Close... far away.

Reeves should be aiming to get off two cycles: “every budget is an ordeal, every minor fluctuation in the forecast is a nightmare“ and “we did some small tax tweaks to raise £2bn and whoopsydaisy, something has fallen over unexpectedly/inflation is higher”.

There’s nothing wrong with it as a policy, other than it just raises much, *much* less money than just raising income tax. And Labour needs to be one and done with tax rises. The way they’re doing this…won’t raise enough.

New post just out: Why the criminal justice system should be top of No. 10's "shit list". No part of the public sector is more broken or brings with it greater political risk. As we saw these past two weeks. It desperately needs a new approach. (£/free trial) open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/f...

Flying Squirrel Loves It Every Time

Between Del Toro's Frankenstein and Rosalia's new album I've had a very Hispanic day.

Gonna watch Frankenstein

I think thermostatic politics is an understated driver of political dissatisfaction. Significant minority of the population keep asking for stuff, getting it, hating it, rinsing and repeating. This is like the fourth big swing since mid-2010s. Maddening.

Things you do when you’re definitely not doing crimes

Well maybe the knitting community of the Shetland islands can go FUCK ITSELF

Cannot overstate how unhinged and insidious what Candace Owens is doing with Charlie Kirk’s assassination. (Short version: a lot of huffing and puffing and “just asking questions” to lead people to believe The Jews Did It)

if i ever reach this point then just put me down

Incredible to have neither as an option but not both

The hatred the youth parliament gets is just so out of proportion. Can these people hear themselves. It’s creepy.

The anti-bathtime left

The anti-bathtime left

Dominic Cummings has this racialised take on David Lammy There is an increasingly prevalent kneejerk online rightwing trait to call the presence of any black or Asian person a diversity hire

I like how the caption on this photo reads as if he's making a claim that could not be independently verified.

your honor, it was a bit

twelve hungry men

Meta earns $3.5 billion every six months from showing Faceboon and Instagram users 15 billion “higher legal risk” scam ad impressions a day, internal documents state. That haul vastly exceeds how much the company expects regulators To fine it for running scam ads. www.reuters.com/investigatio...

Plenty of autocrats in histories have been massively degenerate gamblers, but he’s the first gamer, and I think the lack of consequences for losing between the two forms of play does explain remarkably much

The odds of MBS knowing exactly what “Zerg rush” means are very high

X is designed to radicalise people. The algorithm promotes Elon Musk's agenda to promote racists and people who want violence bought - specifically - to the streets of Britain. Members of Parliament, major institutions and the media should not be there. news.sky.com/story/the-x-...

Good stuff. Time for tax rises. www.economist.com/britain/2025...

The haters said they couldn't do it. And they were right. Honestly, great call from the haters.

Melting out his ears

racist tradcath has to be seen, I think, as its own form of heresy

Huge wins for the Democrats in state elections across the US last night. Chaotic authoritarianism is not popular.

We’re further away from The Rolling Stones recording “Sympathy for the Devil” than they were from the murders of the Romanovs when they recorded it

From now on, any time anyone answers any question I have, I'm going to say "Ahh, that would explain the wasps."

Turns out boomers think you should spend money on them. Who know?

SBF explaining to his defense attorney why they had a “Wirefraud” group chat

You can't compare the stock of *value* like corporate valuation to economic *output* like GDP. It's like saying your car makes up "30% of your annual income" because it's worth $30k and you make $100k. A $5T valuation is big but total US household net worth is like $167T

So funny to see pun based on a 2006 Muse album as the title for a resolution foundation article. Why, yes, I did know the demographics there already.

yeah I was a teenager in the 1990s and there was a level of possible casual violence - of, say, getting headbutted by a random group of dickheads on the way home from school, as happened to me one time - that largely seems to have disappeared from British life. I blame videogames.

I'm a glass half full naive kind of bloke, but this does feel like it's coordinated within Labour, and that it's part of a softening up of the ground for a rejection by the minister of the EHRC draft Code of Practice next week, after the interim guidance case. www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

Picard: there ARE FOUR GUYS! FOUR

The more I learn about the American War of Independence the more the British come out looking like the good guys. Such a fumble by the patriots. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/int...

This New Yorker documentary about the 1988 UK government ban on broadcasting the voices of Sinn Féin and I.R.A. leaders is pretty good but they show *that clip from The Day Today with no explanation and no indicator that it is satire. www.newyorker.com/video/watch/...

this is a fantastic thread

̶n̶o̶ ̶g̶o̶d̶s̶ ̶n̶o̶ ̶m̶a̶s̶t̶e̶r̶s̶ no bedtimes no tradeoffs

I recall Enda Kenny saying, if elected, he'd work "just as hard as you do' and my immediate reaction was I'd like a Taoiseach who worked harder than that.

I've seen silly posts about trains and non-sequiturs about immigration or terrorism, but haven't seen any coverage on what to do about people with some form of psychosis attacking people. We pretended Axel Rudakubana was mentally well to prosecute, but does this part of mental health services work?

Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics, social democrats put up VAT.

NIMBYs will fight incredibly dirty then moan when laws need to change.

New substack: how the government can raise economic growth: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/increasing...

IMAGINE if we ever get another Game of Thrones book.