The amount of money the Saudis have wasted over the decades is just staggering. Huge sums poured down the drain, soaked up by Western consultants and South Asian labourers. Neom is a 21st-century Ozymandias.

"Fuck business" is government eternal government policy it would seem. This is another example of corporate power in Britain being weaker than is commonly supposed. Ideology trumps economic interest time and again.

This is a comfortable fantasy. A complete denial of responsibility, an insistence that you never had any meaningful power and that everything is, as always, caused by the old enemy.

*If you live in a sunny climate

IIRC Mississippi would be a solid blue state if Mississippi whites voted Democratic at the same rate of Ohio whites.

This is hardly a new thing ─ football fanatics and baseball nuts have been around for all the 20th century ─ but what's changed is that it used to be a shared social experience, but increasingly is something enjoyed at home and online.

The Chilean presidential election is yet another example of the Perils of Presidentialism and the problems of the Two-Round system.

Those figures misleadingly presented. Most people are vaguely away Britain did slavery, but asking them for specific numbers ("3 millions", "300 years") is gonna trip most people up.

It's absolutely incredible that in the United States today, federal agents are roaming around and pepper-spraying motorists. Just outrageous.

Yes, it should, actually. I don't want birds nesting in my fucking walls, but environmentalists insist that my home must be used as a bloody aviary.

It's absolute bullshit that you aren't allowed to get rid of bats roosting in your own fucking home.

Genuinely one of the worst chancellors in history.

The sheer amount of vitriol Abundance gets amuses me.

The actual answer to this problem is to make it profitable to build at a lower price. Quicker permitting, lower obligations on development, and a planning regime that is more certain and has a wider range of sites. All increase competition, range of business models, and customer demand for supply.

Lisa Nandy having no understanding of agglomeration effects explains quite a lot about her views.

Everyone brings up that Keynes quote but ignores the dual constraints of productive capacity and balance-of-payments that he was intimately familiar with from running the British war economy.

It also ignores that having the civil service (which cannot be transplanted) far away from parliament would be wildly impractical. Ministers would have constantly travel back and forth between London and the North, not to mention their own constituency.

The number of posts and quotes that amount to 'just sell it for flats/turn it into a museum/let the Qataris have it' and 'build a modern replacement in *insert regeneration destination of choice' is so depressing. A nation of gradgrinds with no love of their history.

My niche take is that it should be knocked down and rebuilt, but with broadly the original design/style.

The problem with this proposal is that the vast majority of the American working class are neither unionised or politicised. And of those who are, many voted for Trump.

Who robbed the Louvre? Right answers only

I know everyone likes to mock AI, but it's damn useful when you're trying to find something you don't know the name of.

I remember Lynton Crosby saying that an electoral strategy should always begin by locking in you're base because doing otherwise is like building a house on a faulty foundation.

It also ignores the fact that it's very well documented that most servicemen voted for Roosevelt in 1944. (Similarly, the military vote was strong for Labour in Britain's 1945 election).

A lot of people seem to think that Israeli Jews can be forced to just up stakes like the Pied Noirs or White Rhodesians.

Far more money went into the strategic bombing than on the Manhattan Project.

The story of the author of this book is fucking insane. > Born a Hungarian-Jew > Used as slave labour by Horthy's regime > Deported to Auschwitz > Released, becomes a student in Vienna > Captured by Smersh, sent to the Gulag > Released, returns to Hungary...

Reform are barking up a dead tree if they head down this route. Britain is not America, and anti-abortion politics will be a real liability for them.

Sandbrook once joked that Starmer was like Ted Heath: “He thinks Britain is stuck in a doom-loop, and that he must immediately schedule some more committee meetings.”

Another thing is that Schmitt is clearly opposed to what I would regard as being pillars of modern Western Civilization and way of life ─ rule of law; individual freedom (including reproductive autonomy); and a genuine, albeit deeply flawed, attempt at racial, sexual and gender equality.

In 1980, The Economist described American manufacturing workers as "often an alienated urban black or blue-collar ethnic who barely talks English".

I've just written a new post about the myths and reality of the 1948 British Nationality Act. Did Britain really "give" citizenship to its colonial subjects in 1948? Sort of... open.substack.com/pub/polichro...

You do not have to like John Bolton to see this for what it is.

I've seen a bunch of dunks on a piece of news that mentions me by name and NGL I now perfectly understand how I'd have been driven completely insane by Twitter discourse if I had 10% more followers and was 10% more neurotic and thin skinned

Not surprising. Labour's reforms, both those proposed and what little has been actually implemented, are a fleabite to an elephant.

Watching a film from 1960 (The League of Gentlemen) and wow those old British Army officer uniforms look really sharp and stylish.

Gonna try and reply rather than QT ing more posts to see if it can drive my follower count up here.

It's completely forgotten now, but in 1945 vast chunks of the population of almost every European country were literal peasants. The great exception was the UK which had a tiny agricultural workforce thanks to centuries of industrialization (and this was a huge factor in WW2).

There are quite a few federal systems - Germany and Switzerland come to mind - where the capital is just another state.

If American liberals seriously think they can waltz back in after Trump 2.0 and start telling the world what to do, then boy are they in for a shock.

God, liberal American chauvinists are insufferable

One of the first things the apartheid government did was abolish Smuts era schemes to encourage White immigration.

Really enjoyable article here. I was pleasantly surprised to read that many Labour MPs believed the Bill wasn't going far enough, even before the amendments wrecked it. Starmer is delivering a fleabite to an elephant and somehow managing to pay a huge political price for it.

Whenever leftists have proposed substantially reducing people's standards of living they have lost. Voters are not gonna accept you taking away their bananas for breakfast in the name of the greater good.

Making planning reform a pillar of your growth strategy and then gutting it would be soooooooo "all pain, no gain" www.economist.com/britain/2025...

One reason that I want Labour to go down an Abundance / Progress Studies / Supply Side Progressiveness route (unpopular as that may be ion this app) is that it has real potential to appeal to it's actual voter base, who are presently hemmed in by high house prices and stagnant wages.

Say what you want about postwar Britain, but most of the nationalized industries — the Gas Boards, Water Boards, the Generating Board, heck even the Railways — actually *worked* unlike so many of today's private entities.

Europe has still not recovered from the Fall of France polichron.substack.com/p/europe-has...

Imagine all the things you could do with that money elsewhere. Mars colonies, scientific research, infrastructure, and grands projets of every variety.

One of the big mistakes the Remain Campaign made was not making greater use of Clarkson, Hammond and May. They should have paid them to make a video with explosions or something and a pro-European message at the end. It would have been *perfect* for appealing to older, male voters.