Could imagine academics escaping the Great Purge of the Lanyard Class by being the main profession that is supposed to wear lanyards, owns lanyards, but avoids actually wearing them.

I'm happy for the new Archbishop of Canterbury and the history she is making, but still think the fact that the nominations commission was chaired by a former head of MI5 was an on-the-nose reminder of all that is structurally dubious about the C of E; a distinctive mixing of Caesar and God there.

Keeping Up Appearances stands as a great record of 90s English small-town suburbia, one that I remember as being an only mildly exaggerated version of the real thing, its mores already pretty alien by now. It was filmed near where I grew up, so perhaps not surprising that it seemed recognisable...

Any conflict over police resources here is the fault of the government and Parliament; proscription created an entirely artificial demand that not only wastes resources, but directs them to malicious ends. MPs of courage should pressure the government to clean up the mess it so recklessly created.

It's striking that in the current UK economy, the mainstream answer to an oversupply of educated people is never to ask what needs to change in the economy to better use this currently under-exploited asset, but rather to seek either to endlessly tweak the supply or outright reduce it.

Very excited for this!

All this must be absolutely devastating tourism (especially internationally, but also within US for those who might visit a city for e.g. a festival)...I appreciate the US is hardly a tourism-dependent economy but one has to wonder whether the damage will start to become more financially visible.

if you hooked a dynamo up to Adorno’s grave right now you could provide electricity to all of Frankfurt

I'm no longer part of Sussex so can say without bias either way that of all VCs I've known (both personally and from a distance), Sasha is head-and-shoulders one of the best VC-level advocates for universities, not least because she speaks with an admirable clarity and authentic strength of feeling.

Just re-upping this one...

This was my thought too.

Exactly this.

100% retaliatory tariff on home alone 2 you cowards

The idea seems to be that I’ll be so grateful for Labour calling Farage’s policy what it is that I’ll happily accept the state ordering my spouse to clean up shit on the street for free, on pain of separation and deportation. Come on man!

On ILR and student grants, Labour have given partly progressive signals in recent days (especially on latter), but then immediately countered them by putting some heavily regressive elements into the mix *on the same issues*. That isn’t triangulating the message , it’s simply cancelling it out!

Astonishing how successfully Reform has been sold as the exciting new thing in politics given how long Farage has been around - he was a prominent UK politician at least a decade before Kier Starmer became one. Surely part of the strategy to counter Reform has to involve reminding voters of this?

The policy implies a massive new bureaucracy to record how much litter-picking the doctors have done, participation in which (with no doubt punitive fines if they mess up the records!) will likely cost charities and community organisations much more than they gain through the forced 'volunteering'.

How about everyone in the "Labour" Party gets an honest job for a change rather than lecturing other people

I’ve been saying this for a while! And the ones I’ve noticed are wealthier-than-average married forty-something men with kids and good careers. It’s really disturbing.

It’s the Lions Club you want to really worry about

This gets to the fundamental flaw in logic in promotion of autonomous vehicles: The human driver needs to remain engaged, but doing so both a) removes the supposed benefit of autonomous driving and b) is made practically harder by it.

Domestic UK politics are morally irrelevant here, but I can’t help noting that Blair’s appointment to run a reconstruction regime in Gaza has the potential to be a truly disastrous thing for the Labour government to be associated with (which they would be, irrespective of their actual involvement).

Heard Andrea Jenkyns doing Any Questions tonight; ofc I’m not favourably disposed to her but my goodness for someone who’s been around a while she’s a very weak media performer. Like so bad it actually made me feel a tiny bit less worried about Reform, hearing her flailing and struggling to connect.

I’m not saying that Hegseth has summoned all the generals to reenact Stanley Kubrick’s original Custard Pie Fight ending to Dr Strangelove, but I am saying that we don’t know he’s *not* doing that.

When the last Labour government got in, if you married a UK citizen you could get British citizenship after one year for less than £100, and claim benefits straight away. By 2010, it was a minimum five-year process that cost seven grand, you had to do a test, and couldn't claim benefits in that time

Since saying that UK politicians have been too squeamish to talk about migration is clearly untrue, the point must be not to break a taboo against expressing concerns about migration, but to assert a taboo on dissenting from those concerns. 'Why won't those libs just admit it' is the subtext.

This looks exciting!

Ok. They’ve pissed me off. I’m back to tell you 3 things about ID cards: 1. Migrants ALREADY HAVE biometric ID cards & govts have been trying to digitise them for years w repeated fuckups & failures causing complete chaos - they don’t work, you do not want that system for you.

My timeline is very uniformly anti-Burnham and I must admit I don’t fully understand why (this is almost entirely people who are also very anti-Starmer)…

I suspect it's partly that previous generations were likely to grow up in/around institutions that unapologetically centered moral language and thinking (primarily, but not only, churches/religious institutions) and now we've reached a generation of middle-class white Brits that mostly lacked that.

I would have to get past the outside making it look like your house is an ex-halls of residence, but the inside is so perfect I could probably manage it...

My bit of Brighton recently had a big investment in doing up the seafront with new parks and sports facilities, and it’s fantastic. But it’s been funded by various regeneration pots from central government. A wealthy small city in the South East should be able to fund such developments itself.

1/ A longtime Wired editor just wrote a mush-brained essay about how he totally missed the political rot of Silicon Valley (& still doesn't get it). But in the late 1990s, a Wired journalist warned of a toxic ideology bubbling up from tech. Paulina Borsook has largely been erased. Let's change that

I notice that chain cafes and shops are still mostly understaffed - almost any Costa or Cafe Nero will only have one or two people on during a busy part of the day that clearly needs more. I feel this was discussed a lot in the immediate post-pandemic period but perhaps people have stopped noticing.

Pleased to see that David Szalay‘s novel Flesh has now been shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize! Read my interview with him about Flesh and his previous work here: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

At last. But not for the two female PhD students informed last week that their families, including children, while eligible for visas, are not eligible for evacuation. Gutting.

No Rapture for Catholics so you’re stuck with me for the time being I’m afraid

Aston Martins, grand country houses, Scotch (I could go on).

Worth remembering many people will be unfamiliar with terms like "indefinite leave to remain" and "settlement". People know what immigration is + citizenship, but settlement is less intuitive So its important for those countering the proposals to put in schoolgate language what is being proposed

Turns out this is quite the target constituency these days!

He may well be dragged into saying something better in a few day's time. But the fact that such moral vacuity and political cackhandedness is always the first impression (even on his better days!) speaks for itself.

I've talked shit about JRR Martin's critiques of Tolkien before, so I think it's fair to say that what he says here is obviously, self-evidently correct, all of the children whining about it are missing the point to a literally insane degree, and it annoys me every time I see this make the rounds.

There's no ecosystem and no infrastructure for reaching the Reform-susceptible and bringing them to a different place. Labour seems not to see this as its job, but it's unclear that any organised group on the liberal-Left is willing and able either; this mismatch with the Right is killing us.

It will be grimly interesting to see see whether the Tories match the Reform position on ILR - a potential definitive break from their history of (albeit very begrudgingly) accepting an institutionalised, predictable and orderly (if harsh) migration regime and turn towards authoritarian populism.

Love to open Bluesky in the morning and see an ascendant political party announcing their policy that would foundationally ruin my life, but such is life in the third decade of the twenty-first century! One day an anti-Brexit political event might properly let out the decades of progressive rage.

It would be pretty easy to frame a populist case against this (even most Times/Telegraph readers presume *their own* families’ rights to engage in transnatIonal marriages) but there’s a frustrating dearth of really powerful voices in politics/media willing to make it and prosecute it aggressively.

This coming to pass would be terminal for many UK families of mixed-nationality - a truly dark future.

If you happen to be canceling streaming services for whatever reason, maybe throw a few bucks to a creative's Patreon or Ko-fi. Many have monthly tiers starting as low as $1, which may not sound like much, but if they get enough sign-ups, it could be life-changing money for those living on the edge.