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"What we need to grasp about this moment is that a revolution is already underway. This is a moment of drastic, monumental change, initiated by a Republican Party poisoned by anti-democratic resentments & a figure in Donald Trump who wants to arrogate monarchical, despotic powers to himself."

"A split of the left-wing vote between Labour and the Green Party could easily allow Reform to cruise to victory." Dr Alexandra Meakin, lecturer in British politics at the University of Leeds www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cw...

Guardian interview

I hope this isn’t true. There are times when it’s more important to put country before party. This is one of them. Burnham’s longstanding commitment to a fairer voting system could transform our democracy & counter the dire threat of a Reform UK government elected on a minority of the vote

It is astonishing* that Angela Rayner's tax affairs - in which the Standards Commissioner found her to have acted "in good faith", in an attempt to protect her disabled son - is STILL a bigger story than Farage trousering £5 million in secret or Tice's taxes. *It's not astonishing, but should be.

🔴 Keir Starmer promised to crackdown on "Slapps" - abusive libel cases to silence journalists and critics Then Labour quietly dropped it We can reveal why: a three-year lobbying blitz by libel lawyers who've acted for Russian oligarchs, Epstein + more democracyforsale.substack.com/p/how-lawyer...

If you totted up the sums for every financial scandal in British politics (£2k per parliamentary question for cash-for-questions, £200k for Johnson’s No 10 renovation, the cost of that very nice campervan) even with second tier stuff like Rayner and Polanski, would you get close to £5mn *in total*?

FWIW Andy Burnham is quite keen on bolder climate action. www.businessgreen.com/news/4412906...

Hardly the major news story, but Labour managing to literally have a by election to elect a man so they can elect him leader instead of considering any of the 180 odd women already in office is going to become a great topic for a politics of gender seminar one day.

BREAKING: Reform UK leader Nigel Farage bought a £1.4 million property in cash shortly after receiving a £5m personal gift from billionaire donor Christopher Harborne, according to property records seen by Sky News.

now Farage is claiming he deserved the £5mn as a reward for achieving Brexit rather different to the line about needing security

While all eyes are on Farage, we're overlooking something even worse: the building of the very tight and truly vile operation that is Restore Britain. This excellent essay/report by Simon Pearson should wake us up to the threat - and to what exactly it is. simonpearson1.substack.com/p/tory-30

Increasingly think there is a strong case for an explicit wealth tax in order to make the politics of a more general tax rise more manageable. About fairness and burden sharing rather than revenue raising as such.

BURGUM: When the sun goes down, solar produces zero electricity HUFFMAN: I want to enter into the record this amazing new technology that apparently the secretary is unaware of -- it's a battery

Very tough week here in Nottingham. 40% of academic posts in my School are being made redundant and the numbers are even higher elsewhere - modern languages and music are being cut completely. The scale of the HE crisis in the UK is almost impossible to comprehend.

BAN THE PERVERT GLASSES

New issue of LSE Public Policy Review Journal 🌍 This special issue examines the ongoing debate around tariffs while taking a wide‑ranging view of global trade systems—exploring economic, legal, institutional, historical, and international relations dimensions. 🖇️ https://bit.ly/4wqxCur

US wholesale inflation soars to 6% in biggest surge since 2022 ft.trib.al/jzU84iN

The idea Big Oil is essential to the energy transition is now laughable BloombergNEF says investments by BP, Shell, Equinor, Eni, TotalEnergies, Chevron & Exxon in low-carbon tech incl renewables collapsed by 65% in 2025 to the lowest level since 2019 www.rechargenews.com/finance/the-...

What will the Reform party's rise to power in councils across the UK mean for the climate? Edward de Quay and @pallavis.bsky.social @granthamlse.bsky.social for @lsepoliticsblog.bsky.social.

Just spectacular. Exactly the same threat the guy tried pulling on Alastair Darling in 2009. www.theguardian.com/business/202...

"nobody will fly" This is another example of where the climate friendly solution is also the best solution. The trains will be faster than the flights. And they won't involve the unpleasant experience of air travel these days.

We need to talk a bit about how utterly absurd the March heatwave was in the USA. This heatwave would have been impossible without a boost from climate change, but even with climate change it remains a deeply unlikely event. A thread looking at some of the numbers. 🧵

Beyond magically taking us back to an imagined 1953, Starmer gave Blue Labour everything they could have wanted. And still they wanted more. And now they turn on him as he had the gall to make the case for a microscopically closer relationship to the EU.

The mind boggles that this grand statement of intent is accompanied by the promise of a youth experience scheme.

I’m on my 8th Home sec in as many years - one a year since I began as Chair of Scotland’s Refugee Strategy. It’s impossible. Policy hasn’t time to be evidenced - it’s all knee jerk panic and gimmick and a constant race to the bottom with no time to do the serious work it needs.

Life’s a bagatelle… also death, apparently…

It's true! I'm one of them. Someone please come over immediately to tie my shoes, give me a cookie and tell me I'm adorable 🥰

my biggest takeaway is that voters think there’s something intrinsically English about the Farage brand, and yet his policy preferences owe more to MAGA radicalism than to traditional English shires

One of the hidden disasters of UK politics over recent decades was the growing pool of "non-voters", who largely disengaged from democratic politics. The challenge for progressive parties is to match the success of Reform/the Leave campaign in drawing those people back into the electoral process.

- Repeatedly taps the sign - EU relations aren't a magic wishing well Starmer can endlessly pull quick, commercially significant, politically popular wins from. Being friendly to the EU is good, but it's not sorcery or a substitute for making hard choices at home.

Anyone gonna do a derogatory cartoon of Richard Tice?

Amazing how little coverage this has had… www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

I’d hypothesise this happened here too: hospitals, magistrates courts, police stations etc concentrated in bigger centres, so solid jobs go, local services then fold, shops close - a downward spiral 1/2

At least three and maybe four years of the past decade have been spent with a PM grimly hanging to power having lost authority with their party. The opportunity cost is so high. We really need to find better ways to manage these transitions.

For the EU would actually like a UK government that understood realistic terms of engagement. Red lines are part of this as long as you understand what they mean. But they continually get a UK government that wants its red lines and to be a European leader.

Departmental Lectureship in Economic and Social History University of Oxford - Faculty of History #skystorians 🗃️www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DRL580/d...

This really is astonishing stuff. And it's quite the irony that it's being accelerated by the climate change denying Donald Trump inadvertently implementing the biggest carbon pricing programme in the history of humanity.

An important role.

If Streeting is the answer, Labour hasn't understood the question.

Why is no one pointing out the contradiction between the two Reform excuses: 1. That he was no longer in politics when he took the gift, and 2. That it was for his security as a high profile politician?

Driving from Belfast to Enniskillen and there are noticeably less flegs than Scotland/England which is, um, a development

Also, as others have noted: The £5m donation from crypto bro Harborne was made in summer 2024. The alleged burglary or arson incident was...April 2025. So implying Harborne's donation was in response to the supposed 'firebomb' is deeply misleading at best.

"There is little to no statistical relationship between Reform performance and Labour performance, but a very strong (negative) relationship between Labour and Green performance." @patrick-pme.bsky.social

This is what normalisation looks like.

The U.S. has spent billions to lose a war that enriches its oligarchs, impoverishes the citizenry, sabotages its alliances, and strengthens its enemies. Empires have risen and failed before, but to my knowledge no state has ever chosen to kill its own power. snyder.substack.com/p/on-superpo...

South West Water are getting fined again?

🇭🇺 Péter Magyar will be elected Prime Minister of Hungary today at ~2:30pm, after MPs take their oath and the new parliament convenes. 👋 Viktor Orbán is no longer PM or MP. 🇪🇺 For the first time in over a decade, the EU flag will fly on the Parliament building in Budapest.

This story is WILD. Juan Orlando Hernandez, the Honduran ex-president pardoned by Trump for narcotrafficking, seemingly caught on tape in dozens of conversations (if true), discussing plans with GOP and other figures to attack left-wing governments, and saying Israel paid for his pardon from Trump.