And that’s why real comprehensive welfare states don’t tax progressively. They tax relatively regressively and *spend* progressively.

As this guy popped up in what was, on a conservative estimate, the 250th Tony Blair documentary, i did wish someone would see fit to make one about how this charlatan's fundamental misunderstanding of economics had broken the British state.

And almost all the things we should or could do to fix it, from 'abolition, fund it via tax' to 'a very different fees system' would in different ways be less 'progressive'. But they would be IMO better all round than 'most high earners have an extra nine per cent marginal rate for 30 years'.

Great column. "Everyone wanted the rich to bear a bigger burden and politicians responded. The tax system is much more progressive than it was. And now people hate the results." "

My column Everyone loves progressive tax changes in theory but seem to hate them when they face the consequeuences One for UK graduates on Plan 2 loans to read... as.ft.com/r/d9c65a3c-1...

Farage himself is smart in spotting when he's about to be drawn into specifics, and he uses prickliness and distraction to avoid it. He would have blustered and bristled at Victoria Derbyshire but would not have got drawn into it as Zia Yusuf did.

Faragism is a political outlook that is driven by simplism, complaining and a generalised/selective nostalgia for 'the good old days'. There's no place within it for specifics so that's where it falls.

Sorry, but the guy who has survived longer an achieved more of his priorities than anyone else in politics over the past two decades, who has outmaneuvered multiple leaders of two larger parties and reoriented politics around his priorities is not “bad at politics”. This is cope.

I wonder how many person hours of thinking has already been dedicated to this. Reminds me of almost any other planning, building, or any other process in the UK, funnily enough.

why did Farage take five days to wake up to the biggest corruption scandal of the decade? maybe he’s not on Bluesky idk

Fact Check: Nigel Farage claims the FT ignored the Mandelson-Epstein scandal it was on the front page for SIX days (long before he appears to have even noticed it)

Yeah - I think that broadly speaking very few of the problems of social media are not consequences of “we chose to forget all of the lessons of broadcast and traditional media regulation…what happened next will not shock you!”

The only question worth asking at these incredibly flash Reform press conferences that take place every week now, is who is paying for all of this and what do they want in return bsky.app/profile/pete...

It would be really great to read an article about young boys that didn't have Adolescence and "crisis" as its reference points. There is something badly wrong in our discourse about teenage boys and girls. Mostly, they are fine and far better adjusted than their parents and grandparents.

Really good and balanced, as ever.

Constant reactions to what has been a period of profound chance since c 2000. Confusingly, this isn’t change in the sense of the guillotine (sudden, decisive), its change in fits and starts with the contours of the pre-system still visible - pronounced elements of continuity as well as change.

Reform are not about solutions; they are about convincing the electorate that everyone & everything is terrible so you should vote for them. They are the party of net curtain twitching, closed high streets & smoky pubs. They are the nostalgia party. This is a vibe; not a policy

This is I think basically correct. The TikTokers who go 'hey, I have done some research' and go viral, and actually they are just attractive people who have read an FT article or a New Yorker piece do not *genuinely* believe they have discovered the thing they have ripped off, nine times out of ten.

I feel so miserable about this. Nearly broke myself working 16, 18 hour days during the pandemic. We did everything we possibly could, then doubled it, tripled it. HE is still struggling to get back off the floor, years later. Now another financial punch in the face. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I find myself in an increasing number of conversations, in which I must somehow suppress the response I want to scream: "NOOOO, NOT EVERYTHING WAS BETTER THEN, YOU JUST HAD MORE HAIR ON YOUR HEAD, LESS HAIR EVERYWHERE ELSE, AND YOUR DICK GOT HARDER, THAT IS ALL." One day I will fail and scream it.

Similar. At the start every lecture took between 4-6 hours to subtitle and edit. Not to mention the workshop walkthrough videos (which were actually new), completely new forms of assessment and remote tutorials. All done during the night while looking after 2 kids on my own during the days.

This... exactly this. Remember 2020 students still in halls v. much wanted to go home to their parents & did get hall fee rebates. They didn't get TEACHING fee rebates BECAUSE WE WERE STILL TEACHING THEM. Pre-pandemic: in room w 12 medical students. Pandemic: on Zoom w 12 medical students. Etc.

Exactly, this has to be the starting point of any further reform.

Prompted by Jonathan’s excellent piece, if immigration is a structurally vital part of the economy (it is) which doesn’t respond to political volatility (boom and bust) why not think about it more in the context of other structurally important areas such as central bank independence or the OBR?

LOOK AT THAT THING GO!

I mean, ironically, the visible aggression and cognitive decline in some of the replies to Sam are *not*...unpersuasive.

Great piece from @dsquareddigest.bsky.social, which touches on one of the big theories for why English-speaking countries do especially badly at housebuilding: Adversarial and litigious common law systems (Anglo) vs judge-led civil law systems elsewhere. samf.substack.com/p/build-the-...

New @therestpolitics.bsky.social trying to unpick the big speeches and big moments at Munich Security Conference. Plus a new LEADING with Rob Malley who negotiated the Iran nuclear deal for the US and is expert on all things Middle East youtu.be/MzalF9cbyww

I really believe this. As I've said before, I believe a lot of our turn to fascism is, in fact, nilhism. Part of that is not realising how good we have it: by the standards of the average person in, say, 1900 we've built a utopia. We should celebrate that way more.

"AI detectors" are themselves AI, and yet are endlessly trusted by people on here if they say that a newspaper article is AI. AI detectors are snake oil. None of them reliably works. And UK broadsheet are not yet using AI to write articles. No, that link to the deal you found doesn't prove it.

Great proposal this. Continues to be incredibly funny and incredibly stupid that for years we've *banned* bus and rail operators "colluding" to make their timetables integrate with each other.

The root of the apparent confusion seems to be that whenever it becomes apparent non-white families get the money, Reform goes off the idea. But the party is not quite ready to openly propose subsidies for *white* families. So it ends up nudge winking like this.

Won't be a revelation to anyone but the reason all the worst people on the right are pivoting to talking about race and culture rather than immigration is so they can keep banging the drum even as net migration figures fall (UK) and even reverse (US). This is the next step and it always was.

The fact is that Reform can’t win with ardent racists alone but they can win if they get enough (insert polite euphemism here) who want to “try something different”. That’s who the future hinges on

if only we had a media and culture secretary @roberthutton.co.uk

Politics London discussing driverless taxis casually referring to “jaywalking pedestrians”. Jaywalking is not a thing in UK law. Transport for London and Government had better not be asleep at the wheel on this.

Explaining the plot of Scooby-Doo to my daughter and realizing the central irony of the show is that the gang cruises around looking for magic and mysteries that never pan out, while the only truly supernatural element is the talking dog they all ignore.

This sums up so much. Americans (and, people in general) find it so hard to parse local context. It's the same for free speech discussions as for views on how porous borders should be. The internet enables a lot of context shock; lots of people in the UK seem to think we can build a wall in the sea.

Europe's history is very different from America's - two millennia of princely warfare, empires and decolonisation, Cold War division, neighbourhood. MAGA's mistake is to see it as the same.

When ministers defended Starmer over Mandelson’s links to Epstein this week, they rushed to X - a platform that lets users strip photos of women and girls. Is it surely time for the government to log off X? And is social media too toxic for all of us? My col: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Nadhim Zahawi thinks London is now unsafe, because the other day a tired-looking man walked past him during the morning rush hour.

Farage's claims here are straightforward lies (and it's about time the media/press said so) The correct figures are 160K (0.3%) and 900K (1.5%) www.gbnews.com/news/video-n...

Weird how the media companies owned by billionaires continue to lay off staff. It's as if they don't really care about journalism. variety.com/2026/tv/news...

Day after Alex Pretti killing I complained to BBC about presentation of White House statements and evidence as equivalent. Duty of balance doesn’t extend to complicity with clear lies, I said. BBC could and should report WH making false statements as a *fact of the story*. Today I got response …

Oh god Frost has discovered Ayn Rand. A mediocrity explosion.

The art of politics is not to do what people think. If it was, there literally wouldn’t be any politics. The art of politics is to convert public opinion in the direction of your policies. Not so subordinate your policies to opinion.

idk how to rebuild society for this but i don't think people should be allowed to talk like this without it going very poorly for them

TV. They've just reinvented TV.