Check out the POLITICO 28: Class of 2025, with Giorgia Meloni as the most powerful person in Europe.

Having refused to learn from Rishi Sunak’s mistakes, the new Conservative leader looks set to repeat a lot of them

Election defeats are to some degree self-inflicted, so the first place that opposition parties should look for someone to blame for their predicament is a mirror. The Conservatives have flinched from that task.

The leadership race over the summer and autumn featured only a performance of reflection on mistakes made by the last government. The looking-glass was positioned askew so no one had to see themselves as part of the problem.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

The 2024 general election was the most disproportional in British electoral history as voters displayed the highest volatility in a century, according to a new report.

Research into this year’s general election by the Electoral Reform Society (ERS) displays that the parties’ votes shifted more than at any time since 1931.

As a result, this election saw a number of firsts such as being the first UK election where four parties received over 10 per cent of the vote and five parties received over 5 per cent of the vote.

Meanwhile, the Labour and Conservative parties received their lowest combined vote share (57.4 per cent) in the era of universal suffrage.

The ERS argues the results show how the current First Past the Post (FPTP) electoral system is struggling with the shift towards multiparty voting and producing increasingly erratic results.

The ERS says a contributing factor to this “historically disproportional and volatile election” is the rise of “cross-pressured” voters — electors who find themselves aligned with different parties on different issues (economic, cultural etc).

The group adds that Labour received 63.2 per cent of House of Commons seats on just 33.7 per cent. As such, an increase of 1.6 per cent in the party’s 2019 vote-share saw it more than double its seats to 411.

Nigel Farage’s Reform UK and the Green Party received 1.4 per cent of the seats between them, after winning more than 20 per cent of the vote combined.

The 2024 election also saw a further eroding of traditional electoral heartlands. The number of seats the Conservatives have held for over a century almost halved from 94 to 48 — only four of which now have majorities of more than 10,000. 

Of the 17 seats Labour has held for over a century only three now have majorities of more than 10,000.

The ERS report also shows how parliament would look under different proportional electoral systems that, the group says, would have produced a much more representative result.

Other key findings from the report, A System Out of Step: The 2024 General Election, include:

• 554 (85 per cent) of MPs were elected without the winner getting more than 50 per cent support in the constituency
• Labour received a seat for every 23,622 votes cast, compared to Reform and the Greens, who won a seat for every 823,522 votes and 485,951 votes cast respectively
• 2024 was the first time since 1923 that the number of third-party MPs elected was over 100
• Labour and the Conservatives were in the top two in fewer than half of constituencies (306) compared to 432 in 1997
• Almost the same number of people didn’t vote in this election as did, with 28.8 million voting compared to around 27.5 million who did not participate
• 2024 was the second lowest turnout at 59.9 per cent, only narrowly missing the previous low experienced in 2001 (59.4 per cent)

Darren Hughes, chief executive of the Electoral Reform Society, said: “It is clear from the general election that the public is voting as if we already have a proportional electoral system, with people voting outside the big two parties in unprecedented numbers. 

“Voters are shopping around like never before and switching between parties at a greater rate than we have seen in a century.

“However, our current two-party voting system is struggling to cope with this new multi-party reality and has produced a parliament that least resembles how the country actually voted in British history.

“This will not help trust in politics, which is at an historic low, and is why we need to move to a fairer, proportional voting system that would accurately reflect how the country voted  before the next election.”

Josh Self is Editor of Politics.co.uk, follow him on Bluesky here.

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Ownership and control of social media platforms is a first-order concern for both domestic politics and international conflict. The most important battleground in the Russia-Ukraine war is elections in NATO member states.

And there, Russia is clearly winning. Trump, obviously, but yesterday saw the stunning success of formerly fringe right-wing candidate C?lin Georgescu. In an unimaginably large polling error, CG won 22% of the first-round vote (and thus made it into the runoff) after polling at 5% just months prior.

A prescient report by Bucharest think tank Export Forum released shortly before the election details the importance of TikTok in Romanian politics — the platform has 9 million users in a nation of roughly 16 million adults — and the impossibly sharp explosion of pro-CG content produced and consumed in the month before the election: “As of November 18, C?lin Georgescu had 92.8 million views, most of which were in last 2 months. By November 22 it had increased by 52 million views.”

This is, simply, not possible without some good old-fashioned “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” The report provides examples of exactly that, using what I now believe to be the most important vector of political influence on social media: paying non-political influencers to create targeted content:

there are Romanian influencers with no affinity to politics, i.e. with exclusive content on fashion, makeup, entertainment, who have started to post under a single hashtag, without naming the recipient candidate. The campaign is promoting C?lin Georgescu under the hashtag #echilibrusiverticalitate and is based on the idea of a president who believes in neutrality, verticality, basically recycling Georgescu’s messages from the TikTok campaign.

Recall the recent revelations that prominent right-wing influencers in the US had accepted money from a shadowy media organization that was later revealed to be part of the Russian state apparatus. They were paid “to churn out English-language videos that were “often consistent” with the Kremlin’s “interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions in order to weaken U.S. opposition” to Russian interests, like its war in Ukraine.”

Does the Romanian election fit the pattern? Absolutely. The Expert Forum report notes that “the theme with the highest visibility pushed by C?lin Georgescu on TikTok in the last two months is peace, more precisely the need for Romania to stop its support to Ukraine in order not to involve Romania in the war.” So now CG heads to a runoff election that it looks like he might actually be able to win.

Control of information environments is a crucial component of 21st century sovereignty. I have been arguing for years that the US should ban TikTok; I had a “Ban TikTok Week” this April — and the same applies to other countries. If anything, smaller countries have even more reason to do so. Western media, understandably if regrettably, focuses on things which Western readers click on. But the worst abuses by social media companies has always come from the rest of the world.

Erin Kissane recently summarized the situation well.

First, whatever happens to social media users in the US, it’s much, much worse almost everywhere else. In 2017, Facebook’s years of active damage to the media landscape and startling neglect in the face of increasingly desperate warnings from experts contributed‚ according to the United Nations, to ethnic cleansing and genocide in Myanmar. Sophie Zhang’s whistleblower disclosures reveal the extent of Meta’s longstanding failure to prevent its machinery from being used with impunity to power covert influence campaigns and target journalists and opposition parties all over the world—except in the US, Canada, and parts of Western Europe. Some of Frances Haugen’s disclosures touch on this exceptionalism as well: As of a few years ago, more than 90% of Facebook’s users live outside the US and Canada, but the company allocated that massive global userbase only 13% of its content moderation resources.

Does this imply that other countries should ban Meta products, too? That’s what I would do — and it’s obviously what China has already done. But we’ve let things go so far, Facebook and Instagram have become so deeply entrenched in so many economies, that this seems much costlier. This is the exact logic of the “Palo Alto Consensus” I outlined in a New York Times oped back in 2019.

To be clear, I don’t think there’s evidence that China and Russia are colluding on this; it’s possible, but not necessary. TikTok is just doing what tech companies do: they expand recklessly quickly, setting themselves impossible tasks like content moderation at a global scale; they break local laws or share data with autocrats, as best suits them; they lie about user and viewership numbers to prop up a digital advertising house of cards; they prevent independent oversight of basic descriptive facts, let alone the possibility of legitimate democratic control.

But I do think that this kind of targeted pre-election campaign on broadly overlooked spaces like Romanian TikTok is the most plausible and effective vector for foreign influence. And all TikTok would have to do is get a bit sloppy with their content moderation for a brief period of time — lord knows Western social media has done far worse — to make the campaign doubly effective.

In James Pogue’s stunningly reported Vanity Fair article about resurgent Bannonism in the US, he quotes a former Trump administration official about the true nature of contemporary geopolitics: “From a systemic perspective there are really only two things in politics that really mean something…Elon [Musk] buying Twitter…and for someone to emerge who could make the MAGA into something bigger than the man Trump himself.”

Musk lost billions on the Twitter deal — but has been rewarded tenfold after bending the platform towards Trump. Romanian sovereignty is under threat because they do not control their information environment. If digital media had developed gradually and from within individual countries, they might have been able to adapt proper institutions for moderating its effects. But instead, the US, Russia and China have airdropped this society-shattering technology across the globe and told everyone else good luck — we’ve got ads to sell.

And what’s the best argument for not banning TikTok, exactly? You find the guy arguing that it’s giving teenagers anxiety and ruining their attention spans annoying?

In place of precision-targeted revenue raids, Reeves needs to win a bigger argument about the reason we have taxes

It is hardly advanced political science to observe that governments are more popular when giving people stuff than when taking it away. Junior doctors, who are getting a pay rise, are probably better disposed towards Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves right now than farmers, who are losing a tax break.

Not all farmers. The government says its reforms to agricultural property relief (APR) and business property relief (BPR) will mean inheritance tax is levied on about 500 estates that were previously exempt. Agribusiness lobby groups say many more will be affected, potentially 70,000. Farmers have marched on Westminster to vent their fury.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

'Department of Government Efficiency' expected to do little more than suggest changes, Congress will still decide

Comment  Well, it's official(ish): US president-elect Donald Trump has made good on a campaign promise to appoint Elon Musk to the head of "the Department of Government Efficiency" – or DOGE. …