Election Leaflet Update 2026

I have been tallying up the leaflets that have come through my door at election time since 2007 and have just updated my graph to reflect the campaigns of the various parties for the Senedd election in 2026. We had a record number of leaflets through the door this time, and the Green Party now holds the record for sheer volume of leaflets, topping the previous high point held by the Labour party in the first election when Jeremy Corbyn was leader. 

So with no further ado, here's the graph:

The overall trend is up, with four parties distributing five or more leaflets. Admittedly, the Plaid Cymru figure this time is slightly skewed because on occasions when I posted leaflets in my street I skipped posting one through my own letterbox. But even if those were counted, the total number of leaflets we would have received would only have been 8, less than half the total we received from the Green Party. 

I haven't spoken to anyone who thought the Green Party didn't send them enough leaflets and I do wonder if the incessant leafleting backfired on them a bit. In fairness, their first leaflet landed on our doormat in November 2025 and then we had a Happy New Year leaflet in January as well. But the trickle became a flood in the last few weeks of the campaign. 

Getting so many leaflets didn't feel very "green" in the environmental sense. It also didn't escape my notice that almost all the leaflets were printed in Essex. I hope the party offset their carbon footprint for all the road miles. In contrast, all the Plaid Cymru leaflets we distributed in our constituency were printed by a printer in Splott (if we used a commercial printer). 

It is mildly amusing that with so many battles now fought online between bots and keyboard warriors, we are seeing such growth in analog paper leaflets. I'm just sad that this year I didn't have time to do a pre-election round-up. I was too busy with campaigning (ironically, giving out leaflets myself!) to do a full dissection as I have in years past, especially as we had so many!

You can read all my previous election leaflet round ups here.

Climate change - reality will 'win' over scepticism propaganda

Last week's heatwave set new records for temperatures in the UK. It was an uncomfortable and oppressive couple of days. The transport system was badly affected and we even saw wildfires on the edge of London in Essex. This all led to some serious discussions about the changing climate and the way weather systems are altering.

The sudden newsworthiness of climate change as the mounting evidence becomes harder to ignore reminds me of the central message of AS Byatt's book called Ragnarok (which I blogged about ten years ago!) 

In the book's preface, Byatt explicitly links her retelling of the myths to climate change and compares the failure to act to prevent disaster as akin to the gods mucking about and wasting time even though they all knew their prophesied doom was drawing near. The gods' attempts to ignore reality just made their destruction more inevitable. 

As I said earlier this year, reality tends to win against rhetoric. The planet is going to get hotter no matter how many lies are told by right wing politicians who are guided by their donors or grifters masquerading as 'sceptics'. Climate change is happening now whether people believe in it or not. In the same way that coronaviruses don't respect anyone's firmly held opinions about whether or not they are dangerous, the damage done to the climate isn't prevented by how many people decide they don't believe in it. 

Ultimately there will come a point when the people who have been spreading the climate scepticism propaganda will be shown to have known that it was true all along, in exactly the same way that Big Tobacco knew that cigarette smoking caused cancer while still denying any links. 

The climate sceptics may even get away with it if there is no longer a functioning human society. Who will call them to account after the apocalypse? 

There was nobody left to ask the gods why they didn't do more to stop Ragnarok. 

Prawn madness

Occasionally certain news stories catch my attention and bug me. Like this story about how prawns caught of the coast of Scotland are going to be shipped 12,000 miles to Thailand to be shelled, before being shipped back and sold in Scottish supermarkets. Why? Because it's cheaper to pay somebody in Thailand to shell prawns by hand than someone in Scotland to shove them through a machine.

In fact Time magazine makes the comparison that it costs $12 an hour to pay a Scottish worker (which with today's exchange rate works out at about £6), while a Thai hand-sheller only gets paid 50c a day. And the environmental impact is mad too - as Friends of the Earth put it: for the sake of a few extra quid, the prawn sellers are destroying the world.

I don't know what's the saddest aspect of this whole tale. That workers in Thailand are on 50c a day. That half a tonne of carbon will be pumped into the atmosphere for every tonne of prawns shipped round the world and back again. Or that someone somewhere has the job title 'Director of Scampi' on their business card.