VAT rates on different products and where to draw the line between higher and lower rates: a problem in UK eg Jaffa cakes case and now in Belgium. Breakfast products are excluded from higher rates. Prepared dishes that with a shelf life of a few days attract the higher rate.

Hear hear! Excellent post pushing back against the timid mercantilism dominating European industrial policy.

So much this! Leadership contests as a substitute for more difficult changes. Juncker as a minister : ‘We know what the problems are but not how to get re-elected afterwards

🚨🚨" Some leaders have chosen to hunt them down and deport them through operations that are both unlawful and cruel. My government has chosen a different way: a fast and simple path to regularize their immigration status." Spanish PM Pedro #Sanchez on why #migrants are essential for Western society:

The kindness of strangers is temporary. www.theguardian.com/film/2026/fe...

A Brexiteer in a Brussels Park querying the art, from X. @goodclimate.bsky.social Do you know anything about these statues? I’ve not consciously seen them.

If Trump and his henchmen's disparaging comments about Europe have done something useful, it is to focus European minds on the need to speed up EU decision-making. This is an old debate. It cannot be a simple 2-speed Europe, with two separate country blocks. 1/2

I see we are already at the "I was only following orders" stage of fascism.

What do you think of this, Chris? @chrisgrey.bsky.social Theres’s a shorter version on Byrne’s Linked in. open.substack.com/pub/liambyrn...

This is not a sign of Labour being pro-Reform, it’s how bloc politics in FPTP works. The other bloc winning is bad. A different party in your bloc winning is worse. Don’t like that dynamic? Implement proportional representation so in-bloc have parties have less incentive to attack each other.

Nailed by Chris!

This random online comment from 2018 remains one of the last half-century's most important works of political commentary. crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/l...

The very same people ordering untrained federal agents to shoot at protesters have very strong thoughts about how Europe should be run. Maybe they should think less about Europe and more about Minnesota.

When the monopoly right granted by copyright is compounded by the speed and scale of media company mergers, we end up with a crisis in creativity. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...

Trade and economic conflicts are only partly about escalation dominance. It's just as much if not more about who has the higher politcal pain threshold and it was clear that it was Europe this time, hence the logic to retaliate if need be. Threat was sufficient.

Concise and damning.

Lest we forget.

Netflix’s Seven Dials: lower quality Christie having an unworthy amount of money and talent devoted to it. Great dialogue, with one or two anachronisms: use of ‘invites’ and ´Pardon’ was niet-niet among 20s upper classes. H. Bonham-Carter, too, too divine, darling. And, my god the Lagonda at speed!

The BS whisperers

Hell , yes! Apple could allow users to choose their own button size, but I guess that function is too deep in the OS.

Bart De Wever is becoming a *very interesting* politician Not always, but at least sometimes, in a good way

Seems that Trump's forgotto clear his threat to invade Greenland with his own Republican lawmakers, or maybe they sense an opportunity to go for Trump to be impeached to save their own skins...?

An alpha point.

"If everyone would just stay out of the Gestapo's way and let them do their job, no one would get hurt." - Someone in Germany, 1930s

Good news that there is enforcement. Will the Italian courts at promptly? Or will this be a forever case?

the European mission to Greenland was fourth in the BBC news running order this morning, which feels a bit like doing a light "and finally..." item about the archduke's motorcade taking a wrong turn in Sarajevo

‘Council documents say the original project team "value engineered the high hazard sprinkler system out of the design"…’ The term ‘value engineering’ needs to be phased out. Phase in ‘Created a massive safety risk’.

I wonder how many Dutch voters fully realize that what ICE is doing in Minnesota is *exactly* what Wilders (and van der Plas, Baudet, Eerdmans etc) would like to see happen here. It’s a free preview of what far right government actually looks like.

Never mind the fact that Labour and Conservative leaders still seem completely oblivious to how even if the US does nothing against Greenland its current trajectory around the Caribbean will put the security of 3 million people at risk who live on islands and territories under EU or UK oversight.

In which the United Kingdom invaded and occupied Iceland, because it was in our interests. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasio...

1953, before the EEC but after the Benelux agreement. Jail time for moving condensed milk from NL to Belgium.

A cracking post from Chris! I liked this especially. ‘Some compare this new era to the international relations of the Nineteenth Century: if so, one difference is that the UK is no longer amongst the great powers.´ 20% of UK voters haven’t twigged IMO.

UK revenues for X drop 60% as advertisers flee www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

A problem with current geopolitical analysis is how in its lack of attention to internal dynamics of great powers it does not take adequately into account how increasingly wild external projection of power by the US, Russia and China is driven by their growing domestic fragility

ICE just murdered a woman here in Minneapolis. A legal observer. Shot her multiple times while she drove away as ordered. She was a US citizen. Absolute, unequivocal, cold-blooded murder by Trump’s gestapo. Abolish ICE, jail for everyone in charge. This is the lowest bar we accept now.

The problem with calibrating strategic responses in an age of hyperactive social media news cycles is the time needed for various policy actors in the EU and its partners to agree a firm consensus is much longer than it takes for a meme-industrial complex to entrench misleading initial hot takes

A story that provides a small counter-weight to all the anti-refugee propaganda coming out of Blighty.

There are two venerated, much feared trees on the edge of Barwell Common. Known as Whip Scar and Tangle Knife, they are home to particularly quarrelsome Wood Sprites. To pass between them has a fearsome terror tithe and even if it's paid, you are still likely to hear them spitting curses.

This is astonishing. It should be headline news. For all those bleating about being ‘cancelled’ this is what being cancelled really looks like. www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/comm...

“The political class has little incentive to think seriously about economic growth. Indeed, it has little incentive to think at all.” Great line from another great @chrisdillow.bsky.social post.

Republican congressman 👇🏽

Fraser Nelson put the first fissure into the commentariat consensus on Brexit in November 2021, as noted in Chris’s blog post below. It’s taken 5 years for LAB to acknowledge that the fissure is now a sinkhole. chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2023/05/brex...

Now a meme.

MAGA: Down with snowflakes and hurrah for FREE SPEECH! also MAGA: You can't come to America unless you show us your social media posts and prove that you've never said hurty words about our president...

Incoming @tristanfwbrown.bsky.social

No doubt warming the heart of Milord Glasman.

"Mr @nicolange.bsky.social argues that Germany should spend 10% of its procurement budget on “disruptive projects”, rising to 30% by 2030." www.economist.com/europe/2025/...

BBC finesses Johnson’ s Nazanin gaffe: it doesn’t name the MP it refers to in the prog info.

Oh, Customs Union again? Based on recent conversations I am pretty sure that any form of greater UK market access to the single market including this will require substantial financial contribution, alignment, and close to freedom of movement. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...