What if Andy Burnham could raise £15bn – without a tax rise? There's one catch. He'd need to solve the UK’s biggest and least-discussed tax problem. Almost half of all small business corporation tax isn't being paid - and nobody knows why. Thread:

As an exercise in disaster tourism, I listened to the 'Today' interview on the Defence Investment Plan: learned nothing about what's in the plan. Helps no-one make a judgement on whether the government has made the right or wrong judgements in their plan. Waste of time as a programme

'Today' is an awful programme, almost unlistenable: the presenters' arrogance as they so blatantly push interviewees to say the one thing they've decided is the story. I learn almost nothing from it, unlike Radio 5 Live and Evan Davis' PM programme: so much better www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio...

Seriously, any two-bit organisation can do a strategy process. What matters is depth of thinking & willingness to confront difficult trade-offs. These are questions of political leadership not reading blueprints from Mazzucato's 5-year-old book that had literally no effect on the election result

Re Ed Miliband as Burnham's Chancellor and 'too left wing' vs 'competent cabinet member', what's missing is that he is the nerds' nerd, very good at engaging with insiders/true believers, not with a sceptical public. Economic/fiscal policy is too important to leave it only to insiders to debate.

Treating any communication platform that algorithmically selects which content to put in front of a user as a publisher, and legally responsible for that content, is the screamingly obvious solution that will deeply upset maybe seven companies and make life considerably better.

DfE pupil data is out today and shows that the number of private school pupils has dropped 5.6% since VAT was introduced. Not 25% like the independent schools council predicted. Or the 50% we saw in some right-wing papers. 5.6%.

Read more in the article by @maxroser.bsky.social: ourworldindata.org/breaking-the...

Switched to Ovo a few years ago after Eon failed to pick up the phone for 40 minutes. Looking forward to the improvement in customer service as Eon now buys Ovo

Today's elections seen as a judgement on Keir Starmer shows our failure, over decades, to take local governance seriously. Lack of local powers + lack of local media/functioning local political conversation means why care who controls the council: might as well send a signal to national politicians

As is traditional, I celebrate Liberation Day by reposting my thread on the final days of Mussolini for newer followers who may not have seen it. Buon 25 aprile a tutti! "Fascism is not an opinion; it is a crime." Sandro Pertini

37 years ago, 97 football fans were killed because of state incompetence. After decades fighting, we got the truth, but no accountability. Despite a police conspiracy to lie to the public inquiry, no-one was ever convicted of perverting justice. It's why need the #HillsboroughLaw now #jft97 #ynwa

From yesterday: Earned settlement: retrospective change is wrong but prospective change is even worse | colinyeo

Very good post from @chriscurtis94.bsky.social on why we need trams and how development could me made easier and cheaper by devolution, reconfiguring costs, and making environmental approval processes more sensible

Really clear account from @draliceevans.bsky.social of why economic growth matters to gender equality and how the stats we commonly use may not be telling us what we think

What's the most under-rated driver of gender equality? (In praise of job-creating economic growth) www.ggd.world/p/whats-the-...

Isn't it wonderful to see your kids growing up: three years ago I had to spend two hours of my life I'll never get back taking my daughter to the Mario Bros movie. Today I'm sat in the Costa at the Odeon looking at Bluesky whilst she's in there watching the sequel with a friend #progress

Shabana Mahmood's 10 to 20 years settlement policy will undermine workers' rights throughout the labour market and go directly against the intentions of the Employment Rights Act and the government's good work agenda. /1

Asked for their preferences, straight, British Social Attitudes finds a strong preference for the norm as < 5 years, with many more people preferring 3 years to 10 years. The Labour findings are more liberal than the median. This shows the More in Common poll cues mattered a lot.

This is a real stretch. This one poll finding the Home Office are using > Has a cue about record net migration in framing; no balanced cue > Uses affirmation bias cue: describes govt policy, > Does not accurately state the policy (15 years for most) Straighter Qs get different results

The wealth gradients go thusly Destitute Poor Middle class Well off Rich Super rich So rich that The Times calls you middle class

Nigel Farage is undermining democracy, not promoting or protecting democracy, when he loudly alleges fraud every time he loses a constituency where there are any visible Asian voters, yet has NEVER once actually brought any evidence to any authority of his allegations, despite OFTEN saying he will

BMA staff being on strike because the BMA offered them below inflation pay rises for all their work supporting BMA members in their own industrial action may be the most BMA thing ever to happen

Now my second favourite answer to the trolley problem soc.kouett.net.eu.org/notice/B4aRC...

Beautiful: www.theanfieldwrap.com/2026/03/youl... #mosalah #lfc

My best moments seeing Mo Salah at Anfield were against Utd: 1: running the length of the pitch to bang in the second on 19 Jan 2020 - "We're gonna win the league" booming out for the first time that season. 2: having a hand in five out of the seven in the 7-0 on 5 March 2023 What a legend

In 1966, abortion was suddenly restricted for most women in Romania. In the decades that followed, maternal mortality increased, and by the 1980s, more than 80% of maternal deaths happened as a result of abortion complications.

Atrocity upon atrocity. Every detail here is worse than the last. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

#TreeOfTheDay, New Ferry, Wirral

I am so full of admiration for Charlotte Nichols’ courage in talking about this - particularly awful that as a woman in public life she will have had to consider first how people might use this information against her, especially online. Hope she has all the support she needs.

Can anyone explain to me what the Blue Labour justification for this is? Who out there will vote Labour because Mahmood prevented a Sudanese Chevening Scholar? And to be honest, why won’t the PM simply overrule her?

Carrying on today's #birdoftheday theme of #standinginwater, here's an Indian snakebird at Keoladeo National Park

Explains a lot about the failure of Brexit that its main adherents should right now be prostrating themselves before the US because they think that's what an independent UK means.

Labour’s Send reforms get this right: disabled children in mainstream schools is transformative for everyone | Frances Ryan

New post out: We have a guest post today from the excellent @dsquareddigest.bsky.social. "Build the Rail! Save the snails!" Or how we don't need to sacrifice the environment to speed up our mad planning processes. (Free to read) open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/b...

Nobody knows what would follow regime change in Iran – but what happened in 1979 offers some pointers | Jason Burke

Day after Alex Pretti killing I complained to BBC about presentation of White House statements and evidence as equivalent. Duty of balance doesn’t extend to complicity with clear lies, I said. BBC could and should report WH making false statements as a *fact of the story*. Today I got response …

It is slightly irritating that the Guardian uncritically reports his claim that taxpayers are spending "an ever increasing proportion of our national income on out-of-work benefits” without pointing out that it is, in fact, false.

My review of @profkepickett.bsky.social's new book, "The Good Society" "If you’d asked Pickett in 2010 whether she’d have accepted this trade she’d presumably have jumped at it...But now, like most of the rest of us, she’s less than happy with the results." www.theguardian.com/books/2026/f...

AI is transforming our information environment - but is it reliably delivering news content to the public? We tested four AI tools to find out and our results reveal worrying trends:

AI is becoming a new front door to the news - 40% of 18-24 year olds use AI for information weekly and Google AI overviews reach 2 billion a month. But we find AI isn't reliably surfacing news content - with implications for public access to information and media plurality. Full report @ippr.org

Exciting moment for measurement of inflation with 25,000 prices collected manually in shops each month being replaced by 300 million prices collected from supermarket scanner data blog.ons.gov.uk/2026/01/28/s...

Those Chinese wind farms are quite well hidden, tbf.

US Speaker Mike Johnson has been sent to win Britain over. But can he hear the words coming out of his own mouth? My SKETCH. thecritic.co.uk/calm...

Why are UK borrowing costs so high when our debt and deficit numbers look better than others? In a @ippr.org paper, @carsjung.bsky.social and I argue the problem is less “fundamentals” and more a bad equilibrium of market vibes: www.ippr.org/articles/rul.... Short thread. 🧵

Overall thought on the budget: doomster narratives turned out to be overblown and Rachel Reeves was able to raise the money for a range of welcome measures through a sensible combination of freezing income tax thresholds and taxing those who could most afford it. /1

Delighted to see the abolition of the two-child limit for means-tested benefits. We should never punish children for the so-called 'sins' of their parents. Children turning up at school too hungry to learn is no way to build a country fit for the future

Useful background to the gambling tax increase here:

Delighted to see the Chancellor has taken forward the recommendation from Gordon Brown, @smfthinktank.bsky.social and @ippr.org to increase taxes on gambling. We called for this hugely profitable industry to contribute to ending the two child limit for benefits