Look what I found yesterday. Our copy of this, sent to every household.

This is a clown-car government elected on a seriousness ticket iandunt.substack.com/p/a-clown-go...

I’m particularly angry today with all those people who attacked us for daring to challenge Laura Kuenssberg, implying we were misogynistic and unfair. No. She, together with Peston et al, played a key role in Boris Johnson’s ‘success’.

This government has not taken a single meaningful step to tackle the causes of the horrendous inefficiencies in the criminal justice system, instead rushing to dismantle trial by jury. Legal professionals have offered numerous alternatives to address the backlog. Ministers are not listening.

Ooooooof

Plans to leave refugees in a state of perpetual uncertainty about where and if they can rebuild their lives are not just performative cruelty, they are counterproductive to integration and the economy. It doesn’t have to be like this - 1/2

Obviously, the way to understand this is as an avant garde performance of post modernism in a political context. Imagine the political world is entirely constructed from a series of different moving planes that - crucially - lack any sort of referential depth. In other words, it’s pure performance.

This is what many of us have been saying. Part 3 of the Planning & Infrastructure Bill is based on a myth: that we don't have enough homes because wildlife and green spaces are protected. It will solve nothing, and inflict terrible harm on our remaining ecosystems www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

As Marx would have said: Musk has only read these books in various ways; the point, however, is to understand them

The fact that Joyce Carol Oates clearly loves beating the shit out of Musk invites us, the readers, to revisit and reconsider our assessment of her famous work, "On Boxing".

I also wish people would spell out the alternative proposal here. "We should have kept tariffs and capital restrictions on China skyhigh in the hopes it never became a competitive industrial producer, trapping hundreds of millions in subsistance poverty and raising the cost of everything."

Very interesting piece, including the extract below which has the ring of truth

It also means a substantial amount of detailed factual programming ends up spiralling off into the world of niche podcasts and Youtube channels rather than formats that are accessible for a mass audience

Headline from a serious and long working paper on the economic impact of Brexit. Possible that this has been feeding into OBR and HMT discussions?

If you want to sustain your carefully-cultivated fury at the stupid Panorama edit then don’t, whatever you do, read or listen to Trump’s speech in its entirety…

A meta point is that it was Sue Gray who drew up the priority list which reflected existential priorities rather than political ones. So obviously McSweeney got Starmer to sack her. And thus was Rohan brought low from the start.

"Seizing Brexit opportunities to deregulate" was mostly unspecified magic fairy pixie bullshit then, and it's not going to get any more realistic in the hands of a bunch of Reform clowns who don't know how anything works, don't care to learn and disdain anyone that might.

Even better, Number 10 staffers touted the replacement of the whips office as a big win to cheer up disgruntled backbenchers, to the complete bafflement of several. Some of whom then signed up to the “Keir’s gotta go” faction, in sheer frustration.

Number 10 is dealing with the problem of no-one being willing to tell it bad news…by firing anyone who tells it bad news. This is why Lucy Powell was fired as commons leader (look how that worked out) and why most whips were shuffled out (for correctly saying Number 10 would lose on welfare).

That the UK - one of the architects of this fund, designed to save the world’s forests - is now refusing to put any money into it is frankly shameful. Starmer’s claim that he still continues to back the fund is meaningless without resources - so much for climate leadership

If parties want credit for telling hard truths, they need to tell them when they're genuinely hard. If Labour had told the truth about taxes & the costs of Brexit before the election, its majority would be smaller. But it would have more real power & the public would put more faith in its judgment

The Dutch electoral system shows the real benefits of proportional representation. Wilders can win the most MPs but because the far-right cannot operate outside of hatred they're unable to form coalitions or actually govern. The exact same thing would happen to Reform since Farage is the UK Wilders.

Good summary of how Starmer's troubles come from a fatal convergence of lack of coherent policy, political and comms strategies. There were key flaws to Blair and Brown's policy vision, but they at least were able to formulate a desired end state around which they designed policy, politics and comms

Meanwhile, how UK politics is being conducted... tax us less and we might invent some investment numbers that make you look good but are unlikely to really make any difference to growth. An increasingly sclerotic economy. www.politico.eu/article/uk-t...

Finding Johnson's testimony at the COVID inquiry difficult to watch. His duplicity is outstripped only by his incompetence.

Is what Zack Polanski and Green candidates in wobbly Labour seats are asking

I know how the media works. The whole China kerfuffle is being bigged up to avoid the bigger picture about Russia. China is not a friend. On the other hand, it hasn't launched the biggest land war in Europe for 80 years with well over a million casualties so far

This.

An own goal, indeed.

EHRC anti-trans campaign loses its momentum - a week of absolute scenes has left the organisation in limbo. Here's what happened, why it happened, and what it all means iandunt.substack.com/p/frightened...

An expert on digital ID cards: ~ ANONYMITY IS HARD: if you are reading this post, it is an invitation for you to consider how anonymity can fail (leading to re-identification) in a heavily networked system – Dropsafe ~ https://alecmuffett.com/article/117409

He is far from alone. Do you know how many people I know, journalists, thinktankers, civil servants, politicians, who always excel at explaining to you why what is currently happening was always bound to happen, from which they conclude that it should happen?

My colleagues & I have taken a huge gamble to set up @thenerve.news We’re trying to build a new independent publication from the ground up. Social media is our only distribution for now. Sharing this article in your networks would make a huge difference. Thank you! 🙏🙏🙏

*cough*

Wilful ignorance of how trade and migration actually work in a globalised economy. The idea that the (short and long-term) movement of people -especially between India and the UK - has nothing to do with trade and investment is (obviously) wrong. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

This is a lie. There are many criticisms you might sensibly and truthfully make of the Sentencing Council and the Sentencing Guidelines. I’ve been making them for years. But this is an outright lie. Pure fabrication. A fraud on the public.

And the abolition of judicial review in deportation cases that they are advocating would make it more difficult to challenge mistakes in court (including for legal residents too)

This is truly chilling, and goes waaaay beyond immigration. When you have political parties saying that you don't need lawyers, courts, judges etc because the government cannot make mistakes absolutely everyone should be worrying. What starts with one group tends to expand to others.

Blustery day, isn't it? Here's the National Grid: Live generation data. Wind and solar are generating 74.2% of our electricity. Gas is generating 13.1%. And yet our household electricity prices are pegged to... the volatile price of gas. Which is the basis on which the right attacks... renewables.

Andrej Babiš's party won Czech parliamentary elections but lacks majority with 84 of 200 seats. Babiš previously threatened to withdraw from the Czech ammunition initiative for Ukraine and maintains close ties with Viktor Orbán and Robert Fico.

The government has responded to the 2.7 million people telling them not to introduce digital ID by basically saying "we know better than you, we're in charge, so stuff it" lol

Labour on form I see. 2.7 million people sign a petition saying "do not introduce digital ID" and the first words of their response are "We will introduce digital ID within this Parliament". Labour aren't listening. petition.parliament.uk/petitions/73...

Ed Miliband was one of the first senior politicians to challenge Rupert Murdoch, so it's no surprise that he's been the most outspoken member of the Cabinet on Elon Musk.

A brief thread for those asking if Baroness Mone can be removed as a member of the House of Lords...

According to a report in the FT, the UK Home Office is still trying to make the UK the least safe, least trustworthy place to go online.

📢 I've decided to do regular 2-3 mins video updates of latest authoritarian antics of Trump administration on YouTube & TikTok. Have been inspired by reading how many people get their news there and how dominated it is by the right. www.tiktok.com/@profchristi... www.youtube.com/@ProfChristi...

The UK’s war on Apple encryption is back

🙄

Just fuck off with this. How about start the conversation by highlighting how much immigrants contribute to the UK - not least by propping up the NHS and social care system! Also - forced volunteering is not volunteering, it's unpaid labour.