Simple question? #BookSky

It has taken Donald Trump's America to make Europeans realize that it is not just scary to look after itself without the USA--but that it also has strategic benefits. As those benefits become clearer Europe will strengthen and the USA will have weakened itself.

Far be it from me to fat-shame a flying horse, but I will say I think this Pegasus might need longer wings

I abhor the Times but two things are true here 1. The love affair between Right Wing MSM and Farage has died. The Times spent years studiously ignoring Farage’s dodgy dealings but recently planned a report on his many houses 2. Farage is brittle & can’t handle pressure, he’s not PM material at all

My own big picture taken here... not an obviously good fit to the talk around the new government this weekend bsky.app/profile/davi...

I think this explains a great deal

Tonight’s third-place playoff between England and France is a dead rubber. Not a nail-biter. Talking of death and nail-biters, it seems only proper to remind you that the ebook of the gritty legal thriller #TheCutThroatTrial is only 99p! What a time to be alive! www.amazon.co.uk/Cut-Throat-T...

This is what a Reform govt would be like except they wouldn't know what *anyone* ever did ever

haaaang on, someone under 40 on this website? this can't be right

The state pension’s not that decent now, the current cohort has DB pensions on top.

I still have hope we can do better than that, I refuse to be defeatist!

Think the more likely “dreadful deal for our cohort in retirement” is “the state pension is decent, but when we slip and fall on a cracked pavement it takes an hour for the ambulance to show and two years for the hip replacement”.

I mean we will have benefited from the triple lock for three decades at that point, and Gen X pensioners are going to be really quite poor! I would hope frankly we’d move to a double lock by 2040 at the latest for other reasons.

Unfreezing thresholds - great way to sweeten a broad increase in income tax to ensure you don’t cut services at the end of the parliament and can fund a few commitments, TERRIBLE way to ruin your finances in a bid to please angry pensioners.

Ironically he talks like the Starmer last-ditchers: as if the government has made a bunch of hard policy choices that will make for an easier run-in to 2027-9, as opposed to the stations of the cross that they have actually constructed for themselves.

"Manchesterism" is like when people promoted a policy called "zero covid" and then tried to explain it didnt actually mean zero covid. Or when other people promoted a policy called "defund the police" and tried to explain it didn't mean defunding the police. If you're explaining, you're losing.

'The best PM we've had in a decade plus' - inflation is up, racism is up, we've nationalised the railways without a plan and the government's spending plans are to go into the next election cutting spending at Cameron era rates and raising taxes at Sunak era ones. What a great record!!

It's absolutely due to the PM, who chose neither to use his government's powers as a regulator or legislator, or to exercise moral leadership to fight the forces in politics driving this stuff.

Once again I am begging Labour to engage with who votes for us

My heart is heavy that we are making a collective miscalculation in undervaluing the humanities - from my FT piece www.ft.com/content/fbde...

One day, somebody in government will notice what the net migration level is hesding to. The fiscal forecast (£24 billion) was based on average net 235k to 2026-29 but that is at least 100k too high, costing £13 billion, or double that if want to reduce immigration visas further.

If you do go and see the Odyssey please no spoilers. Some of us haven’t had time to read the book in the last 3000 years.

Dave of Sunderland nails it…

I fainted in Luxor museum while looking at Tutankhamun's bed and woke up on a sofa in a back room being fanned by several Egyptian men I imagine it was what Cleopatra was used to

While I understand and share some of Starmer fans' frustrations, too many of their posts seem to be based on the premise that the Starmer administration was doing great and could easily recover its popularity then This Other Lot came along and spoiled it all. It is an unhealthy level of revisionism.

If he wanted that, he shouldn’t have taken the appeasement of the far right line. Appeasement has a very, very poor historical record.

But they’re not ‘being public about it’ This is a journalistic scoop. Baffling how so many people don’t get the problem with *foreign governments* funding U.K. political organisations

So much guff spouted about Starmer’s legacy. His legacy is that Clive Myrie gave an interview going ‘I am relieved I didn’t have kids’ and that millions of people in this country now feel unsafe.

“Not confined to online spaces or social media, [coercive control and harassment] is increasingly happening in survivors’ homes through commonplace devices.” She points out that smart plugs, speakers, thermostats, even hair straighteners, can all be controlled remotely.” www.ft.com/content/8a42...

What I hope everyone reading this story actually takes away from it is that a household with two people each earning £38k are in the richest 20 per cent of the population.

Chanced upon Bruce Grobbelaar's autobiography, and it has one hell of an opening line

I'm just annoyed that we *already* had a political philosophy called Manchesterism. Do Cobden and Bright mean nothing to you people? There's a reason it was The Free Trade Hall.

It’s tragic that CO₂ doesn’t look and smell like wildfire smoke.

Several months ago I said in jest: "I bet he'll be going after *transistors* next." OMG he is that dumb/ill/demented. #25thAmendmentNow

Good Morning. Who wrote this?

"Vote for me because it is Europe versus South America and we want Europe to retain the leadership of football." @paulsaffer.bsky.social on Stanley Rous, the last English head of FIFA, who died 40 years ago today. thelionandunicorn.com/2018/06/07/f...

Going to be grimly amusing if Burnham conspires to make exactly this same mistake

Just one para from @jdportes.bsky.social brilliant (and beautifully written) @theguardian.com piece on Burnham and the economy. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

A year long plan to become prime minister that seems to have been wholly untroubled by questions like 'why is there a looming vacancy?'

When you're a mere war photographer, but also an artist. "Armoured car crews receiving instructions of a coming attack." Image: IWM (E 7464) Outside Bardia around the turn 1941/42, almost certainly 7 S.A. Reconnaissance Regiment. @curatorian.bsky.social

FIFA unveils new, expanded by-election format.

Only trouble is the last time people were offered an economically damaging option to satisfy their pet peeves they chose it.

It's a cliche that leaders keep promising change that never happens - but there's a case that the opposite is true. We've had one huge, structural change after another: austerity, Brexit, massive changes to immigration... What we've lacked is honesty about the costs & trade-offs of those changes.

But, and once again, the law is there to protect everyone, even those you despise. Perfectly reasonable to hate someone for their views. But that does not give you carte Blanche to libel them. Let’s all be a touch more sensible and mature here.

You will kindly forgive my challenging yet another terrible legal take, but two points stick our. 1. You cannot sue an organisation “into oblivion”. You can only recover any losses as a result of their tort. 2. You cannot sue someone for expressing an opinion. There has to be a tort. /1

It’s getting irritating seeing Reform politicians accusing others of ‘incitement’ The same guys who call others traitors, who say ‘a reckoning is coming’ and call for ‘pure, cold, rage’ Oh and they invited a woman who called for asylum seeker hotels to be burnt down to speak at their conference

The scene as the returning officer announces the result will be a hoot won’t it? Farage has turned himself into an object of ridicule … www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Good morning we haven't done this for a while so welcome to your FT Weekend highlights giftlink thread. First up the great Gideon Rathman has been down several rabbit holes at the Conspiracy World Cup as.ft.com/r/a51497e0-a...