I mean yeah it’s an authoritarian takeover but can we take some comfort in the fact that the people doing it are INSANELY stupid?

Some absolutely top notch orange cattery here

Quite a change out this morning:

Whilst obvious when you think about it, this line was a lightbulb moment for me: "For as long as humans have had urban settlements, in-person retail has subsidised the creation of shared places". So as retail goes online we need to encourage other activities into shared places. Great column.

Following today’s sentencing of Paul Doyle, several people have understandably queried why he was not banned from driving for life. It’s a good question, and one I attempted to grapple with in #NothingButTheTruth in the context of repeat driving offenders.

It's crazy that the US has the nearly the same rate of road traffic deaths per 100,000 people as India, Brazil and China. It does worse than Indonesia and Mexico. Wow! Neat stuff from @ashendruk.com's excellent new newsletter www.not-ship.com/huh-apparent...

Labour’s shift away from “immigration is good but it needs to be managed” to “it is bad” is a gift to essentially everyone they compete with, because it means that they don’t have the right position to be able to attack *anyone*.

Really fascinating.

If it were steel works we would have a government bailout plan, yet losing thousands of jobs at unis is met with a shrug. & unlike steelworks universities were profitable when they had foreign students. You are killing the golden goose… one of our best exports… HOW IS THIS HELPING GROWTH?!

This should be the main story on all TV news programmes. The University of Essex is closing its Southend campus because of the fall in the number of foreign students and the loss of income they provided for the University. www.echo-news.co.uk/news/2566689...

This story is starting to make me feel I’m going slightly mad - maybe RR overdid the gloom, but the tax rises are paying for a) the welfare U-turns b) the £10bn-plus increase in headroom c) scrapping the two child limit d) bits of other spending eg higher local gov costs 🤷🏻‍♀️

The secret to early retirement; dine out rarely, fly economy and be a Google employee making $390,000/year married to a fellow Google employee 17 years older than you who likely makes twice as much as you.

Rabbiatu is a nurse who worked during COVID, had been in the U.S. 30 years. A judge ordered that she could not be sent back to Sierra Leone for her safety, for fear of torture (!). So our evil regime sent her to Ghana (in shackles), and Ghana dragged her back to Sierra Leone.

🧵This 58-year-old nurse from Maryland is seen being violently dragged along the ground by officials in Ghana. Trump deported her there. This abhorrent & disgusting abuse of a woman who saved American lives and cared for injured and ill Americans for 30 years. All the details below are worse.

Dismal framing. Every aspect of most asylum seekers’ lives is controlled & paid for by the Home Office. They can’t work, are told where to live & have no autonomy or dignity. So they aren’t *choosing* to use taxis & don’t need to be “banned” from doing so. The HO just needs to get its act in order.

Here's UKIP's former Scottish leader David Coburn, who has denied taking Russian bribes after being named in Whatsapp messages between Nathan Gill and a pawn of the Putin administration, being applauded by Gill for arguing against Ukraine's entry to the EU

Richard Tice, March 2025: "I have never met Nathan Gill, and he has never had anything to do with Reform,"

“Inequality is poisoning our economy and undermining growth - and yet politicians see tackling it as low priority or too risky” Julian Richer

This report is that rare thing, whereby you want every politician, and most importantly the current government, to read it and take it on board. If ever they say something contrary, they should be asked to explain why they disagree with this analysis. Brilliant work - thanks.

This is a vital essay by @johnspringford.bsky.social & @acjsissons.bsky.social - diagnosing the British malaise and providing a set of clear policy solutions. You will be much better informed for having read it getting-out-of-the-hole.uk

Yesterday, we put out a report on the most important issues to voters. We know that immigration now tops the traditional most important issues question (see below from @yougov.co.uk). But that doesn't tell the full story. Here is a rundown of the experiments we did to test this out (A THREAD):

New essay out today by me and @acjsissons.bsky.social - ‘Getting Britain out of the hole: a plan for the economy’. You can read the whole thing here getting-out-of-the-hole.uk A chart mega-thread follows 🧵

A great report- very much worth the read

This may be Trump's perfect social media post. A true work of art. He confirms: ✅He personally directs criminal investigations. ✅He is targeting opponents. ✅Epstein "records" exist and he knows the contents. Bonus points for connecting it to investigation of his fondness for Putin.👀

Read 'em and weep. (www.nber.org/system/files...)

Two of the top bosses of the BBC resigned this week, after allegations in a dossier claimed Panorama had altered a Trump quote. One problem: that dossier altered the Trump quote, too www.thenewworld.co.uk/james-ball-e...

NEW The letter the BBC could send back to Trump A proposal for a reply to his $1bn claim By me. Enjoy. emptycity.substack.com/p/the-letter...

Really encourage everyone to read this. All of it

The reaction to the Panorama edit has been nothing short of hysterical. Yes the BBC has some impartiality problems. But its biggest isn't the one you think. New piece from me. open.substack.com/pub/goodalla...

Love being reminded to do this every year. It's a win/win all round

Nowhere in the hysterical pile-on against the BBC in the British press has anyone mentioned that BBC News now has 77 million viewers & listeners in the US and has established itself as the second most trusted news source there.

“When masked federal agents conceal their identity and authority as a practice, anyone can don a mask and a gun and not be expected or required to verify their authority,” says Alycia Castillo of the Texas Civil Rights Project. Read more: www.wired.com/story/fbi-wa...

Lewis is absolutely right here

Why should we switch 2p of tax from National Insurance to Income Tax? ⤵️ Income Tax raises more money and spreads the burden more fairly. The switch would raise £6 billion, and leave the vast majority of payslips unaffected.

It is way past time for the UK government & the BBC to get off X & for Musk to be treated as a threat to national security. The world's richest man is using his site to promote civil war, ethnic violence & the overthrow of an elected government. You won't win him over with another conference on AI

I have a very bad feeling about this...

Stephen Bush on the extraordinary draft legislation which Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp, Matt Vickers, Katie Lam and backbench colleagues have proposed in parliament It is a proposal that would seek to deport around 5% of the resident population, including over a quarter of a million with ILR

“Labour is losing more voters to the Greens and the Lib Dems than it is losing to Reform, not least because many are appalled at Labour’s cowardice on immigration—at seeing the government essentially concede the argument to Reform and the newly extremist Conservatives without even trying to fight.”

Why is a Labour Home Secretary perpetuating this myth in The Sun? Asylum applications in the UK are significantly below the average for all European countries. The only person helped by spreading this falsehood is Nigel Farage

Katie Lam, the shadow home secretary saying legal migrants need to be deported (The Times) will be seen by many as the most racist comment we’ve heard in recent years. Why this isn’t headline news is scandalous. Which will translate to many as acceptance and agreement. Britain needs to get a grip.

With the AWS outage, now‘s as good a time as any to post this old strip.

on.ft.com/47u0XIT How Brexit drained the Tories’ talent pool Excellent via @stephenkb.bsky.social

The absolute bloody vandalism of austerity in one chart. Good analysis of the overall picture here.

This is such a clever idea on taking kids to museums/galleries www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

They have fired the staff of the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report and 70 Epidemic Intelligence Service officers, who are disease detectives that respond to outbreaks around the world. I cannot emphasize enough how dangerous it is to dismantle our disease surveillance infrastructure.

🧵🚨 The UK’s independent scientific bodies are highly vulnerable to politicisation - over the past 5 months I've been working with @martinmckee.bsky.social to map out their vulnerabilities and it's not good news. Today our report is published! www.ucl.ac.uk/policy-lab/n... 1/11

One very very lonely Tory voice on the letters page of The Times. Sorry, Robert. It’s too late. Your party has gone completely nuts. Driven mad by 14 years of failure, Farage and your monumentally stupid Brexit. You can ask them to put the petrol can down but they’re mesmerised by the fire.

Men have had 10,000 years to lead humanity, and that interminable epoch led to this equally interminable concert. I think we—I mean men—are officially done. This concert was our grand finale. Women—and only women—should lead the world for the next 10,000 years. Let’s see where that gets humanity.

OK, let's take this seriously. I had an odd half an hour and via Apple Books had a quick look at the three claims I knew most about - two re the post-Brexit bilateral preferential trade agreements replicated from the EU versions and one about cheaper bananas. All are wrong or wildly implausible. 1/n

This is a breathtaking abuse of the law and power by the President of the United States. America is on the brink of martial law. Do not be silent.