I see Farage now hates emigration as well as immigration. The trouble is, he’s a big part of why people are emigrating. Brexit has made the U.K. a less attractive place for everyone.

Today's migration stats illustrate the migration doom loop in action... (from my presentation at the IMF last week)

Introduce yourself with 5 concerts you’ve seen The Clash The Selecter The Pogues Regina Spektor Taylor Swift

This path leads to chaos.

install a conservatory to own the libs. perfect. www.thetimes.com/life-style/p...

The @uniofeastanglia.bsky.social via @tobysjames.bsky.social kindly recorded this event. I gave Kemi Badenoch a grade D. But then I hadn't heard her supposedly brilliant Budget response. So should that have been a D+ or a C-?

Full of golden statuary, presumably? In impeccable taste, of course.

Stop telling me Starmer isn’t chasing the Reform vote. This is driven only by fear and xenophobia.

Winners in the Game of Tax in the past like losing even more than those who have never really won.

Immigration is finally becoming a real problem, after being a phantom menace for decades. It’s a problem because we have too little immigration now, and it’s going to get worse.

It should be obvious, but every tax change has winners and losers, including some cases on the edge that appear to be anomalous. The idea of a perfect and perfectly fair tax is impossible. The question is whether and if so how you treat those who lose (and to a lesser extent those who win). 1/3

Timeline cleanser

Remember when Brexiters were reduced to pretending that pint bottles of champagne represented a major win?

The ‘poor granny in a family house’ is to the mansion tax what the ‘fourth generation hill farmer in the Lake District’ is to the IHT change for farms.

And everyone on the bus stood up and applauded

There’s a guy works down the ‘French fry restaurant’ swears he’s Elvis…

As an ex-accountant I understand the logic behind the EV pay-per-mile scheme. Revenue from fuel duty will go down, so we need to replace it. This is why accountants make good servants but bad masters.

I might have to go to Val d’Isere rather than Zermatt this year.

the next couple of days are going to see a hell of a lot of "the rich declare themselves poor"

"A new poll suggests nearly half of Britons think there are more migrants in the UK illegally than legally, but in reality just 7% arrive through irregular channels" Charlie Angela on how sensationalist reporting in the right wing press is fuelling falsehoods and misconceptions

Wouldn’t it be nice?

‘The clip, which appeared on live television, shows the President of the United States snapping at a female reporter “Quiet, Piggy!”’ From the new Private Eye, out now.

I know who Nus Ghani MP is - not because we always agree - but because she’s been serving her constituency (as well as lewks) since 2015. Who the hell is Lucy White?! Ah, a quick google search reveals her as a rentagob for GB ‘news.’ I know which one is qualified to chair the budget debate.

Literally the only paying passenger on this ‘peak time’ train…

Spurs so Spursy

On AI’s ‘mediocrity trap’ — experiments indicates that while AI helps the less skilled make something passable, the highly skilled don’t use it to produce something better than they could have; they produce something ok, but lose motivation to make it great. www.jin-li.org/uploads/1/1/...

Nobody who supported Brexit can claim to support ‘our farmers’. #JustSaying

Overall, a less bad budget than I feared.

On Truss & Kwarteng in ‘22. Allister Heath, Telegraph: “the best budget I have ever heard a British chancellor deliver". Alex Brummer, Mail: “a genuine Tory package elbowing to one side the Treasury's fiscal conservatism". These men will now be paid actual money for their analysis of today’s budget.

This ‘mansion tax’ is a pittance, really.

Early evening fox…

He used to be an academic. 😱

Tory MPs now protesting about anti-protest laws which they themselves brought in..

Tory front benches equally furious at a tax on mansions and hundreds of thousands of kids being pulled out of poverty. Shameful stuff.

I spy a conspiracy by Big Bike

and again - literally just the hobby horse of some random anonymous Twitter accounts, enraging how quickly they managed to turn their horrid posting into actual government policy and rhetoric

Farage cited Enoch Powell as his political hero in an interview in Total Politics magazine in 2008. In 2014 he cited Vladimir Putin as the world leader he most admired. You want this guy as your next prime minister???

That Enoch Powell fandom is really telling. I'm surprised that's not the story actually because it's firmly on the record. At some point Farage stopped talking about Powell - presumably because it became politically inconvenient to do so. No evidence of some Damascean conversion to reality.

If multiple people can remember someone being horribly racist, even by the appalling low bar of the racist 1970s, that is entirely noteworthy. As an adult Farage fanboyed Enoch Powell - the most infamous racist of the 1960s - and long cited him as his political hero. And that's noteworthy too.

If one more person tells me we shouldn’t be using the Farage schoolboy racism story, looking down their nose because they’re the adult in the room, I’ll scream. Because I’m so mature.

"We are freezing known Russian assets" says Rachel Reeves "But let me be clear, I don't actually mean the member for Clacton"

Sorry, no, Motability was not about 'helping the most vulnerable' - it was about providing people who need modified vehicles modified vehicles!

Kudos to all political or financial journalists who don’t make the ‘Office of Budget Irresponsibility joke.

I’m beyond proud of Peter Ettedgui speaking out about Farage and the vile antisemitic abuse he endured. I first heard Peter’s story nearly 20 years ago when Farage was a virtual nobody. It’s not a hit job. Just the truth

Could have been done a year ago, but good news nonetheless!

Of course it bloody is. We need migration. Our problem, as I’ve said many times recently, is going to be too little immigration, not too much.

Suggs and the boys, great bunch of lads, always said so.

guys, guys, it's fine. the obr has taken the pdf offline. damage completely controlled

The OBR publishing early is bad news for a) the person who carries the can b) the political debate around the OBR but maybe good for those of us who think Budget documents should be published before, not after, the Chancellor speaks as a matter of course when the world doesn't end at 13:30 today?