One of the men responsible for Google: AI will inevitably affect every aspect of your lives! Students: BOO! NO! Google guy: Why do you think this is inevitable? Don't be so weak! Students: BOO! NO! Google guy: You're scared because of algorithms! www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNH4...

Franz and his sister had the same beautiful, soulful eyes.

From 13 June, 2024. (One of the *41* Reform candidates at the last general election who was Facebook friends with a leading British fascist is now....their candidate in Makerfield.) www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/...

I'll wait for the podcast

Like that Blue Jam sketch about the agency that hires out unbelievably dense people to go and get your car out of the pound by stupiding the person behind the desk into submission

That thing where a company has one good idea, but wants to make itself look new all the time, so just makes that one idea slowly worse.

My psyche is so poisoned by irony that I don't know if my suggestion that Polymarket ought to offer to pick up the tab for this is sarcastic or not.

incidentally, a problem I have not yet seen covered - free to a good home! - is that AP plays a pillar role in election calling in the United States and their financial condition is such that they will be stretched to do this this November and may not exist in anything like today's form by 2028

Public opinion in constituencies that voted to leave the EU in 2016 is not fixed and immutable, people change their minds and populations change too (as younger generations who did not have the right to vote in 2016 enter the electorate).

This is a good idea

Good to hear @philtinline.bsky.social talking sense on Times Radio. Both Attlee and Thatcher knew what they wanted to avoid (mass unemployment, strikes and high inflation, respectively). No one since 2008 has managed to articulate anything similar. The old is dying and the new struggling to be born

Our tracker suggests it has suffered its first sustained net loss since October 2023

Am I missing something, or has the Politico pun tombola finally exploded under the relentless pressure hose of News?

James 'Ukraine brain' Orr makes a similar mistake here to the one Russia apologists make over eastern European countries joining Nato. We didn't force them to join, nor was it a devious plot. They were clamouring to get in. And what happened to Ukraine shows why.

For too long, Labour strategy has focused on avoiding risk. But that's exactly what has been strangling politics. Finally, the dam broke: www.thenewworld.co.uk/phil-tinline...

Haven't looked at this in decades.

What @sundersays.bsky.social reports here is encouraging, particularly the point about the BBC as a model for building our own British response to new tech, not just accepting it on a plate from America. And the need to break once and for all from New Labour's failure to challenge entrenched power.

As it's the American-funded fascist ramblers' big trip to That London today - a quick reup for a piece I wrote after the 2024 riots about the Very Accurate nightmare visions of Britain harboured on the US right: www.newstatesman.com/the-weekend-...

The far right try to claim our flags but in truth hate our country. They despise what makes the rest of us proud & makes us British, from the NHS to our BBC. They peddle anti-British propaganda globally. Thousands may march today but millions more stand against hate & for Britain

Overly powerful trade union unsustainably forces up wages while productivity falls, but with Sam Altman as the union boss

And yet people still believe it was real, and the usual crop of dangerous idiots like Alex Jones based a lot of their BS on it. The book does a good job of giving the history of the hoax and then showing how it still echoes in places like Ruby Ridge and Oklahoma City. Well worth a read.

Finished "Ghosts of Iron Mountain" by @philtinline.bsky.social, a history of the fictional Report from Iron Mountain and how it continues to echo throughout conspiracy theory to this day. The Report was a farcical hoax about the dangers of peace written in the style of a government thinktank.

If you totted up the sums for every financial scandal in British politics (£2k per parliamentary question for cash-for-questions, £200k for Johnson’s No 10 renovation, the cost of that very nice campervan) even with second tier stuff like Rayner and Polanski, would you get close to £5mn *in total*?

For too long, Labour strategy has focused on avoiding risk. But that's exactly what has been strangling politics. Finally, the dam broke: www.thenewworld.co.uk/phil-tinline...

AI hallucinations are appearing left right and centre - including, it seems possible, in consulting reports. My latest for @sherwood.news sherwood.news/tech/ai-hall...

Phil says "Bleakly revealing" where other people might say "hilarious", but the point is nevertheless a very good one.

Bleakly revealing that McFadden's response to Simons' resignation is all risk aversion and processology - two of the reasons the government is in this mess: www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/...

Reform's spending in the by-election will require extra scrutiny too

Recently had to contact a pr agency who didn't list any contacts. Remind me what pr means?

Good to see people taking political risks. Over-caution and 5D chess galaxy brain strategising is partly how we got into this mess in the first place. (And how Burnham lost to Corbyn in 2015.)

Extremely funny for people who watch the conspiracy theory minded that it’s *Josh Simons* standing aside. The evil head of Labour Together who brought down Corbyn? That Josh Simons?

2016: The legacy of Tony Benn's constitutional creativity bites. 2026: And again?:

'Astounding and terrifying story' @pollytoynbee.bsky.social It's publication day for #GhostsOfIronMountain by @philtinline.bsky.social#GhostsOfIronMountainon how America ended up trapped in a nightmare of conspiracy theories. Out now: https://geni.us/GOIMPBorgsoc

As night follows night

Yep - almost as if politicians' desperate search for as many rules as possible to shape their politics, instead of, say, deep beliefs, isn't working out all that well. Labour has successfully avoided repeating the horrors of Smith's shadow budget, Byrne's note, Corbyn & Truss. And yet here we are.

What broke me and got me doing TikTok videos was every bloody piece I wrote was being read out by some fuckwit with a handheld mic who would get five million views and a million comments going 'wow so good to have proper journalism'... which was fine.... but the creator would reply 'THANKS ❤️'

The low point for me was when someone suggested that as an alternative to a sea border they could have checks at British ports and I realized he had previously thought the border would be literally in the sea.

The government has got itself in this mess through risk aversion and processology. Still, at least now a bunch of candidates reluctant to actually declare themselves are edging gingerly towards the Labour Party's leadership election process.

Meanwhile in America

meanwhile Reform make grim capital out of grooming gangs & sexual assaults by immigrants (oddly uninterested if not immigrants). So it matters on a life and limb level for women but also for social cohesion/fighting the far right. Harriet Harman appt was meant to reassure but too late

partly that was over Mandelson (& obv if Starmer gets through all this, there's still the next release of Mandelson whatsapps/emails to come) & sense of a boys club in no 10 but not entirely. It's disappointment that the PM genuinely does care about VAWG, it's not empy words, but can't drive it.

Miatta Fahnbulleh, Jess Phillips and Alex Davies Jones; so far all 3 ministerial resignations are women, 2 directly responsible for delivering on the manifesto pledge to halve violence against women and girls. There has been real simmering anger in the women's PLP about not being listened to.

Headline on Radio 4 news, "Two more ministers have resigned from the Labour Party." FFS.

Phillips' willingness to pick a righteous moral binary - are we for protecting vulnerable kids from abuse, or are we scared of obscenely wealthy tech bosses? - is exactly what is needed. Yes, it needs backing up w worked-through, deliverable policy, but start with defending the public against wrong.

GB News is "surprised and concerned" that Ofcom is investigating and says it "stands firmly by its journalism and editorial standards": www.theguardian.com/media/2026/m... So here's a reminder of what GB News-style "journalism" looks like:

One of Tony Benn's great contributions, along with helping to make referenda a thing.

Thatcher and Blair both ran, however rhetorically, as insurgents against their own parties and (especially Thatcher) the 'establishment'. Any new Labour leader needs to do that but much more so.

Yep. And this means looking medium-term continuing low growth in the face and deciding who is going to have to have a bit less of the cake. Which means politely ignoring public affairs companies (and purging any of their alumni you can't trust). And using the time thus cleared to think.

One question that arises post-Starmer: will any future leader of any party base their platform on ‘I would simply facilitate GDP growth’ again? If not, the terms of political argument in Britain are changed somewhat.

One way of reading British politics' long-term shift - it has talked about rules so much that it has discredited the whole idea.