I look forward to a satirical take on how oppressive Paddington Culture has become.

I get their emails for some reason and every single one of them is basically "X wants to do Y, here's how to object", infuriating

I’m not sure a government who wanted Adolescence played in every school in the country can consistently say that 13 year olds have no responsibility for their actions but there you go.

As always, JR the most balanced and accurate source of legal reporting around.

You can’t even cause £1m of damage and do a GBH for political reasons anymore!

There's much to like in this. I'm quoting some bits that seem v sensible: - cutting NI - low taxes on entrepreneurs - cutting back judicial review - more nuclear power

This chart is really worth looking at to understand the difficulties in the housebuilding sector - it costs almost as much to build a house as it sells for. And land prices are no longer that big a proportion of the costs (12.5%).

Unfair on Callaghan, who was generally quite a popular figure and whose vote share held up surprisingly well given the absolutely shocker of a term he had (no majority, IMF bailout, Winter of Discontent). If he had had a better run of events, he might well have won.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... @ironeconomist.bsky.social any insights on this?

I disagreed with Giles several times on here and the Other Place, but he always struck me as a determined lawyer trying to do what he believed best for ordinary people up and down the country. Its extremely sad to hear this news, and to realise that I will never get to debate with him again.

This is very sad. I only knew him through twitter and here, but a really good lawyer trying to make the world better.

How hard did @ironeconomist.bsky.social's head hit his desk when he saw this?

“Labour lacks imagination”. Hannah Spencer’s imagination? Spend more money (no source identified) and renationalise water (no explanation how that solves the issues water faces). www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Elites will do/blame anything other than build more houses.

This framing is wrong, huge amount of this is demographic changes: (1) fewer kids (2) people living longer so kids at home is a smaller fraction of lives (3) much longer spent in widow hood. (4) more divorces. Don’t love the framing a divorcing couple as extravagantly claiming 2x more housing.

I think it’s a mistake to assume that a mainstream party needs to “out X party X” in order to benefit from any move in X‘s direction. It has long been clear that Labour needs to work harder to convince voters and markets that it can be trusted with public finances.

It’s useful to put these build rates in terms of the UK. 3.2% over 3 years would be just over 1% a year; around 300k net additions per year. At 6.3 for that’s ~600k per year, to replicate Austin the Uk needs to build around 900k a year. Our actual 2025 build rate? 200k.

The purpose of such taxes in the 1940s was (a) to raise revenue and (b) control consumption, which is why the standard rate of income was over 30%, rising to almost 50% during the course of the War.

Yes, you too can be denied your beautiful right to be convicted by Ouija Board, and be forced to join our disgusting civil law cousins in Europe. (Yes I know it only happened once (that we know about), and under the current proposals murder would still be tried by jury. One time is too many)

What were they arrested for?

Must be the UK now has evil employers and Italy suddenly has good ones. Cannot be anything else that happened in the period 22-24...

SDLT is a bad tax, but it’s not the primary cause of the decline of housebuilding. That decline pre-dates the rise of SDLT beyond a 1% flat tax on average or above average properties in the last 1990s To the leviathan it now is.

Yes, passing both these measures have made the government immensely popular.

There is an interesting question here re jurisdiction - if the President simply lacks power to tariff (rather than any question of improper purpose etc) then why is a challenge restricted to a particular court?

Tony Benn’s long term legacies as Minister of Technology were a uranium mine in Namibia used to support apartheid, and a machine used to ferry the rich from London to New York.

As long as you know the long s, thorn and yogh, it’s surprisingly comprehensible all the way back to the 1300s, but then it gets quite difficult.

Move over Court of International Trade. Its the Court of Federal Claims' turn now.

I have been picking up a lot of followers on here over basic small c conservative principles like “Dicey was right about Entick v Carrington” and “retrospective punishment is bad”, but I suspect new followers may not like the rest of my content!

I don’t think people can fathom quite how hard this would be to implement. I suspect almost all of the senior judiciary would resign immediately, as would a large proportion of the rest of the CJS.

The ST should be extremely wary before publishing stories suggesting that taking out private finance to pay off student loans is a good strategy. www.thetimes.com/money/family...

The rule in England and every other common law country is not simply that state agents need a warrant. It is that anyone seeking to enter land without permission (including state agents) is a torfeasor, absent a warrant or other special authorisation.

From recollection, there is at least one Roman author who goes into great detail explaining how their “C” was a hard “K” sound, not the modern “Ch” or “s” sound. Meanwhile the Roman for a babies cry was “vagitus” which makes more sense as “waa-g-i-tus” than “vag-itus”

There are quite a few “simple” routes in the sense that they are technically or practically hard to do. They aren’t politically simple because they involve trade offs that politicians don’t want to explain to the public, and potentially the public doesn’t want to make.

"average New Labour minister causes 3 scandals" factoid actualy just statistical error. average minister causes 0 scandals. Scandals Peter, who lives in cave & causes over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

It is an interesting question as to why Ernest Augustus’ title of prince was removed on under the 1917 Act, if it was possible to remove it by prerogative. George V had removed himself from the royal orders already by that point.

Here is the kind of change that the HL might be expected to make in their careful scrutiny which will be ruled out by the Parliament Acts if they are used.

The age of the Parliament Acts makes no difference. What should make a difference is that the only way they can be invoked is to pass the exact same version of the Bill which already passed the HoCs, no matter how important any change suggested by the Lords.

This is literally the thing that AI is proving worst at, giving accurate answers to high stakes questions.

Seeing this as a constitutional issue is part of where this all went wrong. We all know that no one can enter another’s property without special authority - why should state agents be in a different position?

Cant wait to take away rights and security from renters by abolishing their proprietary interest and replacing it with a contract holding relationship.

Also, the PHSO is not “an independent body that exists to hold the government to account“. It is a tool of MPs to assist them in holding the government to account. That is reflected in the original white paper, Crosman’s comments when introducing the 1967 Act, and its lack of any legal powers.

Why is this question only directed at Crown Dependencies and BOTs (and not e.g. other havens like Curacao, Panama or Seychelles)? Is NB expecting the gov to use its colonial era powers to interfere in the running of these territories?

I can't think what might be driving price increases in a labour, property and energy intensive industry with heavy competition and thin margins... Could it be employer-sided NI, minimum wage, warehouse comparator equal pay claims, energy costs and business rate increases?

Zack coming out for a French style independent nuclear deterrent and increase in military spending. He’s getting dangerously close to getting my vote.

www.gov.uk/government/n... DSFO has a very troubled history in recent years. The Gov really needs to get to grips with what is going wrong there.

The BBC should really stop uncritically reporting bad faith NIMBY talking points, such as the idea that only 'affordable units' (sic) will make a difference. They should be talking to economists about the role of chains. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I suspect most people well versed in the bible understand Paul’s significance, which means this is potentially less well understood today than half a century ago.

www.theguardian.com/business/202... If I was the RMT I would be extremely careful about this, as there will be an immediate equal pay claim made using drivers as comparators. if you thought the Birmingham bin strikes were vicious...