England will be sloppy when you insist on playing an exhausted central midfielder with a virus, a centre-half at right-back, an unfit right-back in midfield, a 10 on the left-wing while leaving your best ball-retaining midfielder on the bench for the whole tournament and your best right-back at home

Farage looking pretty establishmenty vs the man of the people with a bin on his head

Farage could easily lose this byelection: voters don't like being taken for granted, particularly by politicians with questionable financials who are transparently doing it to distract attention

So the people of Clacton are now the arbiters of parliamentary standards in the UK: it's a novel constitutional approach at least

There's something really odd about politicians - especially Labour ones - whose own social mobility was drastically enhanced by a university education not wanting others to have the same experience (unless it's their own kids, of course)

“Small producers are just trapped on this island and we’re all fighting each other for the same market share" Brexit in a nutshell and why free-trade agreements with countries 7000 miles away cannot make up for being locked out of the huge market on the doorstep www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Starting to think that maybe you do need to take your most creative players to a World Cup after all

"Ten years ago I decided to burn my house down because it needed the roof doing and despite living in the embers since I was absolutely right do it"

The most striking thing about the extent to which British voters see Brexit as "a disaster" is that, for two decades now, they've been fed a relentless diet of anti-EU propaganda with few people or organisations with a serious platform making a pro-European case ecfr.eu/publication/...

The notion that 20m+ Britons who either voted remain or didn't get to vote (plus the 14m who are still too young to vote) should be held hostage by a decision taken by a shrinking minority of 10m increasingly dead people will soon become untenable www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Why do journalists only talk about the "cost" of government doing things, rather than calculating and explaining the size of the corresponding benefit, the value of the asset/capital acquired on the national balance sheet, and the ongoing positive multipliers? www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

A decade after the referendum and Britain is still litigating a basic fact of trade policy that experts warned about repeatedly in 2016: the benefits of European single market membership do not arise spontaneously and if you leave you will lose them and be poorer www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Surely we’ve seen enough evidence now to know that a stuttered run up on a penalty should be consigned to oblivion?

This is precisely why we should enfranchise everyone from the moment they’re born so that young people are not held hostage by the prejudices of old people determining the shape of a country they don’t have as long left to live in

The hand-wringing about the pensions triple lock ignores the fact that young people today stand to benefit most from the compounding effect of a growing state pension The paradox is that they'll still ultimately be denied this by a retirement age that keeps increasing until just before they die

Of all the slightly odd England tournament squads I've seen in my 40-odd years on planet earth, this is unquestionably the oddest

Ed Miliband is going to end up as Prime Minister, which, had it happened in 2015 when it should have done, the country would be in a far better place today than it is

Labour’s current troubles are paradoxical: many MPs revolting against Starmer were only selected in 2024 due to their perceived loyalty to his project The government would be in a stronger place if more leftists had been allowed to stand while retaining members, voters and ideas that are now Green

So we’ve now reached the “let’s invite the arsonists back to our smouldering husk of a house to douse the flames with more petrol” stage of our decade-long Brexit-induced national Stockholm syndrome, then.

Props to all the parents taking their kids into the polling stations with them today to educate them about democracy. Know what would be even better? If they were enfranchised and we you could cast an extra vote for each of them.

It was my pleasure to speak to @sianushka.bsky.social of @opendemocracy.net about climate change and geopolitics and my new book #Elemental podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/i...

Just paid my eye-watering half-yearly water bill to a company that has been looted since privatisation: £8bn in dividends and £5bn in debt. It barely needs saying that utilities and natural monopolies don’t belong in the private sector where they become little more than predatory institutions.

This is the sort of genuinely brilliant achievement for which we should be giving out knighthoods www.bbc.co.uk/sport/footba...

I'm sure when I was a kid, people didn't celebrate Easter like this, as a sort of over-commercialised mini-Christmas It's weird too, in the sense that the less religious everyone is, the more they seem to go to town on it

Not gonna lie: $4 a gallon sounds alright to me

From neglected land to a vibrant sanctuary. 🌱 The Windrush Legacy Garden in Sheffield is officially open! Created by volunteers at the Sheffield Caribbean Sports Club and @WildSheffield, this space celebrates an incredible legacy through nature. Full story www.wildsheffield.com/windrush-leg...

Why do both sides need to show more ambition? The EU has already ambitiously constructed the single market. If the UK wants the benefits, its up to us to show the ambition to join. It's not up Brussels to create fudges that meet our self-imposed red lines. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

I’d pay off the external debt of every Small Island Developing State in the world

These are the banknotes we need in the UK, like every other proximate country

"The pollster Peter Kellner has calculated that if the referendum were rerun today, instead of a leave win by 1.3m votes, remain would win by 8m. There’s no historic parallel for the injustice of that"

Real war and culture war. New post on my Brexit & Brexitism Blog analyzing the Brexit imprint of domestic responses to the Iran crisis, the hypocrisy & sectarianism of Reform's response to the by-election and the questions it poses for Labour: chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2026/03/real...

I mean it was obvious. All he has to do now is promise a referendum on joining the EU and the Greens will be polling in the 30s.

Anyone wondering just how we got here vis-à-vis Iran could do far worse than read Steven Kinzer's "All the Shah's Men" which was written after 9/11 and explains why 1979 happened (and, by implication, why 2026 could be opening a pandora's box)

The obstruction of goalkeepers at corners in football is becoming ridiculous. A simple rule change would be that attacking players shouldn’t be allowed into the six-yard box until the ball is played.

All Reform need to do now is replace Farage with Boris Johnson and they've pretty much got the band back together

The Man United team last night fielded players from Belgium, Portugal, France, Brazil, Argentina, Ivory Coast, Slovenia, Cameroon and the Netherlands. One of the two English players has Ghanaian heritage. They'll all be delighted to hear this. www.theguardian.com/business/202...

As the world heats, places become increasing unliveable. Who pays? #NomadCentury

Wrote this over a decade ago on £9k student fees and much of it still holds. The question is not “why should non-graduates pay for people to go to university?” but why have those who went for free offloaded the cost on to today’s young people: speri-blog.sites.sheffield.ac.uk/blog/2013/pr...

Plenty of French politicians simultaneously serve as mayors, both local and regional, while holding seats in the national legislature. Chirac was Mayor of Paris and a Deputy in the Assemblée Nationale and Prime Minster (and an MEP at one point).

Danny Boyle et al have absolutely nailed the 28 Years Later trilogy so far: it's really hard to see how these movies could have been any better, utterly breathtaking from start to finish

The US hasn’t been truly hegemonic since the 1970s

It's 2026 and we still haven't got to the bottom of the mystery of who, exactly, is telling students not to use subheadings in essays

The word “essay” doing a lot of heavy lifting here

There's an alternative timeline in football history where Man United never re-signed Ronaldo and Solskjaer is still the manager, delivering regular top-four finishes and decent attacking football with a team featuring lots of academy players

While many argue that dangerous criminals must be treated as such, and that this strategy is essential to suffocating Maduro’s regime, the truth is that this was yet another example of how Venezuelan suffering has been normalized, minimized, and tokenized … globalvoices.org/2026/01/05/a...

Insightful podcast

Wrong Opin

open.substack.com/pub/johnacar... youtu.be/yBFIz_N3wqY?... Unimaginable pain and fear…and no end in sight? What are neighbouring Caribbean islands doing? What will they do? How long can this continue? @janvoordouw.bsky.social @strongercaribbean.bsky.social @susangoffe.bsky.social #Haiti

Loving all the pictures of groaning American Thanksgiving tables and wondering why stuffing our Christmas turkey with marshmallows instead of boring old chestnuts and caking our spuds in maple syrup has never caught on.