I was a Lib Dem supporter when we lived in the UK in the early 1990s as their environmental and social policies aligned with my thinking.
They lost support when they agreed to a coalition with David Cameron’s Tories. I am not close enough to UK politics now to know what the Lib Dems stand for, but maybe they don’t know either.
Partisanship is different from policy. You could have highly partisan voting over miniscule differences in policy.
I agree there are quite a few issues with how to interpret the model. It ignores the text of the bills obviously, and ignores some of the strategy around voting.
But if nothing else it tells a meaningful story about our legislature, and a good instantaneous litmus test for how individuals generally vote, which is useful if you don’t obsessively follow US politics like we do. Here’s a view of the current senate for example.
I’m not sure that this is particularly informative. I can get similar plots from genetic data where I’m dealing with overall differences of 0.02% and focusing on separating two sub populations.
ETA’ basically, it tells us there’s a difference, but nothing about how big the difference is.
I believe the authors-- Poole and Rosenthal have argued that the distance also translates-- I guess to likelihood of overlapping votes. But I haven’t read the literature.
It is interesting, on a systematic level to see that our congress only votes on one dimension-- Left vs Right, and that every issue-- taxes, abortion, guns, lgbtq, immigration, etc. falls on the line. If there was more than 1 dimension, than the goodness of fit would drop for 1d, and members would spread out on the 2nd (or 3rd..) dimension.
It’s also a convenient litmus test for which members of congress might defect on a close vote. Also who is likely to propose the more extreme things.
Looks like Reform wants to copy the ICE insanity from the US
This does not bode well.
This has not been handled well. Many travellers with two passports have been caught out.
I just saw a friend posting about that. Apparently she has a current Ireland passport, but her U.K. passport is expired.
My daughter has both a Canadian and UK passport but they are both in force. Only a problem if you let the UK one expire.
Good article in the January 2026 issue of Harper’s Magazine on why US electricity rates are so high. The utility companies request rate increases based on high ROEs and the regulators don’t push back. It will get worse for the average consumer as the data centres are cutting special deals on what they pay.
I mean, let’s be fair, Clinton stayed in office while a series of Republican speakers left because of adultery before they just started ignoring all complaints.
I saw earlier today that the CT state legislature is considering a proposal to ban gas-powered leaf blowers in the state, with some of the cost of forcing everyone over to electric blowers to be subsidized with an additional load in our electricity bills.
(About a third of CT’s electricity bills are directly linked to state government mandates, including the programs to provide bill assistance to low-income households during the heating months, as well as a mandate to subsidize the continued operation of the Millstone nuclear power plant.)
Ouch.
Maybe they should force able-bodied citizens to rake their leaves to reduce noise pollution and reduce costs.
The politically-connected rich people in Fairfield County would not be pleased at the extra time they would be required to tolerate their landscapers being within their compounds if they had to resort to manual raking.
Raking leaves is for landscap ers. 
This just got way more serious.
Corruption from Bangladeshi immigrants into the UK has been a serious concern over the last few years. They have been using London property as a way of washing stolen public money from the Bangladeshi taxpayer. This is hugely politically sensitive because they vote as a bloc for Labour in various important marginal seats.
Thanks anglos for not joining in on this one. At least you guys learned your lesson from 1953. Unlike us…
Trump is despised in the UK
Starmer is also being threatened politically by the Greens now (very anti-war) so he cannot go down that road. They would eat him alive at the local elections in May.
Reflections by a few of the nurses who left the US for BC.
Leave because of Trump, stay for the Nanaimo bars.