA to leave. The gulf between UUP councillors/members & the Stormont team is growing bigger by the day.
https://t.co/ASWqOQ6LX7

[Jude Webber @jude_webber]

Sinn Féin proposes reform to remove threat of Northern Ireland Assembly ‘collapse’ https://t.co/rDmYMzi0nJ via @ft

[Jon Tonge @JonTonge]

Re this one, would SF back 40% support being needed from the ‘other’ bloc (i.e. cross-community consent x 3) for some key votes or even 50% support (parallel consent)?

[Jon Tonge @JonTonge]

Interesting proposals from SF. Re this one, should the right to nominate go to the next largest party in the nationalist or unionist bloc, or to the next largest party irrespective of bloc?

[Jon Tonge @JonTonge]

@BethRigby @AndyBurnhamGM Seven(teen) days too long until the by-election…

[Beth Rigby @BethRigby]

Homage to northern soul & the legendary Wigan casino in this @AndyBurnhamGM campaign logo

[Patrick Maguire @patrickkmaguire]

EXC: New polling reveals Reform now winning as many union members as Labour

Unite’s Sharon Graham tells me: “Damning but not surprising”

GMB’s Gary Smith and two affiliate GSs for urgent course correction on policy

Farage to unions: affiliate to Reform

https://t.co/5rwsrYqv4H

[Flora Williamson @Flo_williamson]

We’ve reached peak Guardian blog

[Suzanne Breen @SuzyJourno]

EXCLUSIVE: Doug Beattie was about to be suspended from the UUP & lose the party whip for "abusive language to Jon Burrows, the failure to remove grossly misogynistic tweets, & other issues". The party leader was set to inform the Upper Bann MLA on Monday.
https://t.co/OYns6oiIqg

[Darran Marshall @DarranMarshall]

Breaking

Doug Beattie has quit the Ulster Unionist Party, saying it has become clear his membership is no longer "tenable". https://t.co/QIocZpEzC9

[Julia Willemyns @jujulemons]

Blair, Burnham, Streeting and Starmer all wrote essays this week. Here’s a summary of what they said for those who can’t be bothered to spend an hour reading about Labour’s favourite pastime: fighting about what it means to be Labour.

Blair's thesis is that Labour lost its nerve after 2007 and needs to rediscover the radical centre. Markets work, the private sector is your friend, competent technocratic government is still the answer, and the biggest transformative force on the horizon is AI, which he sees as a positive revolution that a serious centre-left government should embrace. Miss that wave and you miss everything. TLDR; the model isn't broken. Labour just needs to run it properly and stop indulging the perennial delusion that losing votes to the right means the country secretly wants you to go left.

Burnham, Streeting and Starmer think this misses the point. And they broadly agree on the diagnosis but disagree on the cure.

All three locate the origin of Britain's political unravelling in 2008, not 2007. The financial crisis broke the implicit bargain of modern capitalism: work hard, things get better. When that bargain collapsed and the banks got bailed out while wages stagnated for a decade, people got poorer – but also angry in a deeper, harder-to-satisfy way. And then austerity poured petrol on everything.

The more philosophically interesting disagreement is about what the crisis was actually a crisis of. Blair frames it as a delivery failure: the wrong policies and the wrong positioning. Starmer and Burnham both reach for ‘dignity’. The idea that whole communities (post-industrial, working class, people who didn't go to university) were made to feel invisible. That implies a fundamentally different kind of politics.

Burnham argues that New Labour never actually took Britain off the Thatcherite track. He blames deregulation, privatisation, leaving things to the market for the cost of living crisis. The centre failed people. You can't win them back by reasserting it more confidently. On AI, Burnham calls for tougher regulation of big tech and signals that an active, interventionist state would govern how AI develops rather than leaving it to the market. For Burnham, ungoverned AI is just the latest mechanism by which powerful interests extract value from everyone else.

Streeting is more moderate but lands in similar territory. Inequality is the organising fact of contemporary politics, and treating it as secondary is what produced the crisis in the first place. When the rules stop rewarding effort fairly, resentment grows.

Starmer agrees Britain should be an AI superpower, but where Blair frames AI as an opportunity to be seized, Starmer frames it as a force to be governed. The question isn't just whether AI grows the economy but whether Britain is a rule-maker or a rule-taker, and whether the gains flow to Blyth and Castleford or just to London.

The deepest difference, underneath all of this, is a question about whether the post-war and post-Thatcher economic settlement is fixable or finished. Blair thinks it needs better management and AI is the tool that makes better management possible. The others think the settlement itself was the problem, and are open to the possibility that AI (if ungoverned) compounds it by concentrating power further.

[Jon Tonge @JonTonge]

Is that recoverable?😂

[The Times and Sunday Times @thetimes]

Who are the Makerfield constituents that could choose the next PM? https://t.co/zpeeZD2bhE

[Jon Tonge @JonTonge]

Labour’s by-election seat defences this century:
When in government: Held 8, Lost 8
When in opposition: Held 27, Lost 4.

[Jon Tonge @JonTonge]

@LucidTalk Tend to agree Bill - although nearly half of countries do have bans/restrictions…https://t.co/lq1vFDcIPh

[Jon Tonge @JonTonge]

This week’s exam questions: a)1-in-3 voters voted by post in the 2025 local elections. Should the polling day ban on opinion polls be kept, scrapped, or extended? b) Are individual constituency polls most likely to influence voter choice and so should be banned during a campaign?

[Simons @Simon_Ingari]

The final stage of your career is being silent in meetings.

[BBC The View @bbctheview]

"I don't think this is going to end very well - and at the moment my money would be on Doug Beattie leaving the party he once led."

Sooner rather than later? "Yes"

@BBCGarethG - on the relationship between Ulster Unionist leader Jon Burrows and his predecessor.

#BBCTheView

[Peter Stefanovic @PeterStefanovi2]

In a 1,500 essay for The Times, Andy Burnham blames Blair-era economics for the cost of living crisis and warns Britain risks “a toxic, divisive politics like the USA”

https://t.co/SE9I8B41TC

[Jon Tonge @JonTonge]

Just astonished we’ve had so many essays this week without a single deadline extension request #LabourParty