Controversial take: if there is another world war, it should NOT be titled World War Three. Linking WWI to WWII works because they have such great continuities, adding an unrelated third war to the trilogy would be confusing and even misleading.

I can't remember who it was pointed out that a working class job for these people has to mean a man hitting a bit of metal with another bit of metal

If you asked an LLM what Nick Hytner was going to do next and it *didn't* say "Rory Kinnear plays John Maynard Keynes with a script by James Graham" it wouldn't be worth using www.theguardian.com/business/202...

Whenever I hear people say we should ignore bond markets I want to burst through the wall like Hbomberguy screaming "then who are we going to borrow money from Andy, fucking Aquaman?"

There's an interesting parallel with redistributive economics: banning things is like endlessly trying to patch up the system with tax and welfare tweaks instead of making work pay in the first place. You need an agenda for increasing the good, not playing whack a mole with the bad.

Leaving about four women in the Trump admin, the most senior I think being the secretary of agriculture. Keep it up and the US will match the Chinese politburo for gender diversity.

There must surely be some Labour people this evening with the sinking feeling they've just fired the starting gun on years of extremely unpleasant legal proceedings that basically can only end up with humiliating retreat and everyone yelling at them even more

The invention of the constructive vote of no confidence basically destroyed this argument, to the point where some governments that really needed to fall apart did not (looking at you Olaf Scholz)

The problem with polling on immigration is people read it as "should there be more or less immigration" and lots of folks don't really care. What they really do care about is how we *treat* migrants.

Joke's on them, when I retire I'm spending half my pension pot on an enormous job lot of avocado toast

Incredible that the best the propagandists for the CCP can do is "Taiwan is a bit like the American South in 1860"

I cannot get over how crazy it is that in 2026 there are almost no plausible female candidates for US president

Strong "Andrew Garfield returns as Spider-Man" vibes

While it is not impossible to build a movement to appeal to voters with incoherent politics, this was not the project that Blue Labour thought it was in or wanted to be in

At this point he could give the Gettysburg Address and it wouldn’t move the dial. In fact I think it would only further alienate voters, because it speaks more to the issues of mid 1860s America and also he’d be accused of plagiarism.

Everyone suddenly having completely incoherent politics makes you long for the days when people just voted the way their union, church or family told them to

While it is useful to have articles profiling the incoherence of the average Trump / Reform voter's political views, I suspect that the average voter for liberal / left parties has a similar incoherence when asked.

In this telling, are students good citizens regardless of what conclusions they draw from history? Or is there a singular "correct" take on history that they might have missed if their conclusion is that their own country is not particularly exceptional?

Is it possible that the Mandelson appointment was no more complicated than "he will cause trouble whatever happens, better that we get him out of London"

In a proportional system where they actually could vote for a candidate they liked, you just know these people would use the fact that that candidate might form a coalition with someone they didn't like as their excuse for not voting

It was extremely annoying after his resignation that talk turned to reform of the vetting system when quite obviously it had done its job and just been ignored

Tonight is also a massive endorsement of the parliamentary system over the presidential system. Even in its corrupted form, the parliamentary election did not give the dictator the opening that a Trump or Bolsonaro or Yoon relied on.

If ever there was an event that reminded us that the Marseillaise is truly the international, rather than French, anthem of democracy, Orban going down is surely it youtu.be/HM-E2H1ChJM?...

I genuinely did not believe this moment would come. Feels completely surreal.

When Stephen Miller said he wanted to do Operation Barbarossa again this is not what he had in mind

The white working class have lost touch with everyday hardworking pundits

It is very funny that the Founders went to such trouble to expressly give the power to declare war to congress, not imagining that this could be circumvented with the cunning deployment of a slightly different definition of the word "war"

Very strangely, the "For You" feed, which was previously quite interesting, has devolved to 100% "Orange Cheeto in the White House", "just reverse Brexit", "heckin doggo" stuff and I have no idea what in my behaviour would have caused it

The Barrie Kosky Ring's interpretation of Fafner, for some reason

"A country that has always tolerated minority faiths" is an extraordinary way to describe a place that built its constitution around Catholic exclusion

The only genuinely fun national rivalry is between France and England and that only works because they're in the extremely unlikely position of having been a. at relatively similar power levels and b. stuck that way for 800 years

If there is hope, it must lie in the fact that the enemies of the liberal order are so profoundly stupid

Amazing how air power has consistently failed to deliver strategic victories despite the promises of its proponents for over a hundred years and yet still politicians will go "maybe this time we can bomb our way to victory"

A lot of Blue Labour amounts to "we are very worried that one bit of our voter coalition finds another bit annoying"

The departure of Noem means Trump's cabinet has only 4 women. There is barely a single woman in the Republican party you could plausibly describe as a future leader. It really does feel striking in a world of Le Pen, Meloni, Takaichi and Weidel.

If you're Your Party at this point what is your pitch exactly? Split the Green vote for... reasons? What is the sincere rationale for anything they're doing?

Genuinely thought this was a yassified Pedro Sanchez for a moment

AOC weighing in on the intra factional situation of the German SPD does not do me any favours in my attempt not to believe politicians are actually my friends

There is something so Old/New Testament about the way Jefferson's promise to America, so utterly corrupted by his own original sin as a slaveholder, could only be redeemed by the coming of Lincoln

You ever stop and think about CASABLANCA? You ever stop and think about "Welcome back to the fight, this time, I know our side will win?" You ever think about a bar full of people defiantly singing La Marseillaise, played by a soundstage full of Jewish refugees? You ever think about CASABLANCA??????

Raising the interesting question of who is the exact opposite candidate for the Dems: "honest crusader" vibes to the left and "down-home middle American" to swing voters?

I was told I would love Fallout: New Vegas but I couldn't play more than two hours because of how relentlessly brown the colour palette was

A very basic bit of media training is "don't start an anecdote if you don't know where it's going"

There is a comparative history to be written of Hollande, Scholz, Biden and Starmer, last gasps of centre left politics who had done their time in their respective organisations only to reach the top and face a historic rightwing surge with zero aptitude or urgency