Is it?

What?? She was a great writer and there are loads more women publishing science fiction than back then?

I deeply sad to see millennials getting into nostalgia slop.

Farage’s baffling war on hybrid working makes a lot more sense when you consider his audience. Those hoping Reform UK are going to shrink the state are going to be sorely disappointed. open.substack.com/pub/ottersan...

Hearing it might be Ben Swain.

Reform UK’s success has been driven by appearing more moderate than they actually are. This week’s immigration policy is out of step with public opinion. The fundamentals are soft and the party is celebrating victory too soon. My latest post 👇 buildvector.uk/p/farage-has...

Britain’s electricity prices are among the highest in the developed world. This is a blight on living standards and the wider economy. But how can we banish our scarcity mindset and embrace abundant, cheap energy? Today’s post is about exactly that 👇 buildvector.uk/p/why-is-uk-...

The West is ageing fast. Chequebook Pro-Natalism has failed to reverse falling birth rates and migration isn't a silver bullet. This week's post is about what we should do instead: buildvector.uk/p/the-wests-...

I voted for Starmer's Labour believing they would finally tackle Britain's housing crisis. But their decision to water down planning reform betrays their electoral coalition of renters and the young. A grim omen for progress. buildvector.uk/p/a-governme...

The Lower Thames Crossing is a case study in Britain’s broken planning system. £450mn - a third of the total budget - has been spent on paperwork before digging a single metre of tunnel. on.ft.com/4jeSUUK

Tarriffs could very well be Trump’s undoing. Economically illiterate, and will push prices up for domestic consumers. Let’s not forget he won the election because voters trusted him to lower prices more than Harris.

Where is Starmer's statement of support for Zelenskyy. No excuses. No equivocation.

British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has refused to comment on the Trump attack on Zelenskyy, the FT reports. The only major European leader to do so.

America is no longer our strategic ally. There is no salvaging this. We need to treat this like the national and continental emergency that it is. Our top policy priority has to be strategic independence from the US.

“Have you ever been to Ukraine? Come once” Huge balls. Huge respect. The right side of history

I’ve never seen anything as bad as that Trump-Zelensky meeting. JD Vance really is an odious third wheel.

Starmer been doing a good job so far; nauseating tho’ it is to see him larding on the praise on such a repulsive figure as Trump. But, his answer on Canada was shameful, implying he had no issue with Trump’s absurd, offensive claims on Canada. Starmer risks sounding overly sycophantic.

All very pragmatic and blunted Reform/Tory attack lines. But medium term I don’t think being seen to be associated with Trump is going to be good for any British politician.

Starmer just implied Britain has no qualms with the US annexing Canada. The media are “trying to find a divide that doesn’t exist” Cowardice from the PM.

The old order is collapsing. Friedrich Merz— previously a staunch Atlanticist— is now calling for European strategic independence from the US. Keir Starmer’s attempt to build a “bridge” with the US on Thursday may be redundant if nobody wants to cross it.

The government has left Apple with no choice but to remove Advanced Data Protection from the UK. I wrote recently about why the government is wrong. This move erodes our privacy without making us any safer. If you use the internet you should worry. open.substack.com/pub/ottersan...

It’s time for Western leaders to pick a side; they’re either with Ukraine and democracy or Trump and the demagogues.

Chaberlain was a colossus of deterrence compared to this

The free world is on the brink. This week, Trump began trading away Ukraine’s sovereignty, abandoning NATO, and inviting Putin back onto the world stage. For the democratic right, this is a moral reckoning. ottersandinsights.substack.com/p/the-rights-moral-reckoning

My latest on the UK’s government’s fight with Apple over end-to-end encryption. We should all be worried about this anti-democratic erosion of our privacy. open.substack.com/pub/ottersan...

Exclusive: Security officials in the United Kingdom have demanded that Apple create a back door allowing them to retrieve all the content any Apple user worldwide has uploaded to the cloud.

Wrote about the BBC's funding mess. Ministers want Netflix users to pay the license fee, but that won't fix a model stuck in 1946. Time to separate public service from entertainment. commentcentral.co.uk/netflix-isnt...

These tools would be more useful if you could choose what sources you want the model to use. The web is a mess and full of clickbait SEO nonsense. The problem with these “deep research” models is they trust that content as much as broadsheet papers, journals etc. www.theverge.com/news/604902/...

Wrote about Germany this week and how cartel politics is the thread that joins together desperate economic and political failings. open.substack.com/pub/ottersan...

I’ve already got cliche bingo listening to Reeves’ speech.

Up bright and early this morning on Times Radio to discuss Council Tax, Donald Trump, and why young people are fed up with democracy. ottersandinsights.substack.com/p/insights-e...

I do wonder the extent to which people are basing their judgement of LLMs on the free models anyone can access, like GPT-4o mini and Gemini Flash. The paid models are much smarter and less likely to hallucinate but are in front of far fewer people.

You can almost hear the internal discussion about whether it would be inappropriate to push-alert this to 14 million people.

There are many instances of the British justice system failing to put people away for long enough. We should focus on those failings instead of the semantics of the Southport sentencing. In practice, he’s never going to be released (rightly).

Latest post now up! I think Reform UK is fundamentally overhyped. They have a low ceiling, and they hit it in 2024. The return of Trump and Farage’s unpopular stance on the NHS will stymie their progress - if Labour and the Tories play their cards right. open.substack.com/pub/ottersan...

Latest post now up! I think Reform UK is fundamentally overhyped. They have a low ceiling, and they hit it in 2024. The return of Trump and Farage’s unpopular stance on the NHS will stymie their progress - if Labour and the Tories play their cards right. open.substack.com/pub/ottersan...

A big problem during Trump term one was that his opponents responded to everything he did by accusing him of being a fascist. Then when he really did do things that were fascistic, the word lost all meaning. And so we end up with the “Roman salute”.

There is no difference between a Roman salute and a Nazi salute.

Changing electoral donation rules to stop one donor a bad idea. To change system that has benefited established parties & stop donations that now benefit an insurgent party will confirm sense system is rigged & drive backlash. To avoid that do a change which comes into effect after next election

Kemi Badenoch lambasts Starmer at PMQs for “playing politics” over the issue of WASPI women… and then agrees with the government that they shouldn’t be compensated. We talk a lot about Starmer being bad at politics, but Badenoch may be even worse.

We shouldn’t spend billions of pounds compensating people who didn’t take responsibility for planning their retirement. Entitlements change all the time; it’s your job to stay informed and plan accordingly. The WASPIs have not been betrayed in any sense of the word.

More shocking news on London's housing crisis today. With the average student rent now greater than the max maintenance loan, London's Universities will struggle to attract and retain talented young people across the country. Time to build more houses!

Europe has slumbered under an American security blanket for too long. With Trump threatening NATO and the EU proving inadequate, we need to think radically about European defence. My latest for Europinion below. 1/2

“3 new homes” Starmer was ambitious on planning in his speech this week. But backing the “builders over the blockers” will require acknowledging that the blockers in question are hyperbolic voters who don’t want anything at all to be built.

A damning indictment of Biden that he’s being mentioned in the same breath as Trump and Bill Clinton on matters of ethics.

Danny Kruger is a terrible spokesman for opposition to assisted dying. There are so many complex reasons why one might oppose the legislation (I feel deeply uncomfortable with it) but resorting to reactionary fundamentalism is not the right tone.

Damn your eyes, I forgot that little Canuck creep!

Something I love about Bluesky is the way you can set links to open in your normal browser rather than in a shitty in-app version.

Rak-Sakyi is something else. Love seeing him play.

Something makes me think Nigel Farage— the leader of an opposition party that would like to see the British government kicked out of office— might not act in Labour or Britain’s best interests. Insane from Mandelson. www.thetimes.com/article/2211...