"In essence, Leave was a paternalist movement — its key pledge was to spend EU membership dues on the NHS — led by unrepresentative libertarians from the safety of London’s two or three ghastliest private members’ clubs". www.ft.com/content/5cda...

This is perhaps the thing that's annoyed me most about this government. They have had an opportunity to do something important AND in their political self-interest and instead chose to ignore it.

I think this might be the single most viscerally disgusting act of either of Trump's presidencies. Truly, utterly, vile.

Rishi Sunak tells Radio 4 that "AI is changing every aspect of our economy and our lives, and if I was back in office and looked at my diary and where I was going to spend my time, I would spend it on that" At no point does he or the BBC mention the £373,000 given to him every year by an AI company

Except it isn't what he did in government! He raised spending massively, raised taxes, increased welfare spending, increased immigration and was pro-EU integration. Now he's against all those things.

Another Farage ally spewing Russian propaganda 👇

Tony Blair on my radio doing full AI Silicon Valley boosterism Unrelatedly…. Tony Blair’s personal think tank has had or been pledged $350 million from Oracle boss Larry Ellison democracyforsale.substack.com/p/inside-the...

Thanks Mr Blair but a baselessly confident 6,000 word diatribe telling the UK to move right on every issue while embracing Trump and Silicon Valley wasn't even that cute all those times Dominic Cummings wrote it.

When you distil the Blair thing it is pretty dystopian. 1. AI or bust. 2. Reorient everything around AI - go MAGA not EU. 3. Restructure Government around it. 4. Accept no regulatory limits to this. 5. Become a mini US. Enter the EU and turn it that way too. institute.global/insights/pol...

Matt Ridley and the Daily Mail:

"In September 2025, nine mosques and cultural centers in and around Paris were targeted...Bloody severed pig heads, each marked with the word “Macron” in blue ink, were left outside their front doors." This was a Russian stunt. From @occrp.org Read more: www.occrp.org/en/investiga...

Sacking middle managers and then rehiring them is pretty much the oldest false economy in business. AI is just the newest excuse to do it. I do think AI will replace millions of jobs (just like word processing, email and spreadsheets did). It's just probably not gonna be these ones, long run.

I can excuse @iaindale.bsky.social's ignorance here. Just because anyone with a very basic economics education should recognise the lump of labour fallacy doesn't mean he should. But the arrogance combined with the absolutely deliberate refusal to think is quite remarkable.

Third day of outage for HMRC self assessment submissions, and still their self assessment status page insists "Full service available". Chat service useless, phone helpline offers no help. HMRC digital channels need much better support.

And there it is … as predictable as rain. Instead of Trump or Hegseth, they had an “acting Navy secretary” announce that Taiwan's weapons sales will be paused to “ensure munitions for the Iran war.” And I'm sure it has nothing to do with a wink and a nod to China. thehill.com/policy/defen...

The curse of performance management. The mistaken belief that you can measure high performance. In both public and private sector I've seen nothing more likely to damage staff morale. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

- Subsidising consumption in the face of a supply shock - reducing incentives to drive less/switch to EVs - using up limited fiscal space to help better-off drivers rather than the most vulnerable. Hard to think of a worse policy right now.

"we've got something better than a legally enforceable ruling, we've got Elon Musk's word as a gentleman"

🔴 Keir Starmer promised to crackdown on "Slapps" - abusive libel cases to silence journalists and critics Then Labour quietly dropped it We can reveal why: a three-year lobbying blitz by libel lawyers who've acted for Russian oligarchs, Epstein + more democracyforsale.substack.com/p/how-lawyer...

NEW: On the £5mn Harborne gift (which Farage says he didn’t have to declare because it was to cover his security before he became an MP) Farage did declare a donation from George Cottrell in mid-April 2024, which covered his accommodation and travel and “security provision”.

Jenrick listed the money as coming from 'Spott Fitness' - a company which had no employees, had never made a profit and carried debts of over £300,000. In reality it came from Gary Klopfenstein, a Chicago-based investor who pled guilty to wire fraud and misappropriating funds

BREAKING: Reform UK leader Nigel Farage bought a £1.4 million property in cash shortly after receiving a £5m personal gift from billionaire donor Christopher Harborne, according to property records seen by Sky News.

Typical: no mention of social care in this resignation letter by the health and social care secretary, making huge play of his claimed achievements in the NHS

The problem for Blue "Labour" is that in destroying the economic base of the metropolitan elite it is also wrecking the economy. But not to worry, backyard pig iron furnaces should solve the problem.

Fun fact: the magical child safety solution which Jess Philips cited in her resignation letter is a vendor-specific offering, which benefited from an intense PR and lobbying campaign, and was previously praised by ... Prince Andrew. I always keep the receipts. heatherburns.tech/2026/02/20/t...

The Trump administration is now openly stealing from Europe. They are taking in funds through PURL, supposedly to provide arms for Ukraine, but refusing to deliver the weapons. www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/202...

The inexplicable excitability of political correspondents, as their nation withers and disintegrates

About 352,000 Russian soldiers had died in the war against Ukraine through the end of 2025, according to a new estimate, underscoring the high cost that President Vladimir V. Putin is willing to bear to pursue his battlefield aims. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/09/w...

For two years the 'Blue Labour' tendency has told the party's core liberal voters (in the famous words of Shabana Mahmood) to "f*** right off". Now they've acted accordingly www.adambienkov.co.uk/p/how-the-ma...

Incredible way to beat the drinking-on-the-job stories there, Kash, old buddy, old pal.

This is like the guy at Spearmint Rhino who thinks the dancers really get him www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

…after *two weeks* of use

Scary note in this article - when Grok told this guy that people were coming to kill him, it named real people at real companies, including one near him. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

It is absolutely extraordinary for the special advisor of a serving cabinet minister to be threatening a British media outlet with an injunction on what seem like deeply spurious grounds. You cannot get an injunction for defamation: the saying is "publish, and be damned" for exactly that reason.

New substack: Westminster politics is something which no intelligent person can look upon with anything other than revulsion. chrisdillow.substack.com/p/the-stupid...

She’s so desperately online, isn’t she? All of the arguments for staying on twitter revolve around cognitive diversity and ‘filter bubbles’. So why do those who remain look like they’re members of a cargo cult?

Right on cue, Starmer has just said that people should be prosecuted for using the word ‘intifada’. But as we see from the Tatchell example below, there is currently no legal basis for that because it’s based on a lie (repeated by Starmer) about what the word means. 1/

Every paragraph in this story is wilder than the last. The level of assumed impunity is wild. It's hard to pick just one but I think I was most enraged by the part where senior officers invent one bogus reason to detain her after another, as their subordinates point out how flimsy each is.

The Policy Exchange culture warriors that captured the Office for Students always had a clear agenda - to destroy free speech/academic freedom in order to "save" it. Wrote this in 2020. Sadly accurate, although let's hope yesterday's judgment is a turning point. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Drones mean that the ‘Warrier’ vehicle is absolutely no use any more, but Healey is too scared to write off the huge sunk costs of a Tory/MOD disaster program. Labour just made a dreadful, expensive decision on its creaking military gear | The Independent www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/poli...

One of the most remarkable achievements in modern political history has been the emergence of "anti-establishment, anti-elite, people's army" parties - committed to "bringing back the nation-state" - that are led, directed & financed by the richest, most privileged & most mobile people on the planet

Take a look at a State Dept design for new American passports. Banana republic stuff. Genuinely tragic to see.

Ukraine is putting relentless pressure on Israel now. The Netanyahu government has made a catastrophic error by siding with Putin's dictatorial government.

Well that’s remarkably stupid.

A Labour Government, in policy and rhetoric, attacking a group of care workers. How has it ended up here? @guardianheather.bsky.social calls it out. Absolutely rightly. www.theguardian.com/business/202...

The ‘Lord’ Matthew Doyle saga somehow epitomises this zombie government app.prospectmagazine.co.uk/story/73126/...

This chart might look political, but it’s really about data science. The UK can rank great or poorly depending on the KPIs you choose. Our choice of data decides how we view reality.

Ummm.... yikes?

Can't believe there might be a place in AI for massively overconfident self-proclaimed geniuses who believe you can data-logic your way through any complex societal problem if you just reject complexity, empathy, morality and legality as obsolete weaknesses.

On the day it was announced that the Metropolitan Police were considering a big contract with Palantir.