It's noticeable how rattled Mason sounds. He's not making an argument that the BBC has covered Reform well, he's complaining that criticism of the BBC from the left is not legitimate. This feels like a topic where a Culture Secretary could apply a lot of pressure. Wouldn't it be nice if we had one?

And even those who weren't socialised on it have got used to it and prefer it to the full day in day out business of government.

This would be a disaster for Labour as a distinct tradition in British politics, rather than as a generic left of centre grab-bag.

Might be an idea to boost as many Labour MPs saying the right thing as possible to try and get the message across to leadership

There's no doubt that Keir Starmer has a deep and abiding love for the Labour Party. So somebody should probably point out to him that we still haven't forgiven Ramsay MacDonald and that he's on the same trajectory.

It is genuinely absolutely bonkers that one year into a massive new government majority, all the discourse is about what will happen under the allegedly inevitable majority by another party. Much of it is the govt’s fault but not all - this very much has not happened under past unpopular govts!

there's a position that always seem to me particularly British and for which I don't really have a term, but it's basically "the crank *inside* the establishment tent". PE is their magazine.

I’d skimmed it previously but was just reading it again to make a point in a group chat, and what a vile piece about Line*an in the latest PE (also noticeably worrying from the letter page how many of its long term readers are quite quite mad now)

itcouldbesaid.substack.com/p/it-could-b... Did you know we ran a public sector deficit of 5% of GDP last year, a figure which adds up to £150billion? The public finances are in a far worse state than anyone admits to even before you consider public works backlog, gaps in defence & public services

I’d argue the fact this isn’t on the BBC news front page suggests their backers in the press know this too

Really think we should lean into the UAE comparisons that Reform is making. Does Britain want to be a dictatorship dependent on slave labour, that combines shiny skyscrapers with shantytowns? Is that the pitch?

The claim that reneging on ILR is about “cheap foreign labour” is interesting for two reasons. First, it would also affect (say) people like me with spouses on marriage visas. (Which also means it would be a way to leech even more revenue in visa fees and surcharges.) on.ft.com/4gTvkwF

I do actually want some people to face irredeemable social consequences for their antisocial behaviour. This is an overdue and entirely measured social punishment, which the right resent because it merely suggests treating them with the same level of kindness they treat their victims.

One thing we've learned from the past decade is that cancel culture was not in fact real at elite levels and you could get away with saying what you liked without consequences. If we're going to deal with the current wave of racism, that needs to change.

Well, Reform have found the issue that would move me from being a swing voter on a border poll to being willing to campaign for reunification.

Retrospectively removing indefinite leave to remain would be immoral and economically damaging. It would tear families apart. Attacking it as ‘potentially illegal’ is completely beside the point. Argue with the (awful) idea. Don’t try ’well, actually you can’t do that’.

So many parts to this, but the one that painfully echoes 2016 the most is the absolute desire to renege on existing social agreements, no matter the cost to ordinary people.

Buried details: the 18% of kids whose identities shifted over the course of the study were overwhelmingly between binary trans and non-binary or vice versa. The number who shifted between binary cis and trans was very low indeed - out of a subset of 254, precisely *one* kid shifted in this way.

This is frustratingly unserious, essentially recommending that universities follow a corporate logic they are already following, but *better*. Corporate logic (concomitant with the marketisation of education) created this crisis in the first place – why would the solution be *more* of this logic?

Rainbow over Lough Foyle

God I hate how so much of the media is like this. I sequence and differentiate in my teaching but I don’t dumb down the way I speak to students. Have a high expectation of your audience and they’ll rise to meet it. Low and they’ll dig down too far to understand you.

no charlie kirk joke i make will be as funny or insensitive as this

(I think a lot of the BBC’s written output can likely be explained by them interpreting “need to write for a reading age of seven” as ”need to write for a moron with an adult reading age”.)

I'll take it, but England would clearly be a better team if they played with half-backs.

why economy bad? why not economy good for little while, where good economy go

It all comes back to 'you can't run a campaign literally entitled "Change" and then wonder why voters don't reward you for things not meaningfully changing'.

The biggest being Kendall at DWP, she drafted a very good white paper focussed on softening benefits systems and traps to allow a gentler route into work, both moral and pro-growth, and then immediately that fell into a row over arbitrary cuts to make Reeves graphs work. It needs firmer leadership.

This letter to The Economist makes a decent point. The case for robo taxis probably feels overwhelming in a country where the urban design means you're utterly screwed without a car. It's like how higher crime rates presumably boost the car for security solutions. Not entirely enviable

A lot of work in the last couple of years on the 1945 world order has convinced me that a lot of people think the flawed and half-broken system of 2025 is an easy status quo and not something we crawled over broken glass to get

wrote about this last year and sure I wasn't in any way the only one but imo people voting for populist politics in the 21st century *is* a sign that they do just have too much faith in institutions, as opposed to not enough - they want to have their little tantrum but assume things will just hold

We‘ve lost one of the most foundational unifying aspects of being British: our shared hatred and distrust of everything yank. No wonder we’re all so divided

This is bad advice on an individual level: most entrepreneurs fail, and it's better to get a good job in an existing business. On a social level, entrepreneurship matters, but it's determined by access to finance, things other entrepreneurs do, market size, not 'drive'.

The Queen is dead, the Emperor is alive.* Checkmate, libs

I was not ready to be hit with this triple whammy of "that's still a thing?"

I'm proud to be from a country where students go to university to explore research and knowledge, and I actually think society needs *fewer* crypto-hustling drop-shippers who aspire to live in Dubai

🧵 FAQ: Q: What even is this? This account tracks the live level of the urine tank on the International Space Station. Q: So it's, like, real? Live? Right now? Yes.

please, think about the damage you might cause before sending an invoice

The particularly weird thing about this is that Peter Kyle has a doctorate in community development and when he left university he went to work for a charity. Why is he complaining about people like him? There's enough loathing for this government without them getting in on the act.

But this from Kyle is batshit: "Too often people go to University to 'explore research and knowledge'". Yes, Peter, that's what a University is for - it's not to create businessmen, something it's not suited for.

Some might say that he's out by 1500 miles, but I prefer to think he's out by 1500 years (and admittedly about 100 miles.)

Grug needs to go back to cave Grug not like present times Grug preferred it when things were easy why can't life be normal, asks Grug

Oligarchical corruption of the body politic and random murders of political figures over crimes passionelles, the fin de siecle truly is back

There is no material difference between "we do not support the basic foundations of liberal democracy" and "we only support the basic foundations of liberal democracy if it poses literally no risk to future shareholder value"

generally speaking, and with the glaring exception of november 2024, the more directly democratic an institution has been, the better it has checked Trump (eg grand and petit juries); the more elite and insular, the less effective (the Senate, the Supreme Court, big business)