Fintan Smith (Mac Gabhann)

RT / like ≠ endorsement | My views only | Co-founder of | Mainly on bluesky these days | Woke-eats tofu-does karate

[Fintan Smith (Mac Gabhann) @fintan_smith]

@Samfr You can take a look at Convergent's modelling of switching (2024->2026 locals) at https://t.co/bDzng2Wxtc - happy browsing.

[Fintan Smith (Mac Gabhann) @fintan_smith]

Convergent Opinion partnered with @Samfr to poll 10,000 people in local election areas in England. We built an MRP, calibrated to the local election result, that allows us to provide a robust estimate of how Labour's 2024 coalition broke left and right - down to ward level...

[Sam Freedman @Samfr]

New post:

"Playing on difficult mode"

Using data from an exclusive new mega-poll I look at how a new Labour leader can come up with a governing project that rebuilds the party's voter coalition.

And I explain why Blair's strategy wouldn't work.

https://t.co/GRagVhLMH2

[Fintan Smith (Mac Gabhann) @fintan_smith]

You can take a look at Convergent's modelling of switching (2024->2026 locals) at https://t.co/bDzng2Wxtc - happy browsing.

[Fintan Smith (Mac Gabhann) @fintan_smith]

Convergent Opinion partnered with @Samfr to poll 10,000 people in local election areas in England. We built an MRP, calibrated to the local election result, that allows us to provide a robust estimate of how Labour's 2024 coalition broke left and right - down to ward level...

[Patrick English @PME_Politics]

There's a bit of confusion here as to what this poll is actually representative of:

- USDAW included, but they are private sector workers
- NASUWT aren't included, one of the biggest teaching unions in the UK
- GMB, Unite, Unison all mixed public/private sector workers

[Fintan Smith (Mac Gabhann) @fintan_smith]

I'll post a link to that in the next couple of days (you can currently access via his piece). As a side note, working with @Samfr is a dream - and we're grateful to him for working with us on this exciting piece of work.

[Fintan Smith (Mac Gabhann) @fintan_smith]

If you read the piece (linked at the top of this thread) you can get through to an interactive dashboard we've built out that walks you through some of the key findings from this set of locals, and let's you see what happened in every ward that was up in the country...

[Tom Westgarth @Tom_Westgarth15]

Laura Gilbert built 10 Data Science and the Incubator for AI, which have both pioneered the deployment of technology across the British state. Few people have contributed more to improving the UK’s state capacity in AI than Laura and the teams she was a part of.

10DS modelling reportedly informed the choice to prioritise by age rather than occupation. This is widely credited with saving lives versus the occupation-based alternative being lobbied for at the time.

10DS and the brilliant folks there did a lot of other great stuff, including building live COVID data that policy teams and the public relied on, as well as releasing a lightweight data sharing tool on GitHub where anyone can access it free of charge. Today, it has amassed over 200,000 public downloads, used by teams across government and industry to make data sharing easy.

Onto AI, where Zack has suggested that Laura doesn’t have lots to offer to public discussion. Whenever I speak with frontier labs, they tell me the U.K. now has the most ambitious and sophisticated approach to deploying AI in public services.

With Extract (which Laura’s Incubator for AI team developed), planning documents are now converted into digital records in 40 seconds, versus the 1–2 hours of planner time it typically takes manually, with higher accuracy. That’s roughly a 100–180x speedup, and is contributing to a 45% reduction in processing time to build the housing and infrastructure the UK is sorely in need of.

The public sector team who built Extract scaffolded Gemini so that it could orchestrate Segment Anything and pose estimation models to map geospatial information from text and diagrams in a way that even the GOOGLE DEEPMIND TEAM hadn’t worked out how to do at the time.

So rather than outsourcing to big tech, which I’m sure Zack and many others are more than sceptical of, Laura helped build true public sector state capacity that reduced our reliance on the private sector, while also delivering a world class public service.

Powerful AI systems are going to usher in a centuries worth of social and economic transformation within only a couple of decades. This requires a deep analysis of where capabilities will develop, an understanding of which externalities we want to mitigate, a vision of what a good life looks like, and amassing the people, tools, infrastructure, and institutions to build that vision. 

Of course Laura is precisely the sort of person that has much to offer in answering these questions. We should be cherishing the tireless civil servants and incredible technical talent that have built capabilities that many folks think the public sector would never be able to do.

[Jack Shaw @JackTShaw]

NEW SUBSTACK:

Local authorities shape many of the conditions that drive productivity: housing, planning, skills, transport and public health.

[Patrick English @PME_Politics]

Blair intervention making a lot of headlines. One thing I wanted to highlight is that some of the electoral examples he gave maybe aren't the best. Some were drawn from large multiparty systems where getting ~20% of preferences equals success. Labour on 20% would be a disaster.

[Jazz Memes @JazzMemes]

Rest In Peace Sonny Rollins 🎷🕊️🙏

[Patrick Maguire @patrickkmaguire]

Campaign account spelling Rusholme Ruffians as “Rush Home Ruffians” should trigger a Manchester mayoral by-election by itself

[David Lawrence @dc_lawrence]

An organisation is only as effective as its operations team, and that's why we're looking for an exceptional individual to lead our ops at @BritishProgress.

If you might be that person, get in touch! Or if you know someone else who could be, please share with them.

[Jessica Elgot @jessicaelgot]

Tomorrow is phase three.

Nothing quite sums up phase two like this video, which was all about the No10 reshuffle and was launched on the same day of a multibillion free childcare offer saving parents thousands - which was barely ever mentioned.

[Steve Akehurst @SteveAkehurst]

A (probably doomed) plea to not totally forget the role of differential turnout as results come in.

There will be more Lab/Reform switching in some areas but it’s also amped up Reform (& Green I expect) voters turning out in far higher numbers.

This is what happened last year:

[Keiran Pedley @keiranpedley]

Hearing some wildly unsubstantiated rumours based on anecdote. Anyone else?

[Martha Dacombe @martha_dacombe]

New column from me in @ArguablyMag

Starmer keeps saying "delivery". But if the ministers actually delivering are the ones most vulnerable in a reshuffle, what exactly is he rewarding?

Read in replies

[Fintan Smith (Mac Gabhann) @fintan_smith]

Excited to see what @ArguablyMag get up to as they build over the next few months. Well worth a read!

Reclaiming the Future https://t.co/N8jXczi0Qm