When Britain’s prime minister, Rishi Sunak, stood in the pouring rain last week to announce a general election, there could hardly have been a less auspicious beginning to the Conservative Party’s campaign. In the space of a few days, it has gone downhill from there.

Eighty-five Tory MPs have shown their confidence in their party’s ability to win another term by declaring their retirement. These include the former PM Theresa May, long-serving minister Michael Gove, and erstwhile Tory leadership contender Andrea Leadsom. Twenty-two of these MPs have served in the Commons for fewer than ten years, and ten of them were only elected in 2019.
[…]
They are right to be worried. What is happening to the Tories is the culmination of the long-term decline and decomposition of their vote, which was accelerated by Brexit, Boris Johnson, the Truss debacle, and Sunak’s time in office. As I have argued in detail elsewhere, during the 2010s, the party became increasingly dependent on a coalition of propertied interests, with its core mass base provided by elderly voters.

These layers of the electorate were shielded from the direct consequences of the 2010–15 Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government through protection of pensioners’ incomes via the “triple lock” — a guarantee the state pension would rise in tandem with average earnings, inflation, or a baseline figure of 2.5 percent (whichever is the highest).

Deft manoeuvring around the “need” for cuts and judicious scapegoating helped ensure the Tories then escaped the political consequences of systematic cuts to public services, especially the National Health Service, that this demographic cohort depends on. But there was more to this loyalty than the consequences of Tory policy from 2010 onward.

First of all, there is the social location of being a pensioner. Because the incomes of pensioners tend to be fixed and cannot be made good in an emergency by reentering employment, their experience is analogous to that of the petty bourgeoisie. As many Marxists have observed, dependence on one’s own modest capital and ability to labo[u]r produces a political disposition toward stability and a hostility to real and imagined threats.
[…]
The second factor, which you might call the “strong force,” comes from [pensioner's] tendency to acquire property over time. […] This has had two significant political consequences. For the elderly property owner, it has strengthened the tendency to right-wing, authoritarian politics that was already latent in the social location of pensioners. In contrast, for younger people — today’s under-fifties — the housing shortage has severed the link between aging and the propensity to vote for the Right which, in the British case, means the Conservatives.
[…]
Sunak’s election campaign is the last gasp of a historically exhausted party. The task of trying to turn the situation around by appealing to working-age people is difficult, because his own political outlook (and that of the Tories in general) seeks to undercut any demands made on the state.

Steps to addressing the housing shortage would cut against the interest that the existing Tory coalition has in keeping property values high and maintaining the private rental sector. A move away from a politics of scapegoating would deprive the Tories of a tried-and-tested method of binding their supporters together.

As a result of Johnson’s stupidity, Truss’s recklessness, and Sunak’s do-nothing attitude, the age at which someone is more likely to vote Tory has more than doubled since 2019, from thirty-nine to seventy. To prevent complete disintegration at this hour, all the Tories can do is double down and hope there will be a viable enough rump left from which to fight back after the election. Even such a limited measure of success could well prove to be out of their reach.

Video footage shows Jon Benjamin sitting in the front seat of a car and directing the weapon towards a person sitting in the back in what appears to be a joke.

Laughter and music can be heard in the background as the employee makes a hand gesture suggesting they’re uncomfortable.

At the time of the incident, sometime earlier this year, Mr Benjamin was on an official trip to two Mexican states where there is a high presence of drug cartels, the Financial Times reports.
[…]
The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) has not officially announced that Mr Benjamin was removed from his position.

However, the government’s official website states that he ‘was UK Ambassador to Mexico between 2021 and 2024’.

Archive

When Sam Altman was ousted as CEO of OpenAI on November 17, 2023, Kara Swisher started tweeting up a storm of “scoopage,” as she referred to her calls with high-ranking tech figures. Over the days Altman was on the outside, Swisher helped to craft a narrative that a board stacked with his internal rivals had pulled off a coup without a legitimate reason. The face of the AI boom had been betrayed and deserved to retake his position at the helm.

Direct PDF Link, PDF archive. I'd suggest bookmarking the archive as parties have a habit of deleting stuff from past elections (e.g. Labour have deleted the PDF for their 2019 manifesto).

Lot's of waffling but here are the key policies I managed to pick out:

• Ban 0-hour contracts, "ensuring everyone has the right to have a contract that reflects the number of hours they regularly work, based on a twelve-week reference period"
• End the practice of fire-and-rehire
• Worker protections from day one
• Merge the current three-tier employment status into two categories of 'worker' and 'genuinely self-employed'
• Strengthen redundancy rights
• Strengthen protections for the self-employed
• Family working
  • Make 'flexi-time' contracts the default (work hours that fit around children)
  • Ban firing women for six months after returning from maternity leave
  • Review the parental leave system within the first year of government
  • Right to bereavement leave for all workers
• Ensure that surveillance technology can't be introduced without consultation
• Make it so minimum wage considers the cost of living when calculating it
• Remove age brackets from minimum wage
• Remove the lower earnings limit and waiting period for statutory sick pay
• Ensure hospitality workers receive the tips they earn
• Ban unpaid internships, except when part of education or training course
• Establish a new 'Fair Pay Agreement' for adult social care workers
• Reinstate the School Support Staff Negotiating Body
• Remove "unnecessary restrictions on trade union activity and ensuring industrial relations are based around good faith negotiation and bargaining"
  • Repeal the Trade Union Act 2016 and Minimum Service Levels (Strikes) Bill and the Conduct of Employment Agencies and Employment Businesses (Amendment) Regulations 2022
  • Allow electronic and workplace balloting for union votes
  • Remove the requirement for unions to prove at least 50% employee support to be recognised and make final ballot a simple majority
  • Give unions the right to access the workplace for recruitment and organising purposes
  • Strengthen protection for trade union reps
• Close the gender pay gap
  • Include outsourced workers in calculations
  • Require firms with >250 staff to publish ethnicity and disability pay gaps
  • Require employers to provide support to employees going through menopause
• Establish a single enforcement body for worker rights to replace the current fragmented system
• Double the time limit where employees can bring a claim to an employment tribunal to six months
• Allow workers to raise grievances to ACAS collectively
• Extent the Freedom of Information Act to companies that have public contracts and publicly funded associations
• Require public bodies to asses if work can be done more efficiently in-house before outsourcing to the private sector
• Ensure public contract take into account 'social value' when being given out (e.g. local jobs, pay, trade union recognition)

Promises with no real policy attached:

• Strengthen protections for whistleblowers
• Help carers in the workforce
• Give rights to people who work from home to be able to separate life from work
• Ensure "regulations on travel time in sectors with multiple working sites is enforced and that workers’ contracts reflect the law" (this is copied verbatim twice across the document)
• Bring employment tribunals 'up to standard'
• Review health and safety regulations
  • Review guidance on working in extreme temperatures
  • Protections for people with long Covid
  • Increased legal duty for employers to tackle sexual harassment

They also say the terminally ill deserve "security and decency", but don't actually propose anything other than encouraging employers and trade unions to sign the Dying to Work Charter.

A thing not picked up above, but this document spends a lot of time batting for employers. Every mention of improving protections or abusive practices is accompanied with some statement along the lines of "most employers are already really good to their employees" or "ensure there is a good talent pool for employers".

Archive

The last few years have seen a sustained effort on the part of the UK government to clamp down on protest labelled ‘disruptive’ and ‘illegal’. After the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act of 2022 and the Public Order Act 2023, we are now presented with John Woodcock’s ominously titled report Protecting our Democracy from Coercion. It targets not just certain activist groups but our understanding of democracy itself. Emphasising the ‘rule of law’, the report imagines a democracy reduced to a fixed set of rules and institutions insulated from popular control and contestation.

[…] [John Woodcock's] 291-page report focuses particularly on non-violent activists on the left, such as climate and pro-Palestine groups, who employ strategies of disruption and lawbreaking. The threat of these, Woodcock claims, lies in the economic damage they may cause, in the draining of police resources, and in their potential ‘to undermine faith in our parliamentary democracy and the rule of law.’ Although recent changes in policy would suggest otherwise, he insists that these dangers have so far been overlooked and little understood. The recommendations of Woodcock’s report range from establishing channels for businesses to claim compensation from protest organisers, charging them for the cost of policing, and calling on governments and elected representatives not to engage with or consult any activists employing strategies of lawbreaking.

[…] Championing ‘the rule of law’, he writes ‘that if a movement advocates systematic law-breaking as the means for political change, then that organisation crosses a line for what is and is not acceptable.’ This disregards the fact that protests that involve lawbreaking and civil disobedience have a historical legacy of democratisation that extends from the suffragettes to the US civil rights movement — and are recognised as democratic practices by liberal democratic theorists such as John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas.

Woodcock, in contrast, insists that all this is obsolete because ‘the UK’s liberal democracy’ guarantees citizens’ right to vote. This reduces the people to an audience allowed to express their consent or disapproval every few years on the invitation of the government. It also disguises the reality of a corporate lobby drowning out electoral voice. The ‘independent advisor’ Woodcock is himself a case in point: it is difficult to believe that his activity as a paid lobbyist for arms manufacturers and fossil fuel companies did not affect his report’s recommendations to constrain climate and pro-Palestine activist groups in particular. Making acts of popular protest more and more difficult ultimately also makes it easier for corporate power to shape government policy in its interest.