It is absolutely stupid that a major focus of policy response to the Iran War is on the planned 1p rise in fuel duty in September (watching Trevor Phillips interview Bridget Phillipson). Of no help now to anyone to abandon it. Shows how trivial our political debate has become.

How on earth had I missed this before now? (h/t @financialtimes.com; source: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...)

This week's post: Both Reform and Conservatives are now officially Islamophobic mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2026/03/both... The last thing we need right now is a clash of civilisations, but the political right in both the US and UK seem determined to engineer one.

In spite of all the talk of Claude Code and Codex meaning the end of humans writing code, software job adverts are actually going up, according to @jburnmurdoch.ft.com's crunching of millions of job ads for this week's The AI Shift www.ft.com/content/7325...

On Tuesday, activists from ‘Raise the Colours’ erected flags along Abingdon Road in broad daylight. We ask who is behind it – and why the campaign is so controversial. oxfordclarion.uk/raise-the-co...

Y'days post: Both Reform and Conservatives are now officially Islamophobic mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2026/03/both... By saying a traditional Muslim event is about domination, the UK right of Reform and the Tories have now in effect endorsed the racist Replacement Theory.

No Israel prosecutions for killing Palestinian civilians in occupied West Bank since start of decade

A Thai oil tanker has safely passed through the Strait of Hormuz following diplomatic coordination between Thailand and Iran, and was not required to pay to escape the blockade, a Thai official and the oil major that owns the vessel said reut.rs/4srbAVS

Is it a giant wooden horse

New post: Both Reform and Conservatives are now officially Islamophobic mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2026/03/both... By saying a traditional Muslim event is about domination, the UK right of Reform and the Tories have now in effect endorsed the racist Replacement Theory.

Comic framing by the defunct WaPo. It's emerged as perhaps the paramount objective now since it was previously open and then closed as a very predictable consequence of bombing Iran with no means to stop it closing the Strait. The previous objective of regime change/state failure, having failed.

Most of the public does not like the way in which the England flag has been dragged into polarised debates about identity and race, according to new research published today by British Future, one month out from St George's Day. [Thread]

The illiberals do not always get to win.

Media control of the state. See also mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2025/07/othe...

I'm sorry, this is utter and complete disqualifying garbage. Wrong in at least three or four fundamental ways. How on Earth has this been paid for with my money for the LOTO office? Pitiful.

It really is the point. If a Conservative front bencher is allowed to make a discriminatory Islamophobic argument like this without sanction from his party - indeed with support from its leadership - that represents a major erosion of anti-prejudice norms and indeed of religious freedom norms.

Some folks seem unable to discuss immigration truthfully

This is an extraordinary saga that Sunder is pursuing indefatigably. The BBC has repeatedly tried to excuse itself from responsibility for allowing Nigel Farage to lie egregiously about immigration without challenge. It is illustrative of a much wider malaise & so very important. Thank you, Sunder.

Its utterly mad that policy described as doubling settlement timeline actually TRIPLES (for most, 2022-24), QUADRUPLES (for refugees), quintuple and sextuples (30 years!) settlement timelines for some Doubling would align us with Switzerland - the outlier at 10 years. Blue Labour Denmark is 8 years

This week's post: Public Attitudes to taxes and spending, and VAT zero-rating mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2026/03/publ... If politicians are tempted to raise taxes like VAT because they are less visible than income taxes, do we want to make them more regressive by ending zero-rating of food etc?

The Conservatives see Reform as mindset allies not as proper competitors. Consequently, Badenoch's occasional denunciations of Farage's mob don't resonate because of everything else she/Tories are saying. And opportunities like this get missed...

A reprise on old threads and threads others have been writing... but... monetary and fiscal policy have hard work dealing with the oil price rise. This is literally a rise in the 'cost of living'. Living involves expending energy to sustain/entertain ourselves. The cost of that energy is up.

We should be very clear: if you think that “British Muslims praying... to mark the end of the day’s fast” is a greater show of “domination” than anyone praying outside an abortion clinic, then you are hostile to Muslims, and you do not in any meaningful way support freedom of religion or expression.

This week's post: Public Attitudes to taxes and spending, and VAT zero-rating mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2026/03/publ... If politicians are tempted to raise taxes like VAT because they are less visible than income taxes, do we want to make them more regressive by ending zero-rating of food etc?

Starmer/Reeves EU policy: 2024 - reset, but within the red lines 2025 - strategic partnership, but within the red lines 2026 - dynamic alignment, but within the red lines And yet such slow progress, negligible economic dividend. I wonder why. What could the obstacle be?

Y'days post: Public Attitudes to taxes and spending, and VAT zero-rating mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2026/03/publ... The recent unprecedented increase in the number of people wanting a smaller state may imply that attitudes to the size of the state depend crucially on the type of taxes being raised.

More anti-Muslim bigotry. We must re-establish the norm on this - it must have no place in our public life.

The government's "earned settlement" proposals "pull the rug from under those who have planned their lives and commitments and are contributing to our economy and to our society...I believe in a country where we keep our word and live up to our values” Absolutely right from Angela Rayner.

A genuinely big announcement on English devolution from Rachel Reeves today! As we at @instituteforgovernment.org.uk alongside others have argued fiscal devolution was a missing piece of the puzzle in the government's devolution white paper.

An interesting leak at this juncture.

New post: Public Attitudes to taxes and spending, and VAT zero-rating mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2026/03/publ... Does the unusual rise in those wanting a smaller state reflect non-indexation of tax thresholds? If so are social attitudes a problem for economists arguing to scrap VAT zero-rating?

I think that's rather shifting the responsibility, no? It's not the guy who supplies spurious intellectual cover who's to blame for something that a bunch of ideologically-blinkered politicians are going to do anyway.

Pretty staggering that the FT Trump interview opens with ‘if NATO doesn’t help us sort this mess, there’ll be problems’ and ends with ‘Russia might be helping target American soldiers, but really that’s sort of fair enough - we started it’. www.ft.com/content/1ca6...

GB News: its *important* to AIR the view that migration is genocide + to AIR the view that increasing diversity inevitably means violence+death. ("I would love to know where you are planning to go when THEY really turn on US. Because it has happened before + *WILL* HAPPEN AGAIN") Ofcom: Don't Know.

This week's post: Idiot Wind mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2026/03/idio... With a fool at the helm fascist overreach is a constant danger, and the UK government and US opposition may end up benefiting from Trump’s attack on Iran. Those that die in this pointless war will not get the chance to be lucky

39 Sudanese Chevening Scholarship finalists ejected this week from consideration for the scheme, for being Sudanese.

This week's post: Idiot Wind mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2026/03/idio... There is a desperate desire in the mainstream media to pretend that Trump isn’t a fool, but instead to treat him like just another US President. This media’s reaction to fascism in the US is to pretend it is not there.

Genuinely curious what line the courageous British pro-war columnists are going to take this weekend, now that both Farage and Badenoch have performed a reverse ferret. Perhaps call for an enquiry into how liberals and the woke elite triggered this conflict?

IFS correct here: government needs to start thinking seriously about the design of fiscal responses to supply shocks. Otherwise it gets done incoherently and expensively on the hoof, with negative knock on effects. This lesson should have been learned already.

Great piece today by @samfr.bsky.social today on how progressives need to ‘pick fights’ to cut through in today’s attention economy. Our recent piece on “a war on bills” shows what this could look like for the cost of living. www.ippr.org/articles/a-w...

Y'days post: Idiot Wind mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2026/03/idio... In any sane world the deadly foolishness of Trump and the dangerous nonsense coming from the right wing press would be regarded as some idiot wind that we needed to shelter from but at the same time we could laugh at.

At 11.55 here Claude Moraes correctly points out that care workers/dependants are fiscally *positive* every year until about 2045. In response, the Home Office official misstates the facts & clearly doesn't understand either the point or the actual data/analysis parliamentlive.tv/event/index/...

Even granted that the Home Office makes ministers at least 50% more evil, there’s something unnerving about Mahmood’s performative cruelty

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By sticking to the correct and popular position on Iran, even under relentless attacks from the right-wing press, Keir Starmer has forced his political opponents into an embarrassing reversal. It is a lesson his Government should learn from bylinetimes.com/2026/03/10/n...

If you'd told me maybe three years ago that a UK news channel would be platforming someone to set out openly racist, far right, violent conspiracy theories, I'm not sure I'd have believed you. And yet here we are.

In short, while pointing out that breaking news with conflicting perspectives involves publication of competing accounts, pending clarification, BBC accepts it was slow to adjust once it became clear that only one side was engaged in to truth. Key paras in long email here …

This was the point Starmer implied in his answer to Badenoch on this at last PMQs. My sense is that she & others have the idea (if so, an especially strange one for a Conservative) that NS oil is 'ours' and that, as such, UK consumers have first dibs on it at a price capped by the government.

Great piece, thanks! (Small quibble, you write "becoming the second country with nuclear weapons in the region", is perhaps when seen from the west? Its neighbor Pakistan has nuclear weapons. Looking at the map, Iran is surrounded by states with weapons: Israel, Russia, Pakistan, India.)

New post: Idiot Wind mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2026/03/idio... What Trump’s pointless war against Iran tells us about the US government, the UK political right and the mainstream media in both countries.