The Grand Wall, Squamish Chief. Exhausting, terrifying, hard, awesome.

NEW: GB voting intention Labour overtakes Reform to lead by 2 points, as featured in @BloombergUK LAB 27% (+6) REF 25% (-2) CON 20% (-1) LDEM 12% (-) GRN 10% (-1) OTH 7% (-1) 1st-3rd August | 2,048 adults | Changes on 16th-19th June

Exclusive ** Burnham Bounce Latest** Labour overtakes Reform in new @JLPartnersPolls survey, first lead since March 2025 and best score since Nov. 2024 Burnham beating Farage on best PM head-to-head too bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

Yup. Well aware. See bottom bit. Given that it only just got over the line last time, with some fairly heroic estimates of the labour force impact it seems very very unlikely it would be able to for this cohort. So it's likely a large large spending commitment.

The only way we could get this funded/enacted in the budget was that the OBR was willing to score quite large female workforce participation as a result of the childcare offer. Scoring that would definitely not be applicable here, and therefore mean a large spending increase...

We're delighted to welcome Sir Brandon Lewis as Chair of JL Partners. Sir Brandon brings exceptional experience across government, business and board leadership as we enter our next phase of growth. We're excited to have him on board. As featured in @POLITICOEurope

JL Partners has not ran a voting intention poll in Makerfield. The poll numbers below are unweighted past vote numbers from a large-scale focus group exercise.

UKIP pt.2 election boogaloo Reform's vote share numbers are something UKIP could only dream of In all but a handful of councils, Reform has improved on UKIP's best ever performances But Reform isn't just a juiced-up UKIP. A short 🧵 on this

Note how Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Poland and so on have seen their poorer areas depopulate and their richer areas grow rapidly, whereas Britain has seen slow but steady growth everywhere. A huge failure of British land use policy, causing regional income divergence.

SENIOR HIRE: We are delighted to welcome Alex Hickman to @JLPartnersPolls - most recently Senior Managing Director at Teneo, Alex will be running our corporate business development as we grow the firm further. As featured in @prweek and @politico prweek.co.uk/article/1957017…

🚨@CPSThinkTank is recruiting for the best job in Westminster - mine. I've enjoyed every second at the CPS, and will definitely continue to be involved, but the time has come for someone else to take the reins. Thanks to everyone, for everything... cps.org.uk/media/post/2026/r…

Extraordinary result in the @JLPartnersPolls polling we ran for @Policy_Exchange👇 🇬🇧Under half (48%) of British adults have a favourable view of the *UK* at the moment. ▶️That includes just 18% who have a very favourable view of the country they live in. ▶️ 45% of British Muslims have a favourable view of the UK telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/03…

Further evidence for something I’ve worried about for a while. Bad actors in the higher education sector are imperilling public and political support for international students in the rest of the system. The omertà about calling out some dubious universities needs to end.

The Greens surge in our latest JL Partners voting intention, but they are still nowhere near second place A thread on what’s happening in the numbers 🧵 For the first time in our tracking, the Greens have broken the 10% barrier, finally making it into double digits

When I was at DfE I would frequently tell the sector they were their own worst enemy and if they didn't sort out the nexus of quality and immigration a reckoning was coming. They were lucky the dependent exemptions were maintained for research courses. Suspect that will now go.

The graduate premium is falling in the UK but rising in the US. However even if the grad premium was rising everywhere, it still might have nothing to do what students learn at university. It could be the result of the "signal" sent by university attendance - a signal that could be replaced by something far cheaper and less time-consuming. Even in America, where the grad premium is rising, there are plenty of people who would argue that it's still the result of a signal - not the result of the human capital gained from being at university. There is a huge academic debate about this which is very hard to settle one way or the other, partly because we have such poor assessment data on universities. I don't think the value of university is 100% signal. I think it's a mix of human capital & signals. If we want to tilt it more towards human capital, we need better assessment data. We need to know which universities are the best at teaching certain skills (and which skills are most valuable in the job market). Graduate earnings data cannot tell you this. I just don't think it's good enough for the graduate premium to be the sole measure of university impact. You wouldn't measure a hospital by the later earnings of the people it treats! We shouldn't measure universities that way either! substack.nomoremarking.com/p…

I don't think I've ever seen a focus group or poll to back up this position...

Worth a read from @jim_blagden with @JLPartnersPolls data 👇

NEW: GB voting intention in @thesun Reform at highest level of support since September REF 31% (+2) LAB 23% (-) CON 19% (-1) LDEM 12% (-) GRN 9% (-) OTH 6% (-1) Fieldwork: 4–12 Feb, 2,006 GB adults Full results and analysis from @jim_blagden ⬇️

You should take all polling with a massive grain of salt right now for a variety of reasons, regardless of your political stripe, but the one thing i find genuinely odd is how if you just listen to mainstream press you'd assume conservatives were down by double digits and in massive trouble, which is not the case. There are undoubtedly challenges for the CPC right no, but it's a much more competitive and complicated picture than some people are painting.

A quick work update re @jlpartnerspolls and @j_l_partners. I'm immensely proud to share that we started the year on 8 people and we are ending it on close to 20! Last week we convened our annual retreat to celebrate that success. Taking place on the Red Sea in Egypt, it was an incredible few days of team bonding, strategic and training sessions, and an opportunity for the US and UK firms to come together - plus to plan on how we are going to get even bigger wins in 2026. I'm hugely proud of every member of these incredible, high-proficiency teams; and of my co-founder @tmlbk and director @guymiscampbell in helping to build them. On to 2026!