Alexander Voss

@vossaj.bsky.social

60 Followers 204 Following

Master of Laws (LL.M). Nerdy about politics, tech, and drugs. Live with TR-D, GAD, and DPDR.

What is bodily autonomy?
‘Pat McFadden, the new Work and Pensions Secretary, has said he wants to get to the bottom of why so many people are off work and claiming sickness benefits as a result of mental ill health.’ - Rowena Mason, the Guardian’s Whitehall editor.
Immigration did not even rank among the top five reasons people abandoned Labour at the local elections. Top of that list was voters’ opposition to the welfare cuts. Followed by Labour’s failure to act quickly and radically enough to improve public services and reduce poverty, and their unwillingness to take on the wealthy for the tax revenue to do so. This is where Labour’s focus must be. This anti-immigration messaging from the Prime Minister only energises Labour’s immigration-skeptical voters into finally making the switch to Reform; while pushing Labour’s leftwing voters to switch to the LibDems or Greens. If Labour continues down this path, of slashing spending and telling voters to blame migrants, they are going to haemorrhage votes on all sides.
Voters across the political spectrum are so deeply sick of budget cuts; we’ve had 15 long years of them, they clearly don’t work, but depress our economy and subsequent tax revenue, begetting ever-more cuts. Our economy has been stuck in a cut-and-depress doom spiral ever since the 2008 recession - and voters are desperate for a different, bolder approach to break us out of it. The Labour Party needs to become much more radical, to speak to people’s frustration with the slow pace of change, and the stale neoliberal model which hasn’t delivered for them. You need to produce urgent, tangible change that people can feel. Take primary care, as just one example. If you want to speak to a GP, you have to phone their surgery at 7:59am, and wait in a queue behind 48 other patients, only to be told there are no appointments left and to call back tomorrow. People absolutely hate this. They’re spitting angry about it. If it is still the case in 2029, I am convinced Labour will lose. It’s the kind of thing the Party was specifically elected to fix.
Dear Tonia Antoniazzi, I hope you’re keeping well, and I thank you for all the work you do for our community. I’m writing to you to express my deep concern about the direction the Labour Party is headed in, and the strategy the government are adopting to try and tackle the rise of Reform. Yesterday, the Prime Minister gave a press conference signalling a new, ‘tougher’ approach to immigration, in startlingly Powellian language. Respectfully, what Labour has just done, is shift the terms of debate in Reform’s favour. The way I see it is this. If we had a big party like Reform saying immigration is to blame for the problems people face, and a big party like Labour saying, for instance, that our broken economic model is to blame, the public debate would be, “which is to blame, immigration or the broken economic model?” This would be very advantageous for Labour - the economic model side is empirically correct, so it has a decent shot at winning.
my Political Compass test results, which place me in the leftmost, libertarianmost square on the grid.
a mirror selfie of me, in need of a shave, with bed hair and black nail vanish.