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...

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... I fundamentally beleive that it can be done, it is just we lack the political will or logistical competence as a country to do it.

www.standard.co.uk/news/london/... Good. “Affordable home” requirements are a tax on new developments, which is why NIMBYs love them so much. The only way to affordable homes is building as many as possible.

There is a big difference between an incumbent losing an election and an incumbent being unpopular. I don’t think you can compare the two.

Here’s an alternative - scrap the BSR and instead an offence with up to life imprisonment for anyone convicted of knowingly using unsafe materials, plus a statutory tort for the same to anyone injured by the same, with punitive damages at least equal to that damage.

EU example of drowning small companies in paperwork. UK examples will be easy to find (and let's not start again on ending small company de minimis exemptions...) www.ft.com/content/0797...

Sorry, someone’s been raiding the old Yes Minister storylines again. Specifically the one about the hospital with no patients but fully staffed. www.theguardian.com/business/202...

The fact that jurors subjectively believe they do a good job does nothing to reassure me. Again, the problem is that they do justice in secret, without reasons.

Hahahahahahhaha. We’re really doing this again are we? A 29 year old is just the same as 12 year old? www.bbc.com/news/article...

The responses to this suggest we are all in a lot of trouble if BlueSky ever does get its chosen leaders into office.

This (from: www.ft.com/content/75ce...) is something you can *feel* if you are in the UK, especially if you've experienced living abroad. But infuriatingly successive governments and our entire media are somehow absolutely committed to suggesting anyone who wants to change this is the devil...

“Affordable” homes are built by effectively taxing developers. Building them relies on having developers building profitable developments, some of the profit of which goes into building affordable housing. The BSR has effectively killed such developments in London. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

It will never not be surprising to me that the last commercial canal to be opened in England (1905) opened after the last main line railway (1899).

Merely freezing threshold and abolishing salary sacrifice is the definition of politics over good policy. Salary sacrifice is one of the few ways that an employee approaching the £100k cliff edge can avoid falling off while still getting a financial benefit.

Damn every one of these selfish people, who have themselves already got accommodation, but are happy to see other people without homes. www.mylondon.news/news/north-l...

Because we haven't really been trying. We've been saying we would like to have it, without any willingness to consider the necessary trade offs to get there (indeed, pilling on obstacles to growth).

Responses to Dan here as serious as you would expect. "Tax the rich", "the money is there its just being hidden", "Tufton Steet!!!!!"

It’s well known that homes have an inherent and immutable value, which is why there has been no rise in real prices ever. It may be that supply restrictions (s106, impact studies the length of war and peace) mean the homes cannot be sold profitably. But that is all the same problem.

One for @spinninghugo.bsky.social. You share a name with a public figure in your city. A large institution contacts you personally out of the blue wanting to contract. You accept. Voidable?

I don’t believe politicians are simply prisoners of this polling - which in any event has all the usual caveats of single issue polling. Politicians can and should try to shape public opinion, and Labour are doing a terrible job of that.

I always find the ‘people with X amount of wealth’ tax results funny because it’s very clear that the British do not consider their home as wealth and if you actually started a property tax at £200k of annual value they would scream bloody murder. But housing is where the wealth is!

uk.news.yahoo.com/government-c... It doesn’t sound like Lab is actually going to do this, just Lib Dems being Lib Dems, but what an unconscionable fucking policy.

You’re just re-allocating an existing scarce good using the deepest pockets of them all. You can’t fix the housing crisis like this.

I can see that one off payments for unfair dismissal etc wouldnt be caught, but it cannot change the fundamental issue that bin men (used advisedly) cannot be paid more than TAs, and they think they should be. www.itv.com/news/central...

I’m worried by the fact that, from the report, the MR appears to see no inherent value in a decision being made by a human, who has had to sit and hear the evidence and arguments, and articulate their reasons in public. www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/debate-...

I’m pretty sure that while Andrew can cease to use the title, he cannot cease to be Duke of York without an Act of Parliament. www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cv...

I agree, but these words ring hollow in a world where individual lawyers very publicly identify themselves personally with their clients and their causes. The regulator(s) would do well to mandate that this isn’t done in a professional capacity, in order to protect the independence of the profession

These cases (see also one a few months ago where a teenager was allegedly assaulted resisting being taken to his mothers) really do demonstrate the limits of the law - family courts cannot force broken down family relationships back together under the barrel of a gun. www.bbc.com/news/article...

I have a lot of sympathy with the problems which this is aimed at solving. But I do wish the judiciary would have greater regard to s.5 Civil Procedure Act 1997 which considerably limits the powers to issue them. Even if they are approved by the President of FamD & titled a “Practice Note”.

Hot take: maybe it’s better if judges don’t do this?

We’ve tried basically nothing and we’re all out of ideas.

Is Andy Burnham right? Is there "definitely a case" for reintroducing the 50p tax rate?

”You can’t stop me chopping down the forest at an excessive rate now now because that means you won’t get to chop it down when you’re older” There won’t be a forest to chop down. Simple as that.

Not looking great on the “Your Party won’t descend immediately into factional infighting“ front.

The madness all comes from having secret tribunals of fact who give bald conclusions without reasons and can never be asked why they did what they did in a given case, so we have to start inferring from random samples.

A new paper from Philip Murray and me: 'In Defence of Classical Administrative Law'. We argue that the voidness of unlawful administrative acts is central to the rule of law and that recent challenges to that view can and should be resisted. publiclawforeveryone.com/2025/09/16/i...

www.ft.com/content/868f... We just did this with employer NI. People can’t leave their jobs if the jobs aren’t there to begin with.

Things the Spanish government can also do: build a high speed railway line in less than 20 years at a reasonable price…

It is interesting that this relies quite heavily on the incorporation obligation in Strand Five, whereas other commentators taking the same line have focussed more on Strand One para 5(b).

I feel like a spell the Labour leadership has cast over itself but also, bizarrely, a lot of people on this website, is a belief that a government’s re-election campaign is about what it says rather than what it does/what has happened to it.

Rayner was the only one who was actually delivering on Labour’s promises even to a small extent. If she’s replaced by Pennycook we can kiss anything even approaching 1.5m houses goodbye.

Green siege economy incoming.

We’ve tried six months of slight tinkering around the edges of our crippling planning system and Henig is ready to declare it a failure.

I see that this website is predictably back to claiming that because they would *prefer* the Good Friday Agreement requires ECHR membership, because it might have been a good idea to include that requirement, it in fact does.

Curiously, this is exactly what sensible people calling for deregulation mean - cutting back the every increasing burden which is manageable if you are a multi-national but absolutely toxic for small businesses.

S106 isn’t a small thing. It creates a huge adversarial process between councillors and developers and councillors often don’t want the building in the first place. That’s the nature of having planning at far too local a level.