Our local Waitrose doesn’t seem to be very well stocked. No loose potatoes earlier in the week and they were out of their best mince pies today. I’ve noticed Sainsbury’s doesn’t seem to have rammed shelves this year either. They create confusion by starting Christmas in November too.

Is this one of those deliberately provocative Simon Jenkins articles, saying something that begs belief?

Suspect some female Tory MPs are quietly dying inside at this. When you’re so desperate to get in a bit of gratuitous foreigner-bashing that you find yourself arguing *against* preventative strategies that try to prevent sexual violence, ffs, what have you become?

Out this very day in 1966, The Observer’s Sunday magazine with cover stars Thunderbird 1 & Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward. Inside were articles about, among others, the Anderson TV shows, Doctor Who, and those darn Daleks.

NEW ANALYSIS: Electric vehicles are entering the mid-transition space starting to replace ICE vehicles. History shows that shifts like this can happen faster than expected: in the early 20th-century US, horses and mules virtually vanished from roads in under 30 years. cdn.sanity.io/files/lrxd4j...

Loved it not least because we lived inside the M25 in Watford at the time and imagined it was set in the Harlequin Centre. Can’t believe it was written by 20 years ago.

Quartet for the End of Time by Michael Symmons explores how loss, faith and music impact on our lives, and is Big Issue's book of the year.

You can already see it in the Daily Mail's coverage of Poles leaving the country. They're not going to thank you for non-Brits leaving / not coming in the first place. They're just going to say it's because the country is going to hell! Amazed the Government can't see it coming

They call it peace, but in storm-tossed Gaza, it looks like purgatory Israel is still regularly launching attacks inside Gaza and aid is still woefully insufficient, whatever Trump might say https://bit.ly/4aNO7bo

New post just out: "The Overshoot" Net migration is collapsing, and will fall further over the coming years. We could even have net emigration. What does that mean for the country and the political narrative as we head towards the next election? (£/free trial) open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/t...

Love the Ad for The Observer in the middle of @theguardian.com app! A reminder to read it later.

Was going to watch it last night but spent allotted time trying to solve MUBI sound surround, Chrome Cast, Sony Brava TV, IPhone issues using Chatbot. Perhaps my evening was better spent?

"..the Lord said I was hungry and you told me I could make a meal for 30p, I was a stranger and you said 'fuck off back where you came from', I was sick and you said we should replace the NHS with private health insurance..."

When Henry arrived at the Junction for the Electric Line, he met an unfamiliar engine at the other platform. “Be careful!” squeaked the newcomer. “Your smoke will surely interfere with my overhead wires!” “I’m always careful!” grunted Henry. “You needn’t worry.”

This Government once vowed to be “the most nature-positive [we have] ever had”. Months of blaming wildlife and stripping back protections have already made a mockery of that promise. And if the rumoured cuts to BNG go ahead, it will deal yet another devastating blow to nature.

Cathedral Builders serenbooks.wordpress.com/2020/02/07/f...

Bonhoeffer’s public witness against christofascism in Germany will be an important reference and inspiration for Christians across the globe as once again we see the faith debased by toxic heretical Christian nationalisms from inside and outside our Churches!

I feel like writing “A Day In The Life of True Born Little Englander” making clear how much of their life, from emptying their bins to bringing in fish and chips, depends on immigrants of all wage levels.

Instead of 18 year olds being sent to die in wars we could send the elderly politicians who want send them instead.

My favourite is the Brutalist swimming pool.

I wish my History Degrees had given me Wes’s psychiatric diagnostic skills too!

Who remembers that Brexit campaign slogan from 2016? 🤔

Basically a chaotic muddle!

‘There is no magic bullet. Neither geographic isolation nor a sense of existential threat can be readily reproduced. Meanwhile, current policy prescriptions look like tinkering round the edges of the problem.’ David Runciman on how to solve the depopulation problem. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Still reeling from the Stanford report on Brexit. Reduced GDP by up to 8% and investment by as much as 18%. The UK Treasury would have £40 billion more each year if Britain had remained in the EU. Devastating self-immolation.

‘As a journalist living in exile in Vienna, Trotsky was impressed by the cultured intelligence of the Austrians (which he admitted was superior to his own) but saw them as self-satisfied and the opposite of revolutionary.’ Holly Case on the Habsburg experiment. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

No, the problem is lack of infrastructure - there’s no where to plug one in our flats.

John Major, "Our links to Europe and America may be loser now than once they were and that is a loss" "The loss of trade with Europe alone costs us £100 billion of lost trade every year" "That's a tax yield of £40 billion" "How useful would that have been in recent months to the Chancellor?"

It's hard to find words to capture quite how revolting, steeped in bigotry, irresponsible, morally unmoored, Labour has become. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

Says it all:

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... I remember Deepdene House being demolished in 1960s. I could see its yellow form from our front bedrooms. My great grandfather was a gardener on the estate and Edward VII gave my grandfather 6d when he visited having caught him up a tree.

At this rate everyone will be driving electric cars before UK Gov has electrified the rail network.

Developers met ministers dozens of times over planning bill while ecologists were shut out

Must be a sign of getting old that I can’t shed a tear for these. They were uncomfortable, either too hot or too cold and with no loos. They still seem something of an innovation compared with the 4-SUB units they replaced, not to mention the steam trains I remember from my early years.

The Brexit Tax! The fear is that we’ll be paying more to support still failing public services.

It’s clear to anyone paying attention that Farage gets an easy ride from the media. They give him as much airtime as he wants but never hold him to account for the damage he’s done. So much of what’s broken in Britain is thanks to Nigel Farage.

Then there are those strange small islands in the Atlantic archipelago near Ireland. They might want to join someday although that would be scraping the barrel a bit.

You’ll need a lot of prudence to live on the old state pension of £187.80 a week which is all many of the very old have to live on.

did the sitwells sit well? an investigation

Fed up with Reeves playing games with us with a daily drip of rumours and hints and now this speech, all raising questions of competence and creating uncertainty. A government with such a large majority ought to be able to make hard choices and get on with it.

Finally saw this all the way through a few months and yes it is amazing.

Extraordinary to hear Reeves cite tariffs and increased defence spending in her speech, as she sets up the blame for tax rises. This message could have been really effective if she'd issued it when Trump introduced tariffs. Now, much less so.

There have been so many articles about ‘6-7’ that I’m beginning to say it.

Even a big far-right vote couldn’t give the far-right total control, because the Dutch democracy promotes cooperation. Here in the UK, just one-third of the vote could give Nigel Farage a huge majority of MPs. Our democracy isn't fit for 21st-century politics. We need Proportional Representation.

I suspect Zach’s grandma is more knowing and less innocent than they think!

The issue is that Starmer doesn't actually understand he has both power and the ability to use it, and has ideologically curled up in a ball and already given up.

Exclusive: No10 chief of staff Morgan McSweeney addressed a meeting of Labour peers on Wednesday night. It did not go well, for him or Keir Starmer. The HuffPost UK weekend political read 👇 www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/end-of...

How carcinogenic are they? @theguardian.com has another article saying bacon should have a cancer warning like cigarettes. A lack of editorial consistency. Noticed a journalistic decline of late. Not sure why.