If the Kokororko album isn't in your top five of the year I do not know what to say to you.

Reminded by a post I can’t quote of this superb “Call Me Maybe” / “Walking On Broken Glass” mashup. Isn’t it time for a mashup revival already? www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/aqw0l...

the twelve days of christmas - and I cannot emphasise this enough - are 25 December - 5 January. we are not currently in a day of christmas. marketing departments stop it. STOP IT

But if you really want Rejoin, go join your clp and make it clear you won't select anyone who doesn't support it. This is how leave marched through the Tories.

As ever, a huge difference between Australian Labor and UK Labour is that while the AU Labour government hasn't exactly set new winning records in office, it *hasn't* done any of this mad nonsense and instead has watched with a sensible face on while the Australian right wing burns itself alive

It is funny that they have settled on the meaning of CHANGE as "changing the Labour party" and that means.. changing into a party of continuity tory

I do think Starmer thinking things were basically fine before does explain a lot tbh

New York prices with Ohio wages, that is London

One of the many global village idiots who doesn't know their own email address has signed me up to some UK job boards by mistake and bloody hell, UK salaries are... not good. "This number looks very small... oh wait, I should double it for AU$... oh wow, that's still very small"

Which is why positive arguments for freedom of movement should be (and always have been) absolutely core to any pro-eu campaign. Until we see it as what it is; the crown jewel of the benefits of being in the EU, rather than some inconvenience, or even a penalty, I don't see the UK joining the bloc.

The thing about Sam Ashworth-Hayes is he thinks it's fine and good for kids to go hungry and live in poverty provided they're brown.

properly nuts that Labour won a huge landslide 18 months ago and they’re already so desperate they’ve running with ‘the Greens want to sell your children heroin’

Superb letter.

An excellent article that illustrates why Starmer is so unpopular. He has no idea - 🫥Why Labour won the GE2029 🫥The real problems voters face It is an interview that reinforces the fact that he thinks of the UK and it’s people as an abstract problem rather than those who need help and investment

From the @wsj.com chief foreign correspondent

Lots of folks out there whose thought process is basically this meme:

Ah yes, the classic Labour position - that anyone who isn't a high earner, an entrepreneur, or a skilled public servant is a taker, not a giver

This is so disgusting.

This government has no courage to actually change things in a meaninful way. As with the budget, the best it can do is tinker around the edges while the system gets worse.

why is that every single one of these cunts look like this

I think one of the first steps Labour could do to try to reinstate good faith between the government and is its natural supporters is to wake Lisa Nandy up from her coma and get her to acknowledge the issues with GB News and detail how she expects them to be dealt with.

it is genuinely fascinating, if not bleak, to watch happen in real time to basically every Anglosphere user still on X

This is a huge deal; Crucial is one of the biggest brands in computer memory and storage, and Micron abandoning it completely means that AI is entirely devouring the consumer computer market.

This is precisely the way he 'managed' the will he won't he join the dance of the 2022/24 period. Appear somewhere say something, then say not in current conditions. We can I think expect a pact being categorically ruled out in Week 1 of the short campaign in 2029 and then announced in Week 2

You know what? I really don't think it is. Great domestic political posturing, but Labour have no plans to go beyond the 'reset' agenda, certainly none the EU are likely to accept. This will be talk to little if any action.

IBM’s Arvind Krishna doing the math that AI tends to struggle with This is from an interview with @reckless.bsky.social on @theverge.com

And were I to ever attempt a PhD, this is the topic I'd write it about: what is the role of state owned companies in modern mixed economies? Because from railways to postal services, telecoms to utilities, we no longer know. And everyone argues according to their historical frames.

Of course, she's not that stupid. She knows that most people have a very poor understanding of events. Folk may be dimly aware that there was some cockup to do with the budget. The papers repeat Badenoch's words, and lo, it sounds like Reeves is incompetent. Disreputable, not stupid.

wont anyone think of the boers

For context this "independent voice" is a former Conservative candidate and the sister-in-law of David Cameron

There’s a whole cadre of people who the internet just totally mentally destroyed. Not kids, but middle aged people, behaving like *this*. I dunno maybe they were monsters anyway, but they definitely are now.

When I was at the BBC I struggled over things like writing “said” or “claimed” because one might come across as more partial. And somehow this gets published?

Feel like I'm going mad. The Budget's 'headroom' is based on frankly irresponsible and wildly optimistic claims about what Labour will do in the final year of the forecast, and on ignoring a bunch of upward pressures on spending, and the claim is that she was being exaggeratedly *pessimistic*?

“The trouble is, there’s an alliance between Treasury officials and ideologues on the left” is the saddest Labour mandarin quote I’ve ever read. Just how lost are these people?

This hasn't been serious county for 20 years

The thing about demographics is they’re pretty easy to predict.The OECD was talking about the implications of ageing populations thirty years ago.

Yeah - a strategy that does not synergise (as Anthony rightly acknowledges) is not IMO a strategy at all.

I would need to stop myself just writing: the sooner the Government realises what everyone can see, that Blue Labour extracts an economic price that neither it nor the country can afford, the better.

This trilemma warrants a longer piece from you! What Gove/Cummings tried was an abortive attempt at the experiment of “levelling up without a conurbation hub because conurbations lead to social liberalism” Labour is attempting a unique experiment in “economic growth with population decline”

"Strong Floor, No Ceiling" is just dressed up magical realism / prosperity gospel. The strong floor is literally funded by the ceiling. This is the function of a society: it blunts the tails of the distribution, preventing good and bad luck from snowballing. We gonna need a ceiling, sorry.

That is a lot of tweets. If you got this far you deserve a prize. Reasonable people will debate this growth strategy. But claiming there isn’t one is lazy nonsense. Higher growth matters because rising living standards are the goal, and higher investment is a key tool.

No value, no villain, no vision. Sounds like the tagline for the earnings call of a collapsing appliance retailer

This is the most alarming story I’ve read today. Giving up the fight before it’s started

The Bakerloo Line stuff is the most pathetic talking point to come out of the British right. The Conservatives hallucinating a national malaise as a result of their own (correct!) decision to get as much our of the old rolling stock, which has a trade off in terms of maintenance.

Honestly we can see this happening already with Yimbyism but I do kind of think pro-market, anti-monopoly policy becoming left-coded would be an extremely good development

'We have historically high welfare spending.' No we don't. 'We have a historically high proportion of working-age people not actually working.' No we don't. 'The number of Britons emigrating is skyrocketing.' No it isn't.

chat are we cooked

Huge respect to the papers for finding both an 88 year old worried about the tax bill on her 6 bedroom Kensington house and a 20 year old fretting about only being able to save £12k a year tax free. Top work all around. These are not easy case studies to find.