There’s something very awkward about the Badenoch/Conservative line that £5m is “more than most people will earn in a lifetime”. It’s not *wrong* but it’s quite an understatement!

Starmer's speech tl;dr: 'The UK and the world faces its most dangerous moment in over 50 years and we need much more than incremental change, and that is why we're nationalising one steel plant, might introduce a European youth movement scheme, and want to fund more apprenticeships'.

"The forest was shrinking, but the trees kept voting for the axe, for the axe ... [had] ... convinced the trees that because his handle was made of wood, he was one of them." He isn't one of us. #NigelFarage

Important data point here: “A sharp fall in Labour's performance is accompanied more often by an above average Green performance than it is by a strong Reform performance”. The Greens have already hurt Labour even before any direct gains.

I’ve been hearing so much anger and disappointment from frontline workers about the BBC investigation into fraudulent asylum claims. One of the most damning responses has come from one of the experts they interviewed, solicitor Ana Gonzalez. It’s really worth reading her response in full:

Lots of brave people in this report speaking openly, but I'm still impressed by @bbcstever.bsky.social's bravery. He's such an obvious target for the Kremlin, they have targeted foreign journalists before and the Kremlin clearly has a special hatred of the UK. www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gaw...

This is a video of 2 halves. The first is sensible, normal and what I'd expect from a channel I stumbled on watching nerdy stuff on YouTube. The second half, after the 'credits'? Oh blimey it hits *hard*. Especially coming from someone who usually does videos about things like DVD-RW vs DVD+RW.

PublicSquare seems to have memory-holed its marketplace pages, but I just scraped 40k of them from the Wayback Machine and extracted JSON data for 37k businesses, including 34k distinct email addresses, 31k phone numbers, physical addresses, etc.

So the combined pitch from Farage and Jenrick is that it took Jenrick at least 4 months to come to the conclusion that Reform is probably the best party to run the country, but like, he's only 60% sure of that?

Counterpoint: There have always been dinner parties with well educated, prosperous and successful *pillar of society* people who argue exactly in that way. First reaction when I finished my PhD from plenty of people was "Nobody needs a PhD on the job market anyway.“ It is not new.

I genuinely do not understand why this is allowed. There's lots I disagree with, but understand the logic. Party funding? - people don't want to find the BNP etc... But hospitality? Why is this necessary?