Capitalism will sell itself the rope to hang itself

The UK is almost three decades into a mass devolution of powers (if not resources to a similar extent). The centre still acts like a nineteenth century colonial administration. Staggering what it tries to manage- and fails to. Burnham is right here.

You cannot really run a university like a business because our most valuable product is failure.

New substack: how bad government is in part the product of bad incentives: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/bad-incent...

Remember when parties who lost elections used to be like "This is a strong message from the electorate and we will listen and learn and change" rather than "Fuck everyone who didn't vote for us, you're all extremists trying to destroy Britain"

This is brilliant. Why are pubs closing? For the same reason everything else is falling apart - we have sold off the social fabric of the country.

Why are members of the House of Lords allowed to own lobbying firms in the first place ?!! This is completely absurd. In France, that would be illegal.

Dear Film Industry, Wouldn't it be nice to have a film version of WUTHERING HEIGHTS that was: 1. Filmed in Yorkshire 2. With actors that one could plausibly believe to be from Yorkshire 3. Of the right age (teens and 20s) 4. Actually scripted by someone who has read the book ALL the way through?

And everyone keeps buying from Amazon… And everyone keeps using X… And everyone keeps using Facebook… Because… what else can you do?

30th January 1649 Charles 1 was beheaded in Whitehall. A lost traditional but nonetheless Happy Beheading King Day!

Refreshing to see a rhetorical device often used by anti-migration politicians flipped by @alanbeattie.bsky.social "More people attend English League Two football matches to watch the likes of Accrington Stanley and Crawley Town in an average week than arrived by small boat in the whole of 2025."

The insanity of UK public bodies threatening other UK public bodies with the apparent intention of limiting the reuse of UK address data. Meanwhile the rest of the world has long recognised that postal address data is critical digital public infrastructure in the 21st century.

New substack: what to do with our regulators: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/on-regulat...

“No protest movement has ever brought about change through a one-off demonstration” Civil society groups condemn Labour’s plans to restrict the ‘cumulative impact’ of protests Labour ought to be repealing the last govt’s anti-protest laws, not adding to them: www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

It’s important to be at the Nazi Nonce club to provide a counter-narrative to all the nazis and nonces.

i would suggest an online safety act that can’t deal with CSAM on a widely used social network frequented by most westminster public figures isn’t doing a very good job of keeping anybody safe online

AI tool developed by a company owned and run by a Fellow of the @royalsociety.org floods the internet with sexualized photos of women and minors www.reuters.com/legal/litiga...

"Aha!" said Thomas Becket #OnThisDay 1170. "NOW we see the violence inherent in the system!"

The Government has just announced the first of their ‘nine new river walks’: a section of the River Mersey. Whilst we commend any new access, this is giving us the Boxing Day scraps, and is not the ambitious access legislation we have been promised.

It’s so utterly gross how many incredibly senior UK politicians go into lobbying. It’s simply corrupt.

Trump sues the BBC is the stupidest story ever Of course, cover it but please, please point out - early - how stupid it is. And don’t put it at the top of the news. Because it’s really, really stupid.

Their inaction would be understandable if they were free speech absolutists. But given that they support the arrest of 00s of pro-Palestine protesters they are not. That leaves the explanation that they're simply scared of the right-wing media. They're cowards.

In a quick scroll down my TL, I've seen lots of references to various right-wing nutters but none to intelligent leftist ideas. Which shows one of our problems. "Flooding the zone with shit" actually works - by stealing cognitive bandwidth from worthwhile things.

“Europe faces an existential choice: build genuine technological sovereignty now, or accept governance by platforms whose architects view democracy as an obsolete operating system.” Labour needs to wake up (and treat Palantir like the plague).

New substack: a portion of a dictionary of politics: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/a-short-le...

This is great, and much misunderstood

My dad abhors any negative comments about immigrants. Asked him recently why he’s so strong on it: ‘Because we’re always happy to take the rich and clever ones. Which means it’s not about disliking immigrants. It’s about disliking the poor and vulnerable. And that’s a bad human instinct.’

I suspect you have to be quite racist to stand out as "the racist guy" at a boys public school of the 1980s.

This is scary. "Three of the five worst harvests on record have now occurred since 2020, leaving some farmers asking whether the growing impacts of the climate crisis are making it too financially risky to sow their crops." www.theguardian.com/environment/...

One of the most common replies in any discussion of universal basic income is "but how do we pay for it?" and not once do those same people ever question the costs incurred by not doing UBI. We spend $1.5 trillion every year on the costs of child poverty alone. Poverty ain't free, folks. WE ALL PAY.

Which bit of Magna Carta is supposed to guarantee trial by jury? Chapter 39 famously says no free man will be arrested, imprisoned, etc., 'except by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land'. That final 'or' clause means Magna Carta does NOT guarantee judgement by peers.

I really wish we'd stop calling them climate "skeptics" or "vaccine skeptics", if you jump off a cliff we don't call you a "gravity skeptic"

The real BBC bias story, narrated by Anna Ford

This stuff is honestly so far gone now, it would take a political generation to rebuild. And none of the incentives in British politics are taking us that way.

New Substack: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/on-incompe... Parts of the Labour party and BBC simply don't know what their jobs should be.

I agree with @arusbridger.bsky.social about BBC governance. Although v hesitant about another rearrangement, the single corporate-style board is massively flawed, not least because there needs to be some distance for the governors/board members from editorial decisions

Tips for the next DG: 1 - Don't stake your future on impartiality. Perfect impartiality is impossible. Focus on accuracy and accountability. Let journalists and producers do their job. If they get it badly wrong, sack them. 2 - Reverse the deliberate, prolonged cut to arts programming.

Sobering news for a lot of top Democrats, tonight, as they realize people would prefer they actually fucking do something.

A wonderful article on Royal privilege & the colossal resources of the British monarchy. Resources that in my own opinion should be national not private assets. It is time for the Royal Collection of art in particular to be in public ownership & used for the nation's benefit.

Makes his own kimchi and likes the warm sound you only get with vinyl.

This is why the Greens are rising in the polls, and why Labour have fallen so far. Labour’s ’natural supporters’ aren’t anti-immigrant. They’re not xenophobic. Labour’s leadership are alienating them, and now they have somewhere to go. Well said.

In A Glass of Blessings (1958) Barbara Pym says the post arrived 2-3 times a day in the run-up to Xmas. Which reminds us that technical regress is a thing: enshittification isn't just for the internet. Here's one I wrote earlier: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/technical-...

Limited liability is one of our weird silences. It's a massive free gift society makes to plutocrats, seldom remarked upon, let alone contested. Shareholders should have to buy limited liability, like any other insurance. The insurers would then be liable. 🧵 www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

Ah, happy 88th anniversary of the day Oswald Mosley tried to sell fascism to Liverpudlians – and someone concussed him with a brick

“You can’t blame austerity on one hand, but then say it’s the immigrants. The immigrants haven’t caused austerity.” Zack Polanski takes on Reform’s Zia Yusuf over spreading of misinformation on #BBCQT

Woke Pope Says Nope To DisInfo Slope

We will rebuild