This is basically every story that I write about London now, you don't have to want to live with Germany bureaucracy to want someone to do very basic checks. And the 'ease of setting up a business' is great (I've done it myself! It was so easy!) but unfortunately it's created scam central nation.

Why Labour MPs are still on X

He could strangle a teenager on camera and they would say he “defied a long-held tradition of presidents not doing that”

Babe wake up, new industrial band five-album discography just dropped

Coal merchant just called, asking if I fancied a ton of household coal at ten per cent off. And they say Brits can‘t hustle.

The most persuasive part of Larry Elliott’s no-regrets Lexiteer piece in the Guardian. I have great respect for him, but a long article about the impact of Brexit that doesn’t mention how it helped gentrify racism, doesn’t mention immigration at all, makes me queasy

Compulsory reading for anyone who hasn’t followed Burnham in GM I think and even for those who have. Absolutely nails every detail. All the things you hear from those who have worked with him are in this.

Or to paraphrase Michael Herr even further: "conventional journalism could no more reveal the Britsh electroral system than conventional politics could win it, all it could do was take the most profound event of the British decade and turn it into a communications pudding."

Interior. Night. A bathroom. ANDY BURNHAM lies naked on the floor with a bloodied hand. He opens his eyes. ANDY BURNHAM (V/OVER) London. Shit. A MASSIVE ROLLING PEAL OF THUNDER ANDY BURNHAM (V/OVER) Everybody gets everything they want. I wanted a premiership. And, for my sins, they gave me one.

All of left politics right now is some version of ‘here is my one weird trick to avoid sticking 5p on the basic rate so we can actually pay for public services’ so I am excited to find out what burnhams one weird trick will be.

"The Americans can't get the slime out of their capital's monument pool and will arrest you for touching it," sounds like the sort of lie they'd tell us in the Soviet Union so we'd stop bitching about bread lines.

Sometimes you find an especially perky ancient little guy and you need to make a gif to express it, ok?

@ameliagentleman.bsky.social sharp as ever on Mandelson's way with words, and what punctuation tells us about a power dynamic www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

We only went and won it!! 🎉🎉🎉 A newsletter has just won the biggest prize in British journalism Absolutely delighted. Huge thanks to Khadija and to all Democracy for Sale’s supporters 😊

devastating story:

Nice review from Donald Macintyre in the TLS, who calls IF WE TOLERATE THIS "a lucid primer on how to resist the appeasement of Reform". www.the-tls.com/politics-by-...

@mayor.nyc.gov: “I have thought often of the "Margeret Thatcher quote: ‘the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.’ If anything, my friends, it seems that you eventually need a socialist to clean up the mess."

Message from the streets of south London

‘Like England, Greater Manchester has its richer south, the Cheshire fringes where the superstar footballers live, its main city of hedonism and sky-high rents, and its decapitalised northern towns.’ @jamesmeek.bsky.social on Andy Burnham’s Manchester, from 2024. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

"During his summit with Xi, Trump also suggested that the US, China and Russia should join forces to combat the [International Criminal Court], saying their interests were aligned, according to the people familiar with the talks."

Crispin Odey and the £79mn libel battle that wasn’t - www.ft.com/content/edbe... Nothing but awesome respect for the resilience of the FT and victims

Reading this and thinking of the taxi driver in Torquay last weekend enthusiastically telling me he’d watched a video of Nigel Farage speaking up on Question Time to champion the needs of those who earn just £15,000 a year. He’d later discovered it was AI, but “I was impressed anyway”

it’s such shibboleth of modern politics to blame politicians for failing town centres when the primary driver is - surely - all of us buying more and more stuff online

If you like it then you shoulda put a stylised owl’s head on it

A remarkable portrait from @christopherjm.ft.com ‘I’m fighting two wars. One against the Russians. And one inside myself.’

It's a 70s sitcom, but without any good humour or lovable characters.

Highly recommend @hettieobrien.bsky.social’s timely new book

This is essential reading

#FrescoFriday the tomb of Nebamun, an accountant from Karnak. It dates from c1350 BC. The hunting scene in particular is extraordinary; the detail on the birds is so life like, you’d think a 17th century Dutch painter did it 🏛️BM 📷 mine

Everything these days is a choice of 'the all-inclusive luxury package, £499' and 'crisps and a fizzy drink, £4.99' with no in between

Very good on why Britain can't seem to build or run anything unless a group of seven-figure-bonus suits in Manhattan give their permission

Gas generation was down 16 per cent in the first quarter due to the UK's latest wind power generation record. If it weren't for renewables this fossil fuel-induced energy crisis would be even worse. www.businessgreen.com/news/4528492...

I’ll never forget watching The Wicker Man with my outer Hebridean mum. “I just don’t know where there got all that wicker from”

Little 🧵 on vetting: There’s been a certain amount of chest-puffing from former holders of DV clearance about how rigorous and exacting the vetting process is and how rare for it to be overruled. The latter is definitely true. Never heard of it happening, ever. 1

No10’s account is incredible. I held Developed Vetting for nearly ten years and spent three years at the heart of the Cabinet Office. I have never heard of a Developed Vetting denial being overruled. Here’s why…🧵 www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Great analysis of Orban's defeat from Ivan Krastev c.o. @equatormag.bsky.social www.equator.org/articles/the...

You don’t even have to be a socialist and make an argument any more, it’s there on the front page of the New York Times: champagne for the wealthy, austerity and war for the rest.

I keep thinking about the UK elections in 2034 when the country will be so desperate to kick out Farage after five years of corruption, racial persecution and institutional destruction that it'll vote for an ex-Farage fan called John Briton to do the job

THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MAGYAR.

Wonderful news from Budapest but also a horrific marker of where we have got to that Orban’s entirely normal acceptance of the fact of his democratic defeat should seem so strange

Looks like it’s gonna be a very bad night for Matt Goodwin, James Orr and the Spiked crew….

There is no McTry.

Andrew Cockburn on Mossad’s kill list - read it here: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

This is very good, treating NATO as it is, an alliance of fading convenience, rather than, as too often wrongly characterised, a body with agency apart from that of its constituent governments

Here on the beach, feeling angry about privatisation all over again

From Roger Scruton cafes to paying Matt Goodwin $10k a month, Viktor Orban has built a network of populist right think tanks, journalists and activists Today Democracy for Sale delves into Orban’s allies on the British right Well worth a read democracyforsale.substack.com/p/orbans-brits

God-emperors are the worst people to have to get presents for

There is an imagined working class, that largely no longer exists and a modern working class that the political class rarely interact with outside of service provision.

Today, I'm introducing my wealth tax — and more than 50 members of Congress are joining me. It’s time for the government to start working for American families, not just the ultra-rich.

There is something profoundly unserious about demanding the country spends vast sums on reducing its carbon emissions and then calling for a massive fossil fuel subsidy to consumers the moment gas prices rise.