Views that immigration is good (a third), neutral (a third) or bad (a third).for culture & the economy now divide parry voters much more dramatically Labour/LD/Green: +40 Good > Bad Reform/Cons: -45 Bad > Good

You may not like it, but strip out the hyperbole and abuse and it's quite hard to argue with this Cummings asssessment of the public mood

Is there no job not at risk from AI?

Alistair Darling and the official Treasury were always aware that investment banks had an inside track to Number 10. But the brazen nature of that inside track is rather breath-taking.

I see some people (<side eyes>) are talking about space based AI server farms. Please stop this. The entire ISS solar array provides enough power to fire up less than two H200 equipped racks. And don't get me started on getting rid of the heat and how hard it is to rad-harden chips in space.

BREAKING: The Metropolitan Police: "Following this (Epstein) release and subsequent media reporting, the Met has received a number of reports relating to alleged misconduct in a public office. The reports will all be reviewed to determine if they meet the criminal threshold for investigation."

Oh.

You have to admire Peter Mandelson's capacity to deliver surprises. thecritic.co.uk/pete...

While Reform's candidate Matthew Goodwin is much better known in academia, media & think-tanks than to the publicl, he is unusually high profile for a by-election candidate. I wonder which if any party by-election candidates (say this century) were better known without having previously been an MP?

This is becoming a critical election for control of the left bloc samf.substack.com/p/whats-the-...

V interesting from FTAV

But why were they *mirrored* aviators ?

What should be a big moment in Westminster - William Hague says Greenland is lost and also that the UK needs to reduce dependence on the US Will anyone listen ?

Very interesting. Young women are moving more to the left than young men are moving to the right.

9 million people a day use X, for an average of 6 minutes, making it the 6th site bsky.app/profile/robb...

“What appears to be a newly created account appeared to invest $30,000 Friday in Maduro's exit. After Maduro went into custody Saturday morning, that same investor netted $436,759.61.”

I wrote on the Caracas raid: an unusually large, well planned & successful operation, even if decapitation isn't the same as regime change. Also an opportunity for special forces to show their utility to Trump foreign policy in the post-GWOT age. www.economist.com/the-americas...

Venezuelan President Maduro will be taken to the DEA’s Manhattan headquarters. He will then be held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn until a court appearance, most likely on Monday, a person with knowledge of the plans told The Post.

Very important signal here. You can say it's abt oil. And part of it is. But the White House is actually being forced to strongarm the oil companies to get involved. www.politico.com/news/2026/01...

So I’m 65 according to Spotify Wrapped. I maintain this is due to discovering that Donna Summer’s “MacArthur Park” gets me through reading any hardcore political or economic analysis. Also that I only discovered this song thanks to Beetlejuice 2!

This graph shows what the public thought Labour (red) and Cons (blue) would do on tax and spend on every day of the campaign, and what voters themselves preferred (black). The public expected tax rises from Lab, tax cuts from Cons, and what they themselves wanted was...tax rises (tho less than Lab)

Keir Starmer is set to offer a peerage to Matthew Doyle, who in his former job as Starmer's spokesman repeatedly used to assure me that his boss was firmly committed to abolishing the House of Lords www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Don’t normally post work stuff but I was delighted and surprised by this www.cfauk.org/media-centre...

I commend this review which I carried out in 2013. The recommendations remain relevant today. assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7f09...

So long mission driven government, we hardly knew you

The rare, diamond and gold Cartier watch that Taylor Swift was wearing when she got engaged upended the watch market, Andrea Felsted says

This is the hidden in plain sight heffalump trap in the Budget - Mahmood’s plan will deepsix whatever fiscal headroom the Chancellor has.

Found the Dad Shop. Based around the idea that middle-aged men are smut- and gadget obsessed alcoholics. Quite offensive and quite put out by how much stuff I’d quite like there is here.

And the head of the OBR has resigned. I see why some think it looks excessive, but it’s not. Publishing reports is what the OBR does! This was a failure of process at multiple levels, meaning they messed up the most important thing they do. It’s the 21st century: ”IT stuff” is boardroom stuff.

This and this similar point (bsky.app/profile/jsph...) goes back to the flaw with the OBR in the first place - not assigning it to parliament to oversee. If it was a parliamentary body, it could just use their website & other operational support teams whilst still being independent of the government

And whilst it's an issue if arms length public bodies have poor cybersecurity, I'm not convinced that it's a resignation issue for the Chief Exec when a) it's not clear that was down to a decision on his part and b) the cybersecurity relates to accidentally publishing something an hour early.

On wealth taxes and whether the Budget was a missed opportunity, the recent referendum failure in Switzerland on a tax that only the very wealthy would pay shows that what might seem on the face of it very popular turns out not always to be so. www.ft.com/content/f03f...

But if they did, then someone could potentially be party to a YourParty party party

loving the fact that YourParty has voted for a new name and it's YourParty

Obviously every political movement has its weird online cultists, but the Starmtroopers are far and away the weirdest, because they are almost all 60+ yet their understanding of the media is the kind of thing you'd expect from a precocious 12 year old who had read a wikipedia article on Chomsky.

Downing Street has self-soothed itself into thinking that the reason why the PIP cuts didn't pass is that they didn't convince the soft left they were 'Labour enough', as opposed to 'they had no plans, could not make an argument for them, and were wildly unpopular with most voters':

Trump claims “any document” signed by Joe Biden is “hereby terminated.” He calls out executive orders later but obviously “any document” would be much broader and include legislation. (He can’t legally do that but, as always, we get to watch how far he can push this without repercussions)

@niesrorg.bsky.social have created a useful fiscal impact metric Whilst it becomes contractionary from 2027, removing 0.4 pct pt from GDP, this is *less* than in March In short they conclude BOE to cut rates further niesr.ac.uk/blog/what-st...

The (obvious in advance) limits of the government's strategy since it took office: a budget in which the majority of individual items poll well, yet people think it is the most unfair budget since YouGov started polling on this question.

Proper budget chinwag with @johnstepek.bsky.social and the Merryn podcast crew this morning!

It seems a stretch to describe this as a “step” unless it’s off a diving board:

TLDR:

Oooh changes to the NI contributions loophole that allows people overseas to “buy their way” into the UK state pension. This is advertised in countries like Australia to people who may have only lived in the UK for a few years

@mattchorley.bsky.social My input to the Budget Bingo game! Dabbers ready

It’s been a Christmassy couple of lunchtime roundtables to discuss the Budget ! Fortnums and the Lanesborough provided a beautiful backdrop to quite a painful discussion …!

Labour’s “we have to do it, or racism will get worse” argument is striking. Any other public policy failures British ethnic minorities should be on the hook for? Can we be blamed en bloc for Rachel Reeves’ budget next week too? www.ft.com/content/37b0...

Writing about the government’s latest policy announcement and, as usual, torn between three angles: morally awful, politically foolish, and probably unworkable. Something for everyone there

A more legitimate proposal to reduce racism against Shabana Mahmood, other men + women in public life + all other people across society would be for a Labour Government to have a strategy about hate crime, causes of racism + how to reduce them [Last strategy: 2016-20] www.gov.uk/government/p...

Mahmood is mirroring this “racists will stop being racist to me if we concede that immigration is bad”. They really won’t! They’ll say “oh so you admit this was bad all along - so now let’s look at the people who should never have been let in”. end

The Young Greens of England and Wales is officially the largest youth and student wing of any British political party. Greens: "With overall Green Party membership now at over 150,000, the Young Greens have over 40,000 members – making them larger than Young Labour."