What's wrong with the selfish gene view of evolution? Not much, it turns out (with caveats) 🧵1/6 www.newscientist.com/article/2525...

I remember a British-German meeting where a delegate said: "Germany has money but no plan, Britain has a plan but no money.”

Cartoon by @jamesdfmellor.bsky.social

"Good news Wes, you're outpolling the sweet release of death in the Labour leadership stakes" "by a lot?" "4 points, it's almost a statistical tie to be fair"

Brat Summer > Burnham Sumner

Starmer and Burnham's stance towards the EU is in that classic place on the British politics Venn Diagram that is tactically sensible while at the same time looking strategically and tonally weak

Britain’s post-Brexit ungovernability. New post on my Brexit & Brexitism Blog discussing last week’s elections, the Labour leadership crisis which has followed, and what both tell us about post-Brexit politics: chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2026/05/brit...

Liberal England: Is The UK heading for divorce? An interview with James Hawes Among his insights are that "England", to the Conservative Party, ultimately means the South East of England and the elite institutions to which it is home.

Read 22 out of 100 on the list. (And I was being honest) www.theguardian.com/p/x4f9v5

Virtually none of the iconic portions of the Odyssey take place in Greece, as anyone who has actually read the book and has a rudimentary knowledge of Mediterranean geography can tell you.

Jesus wept

UK folks... you deserve this laugh.

New post just out: "Where's the centre?" I have an exclusive new poll which challenges conventional wisdom on one of the biggest questions in British politics. It turns out median voters aren't actually in the centre. (£/free trial) open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/w...

Look at the graphs. A precipitate decline that started in 2020. WHAT ELSE started in 2020, that this piece doesn’t even bother to mention?

🚨 UK debt-to-GDP wasn’t what it used to be! www.ft.com/content/c6f2...

In July 2024, ONS said "At 99.4% of GDP, debt was estimated to be close to the annual value of everything produced in the UK." Today they say it's about 94%, *down* about £200 billion. Reflects (?) revisions/classification changes but should get more attention!

Vintage data sets of GDP often rewrite the narrative www.measuringworth.com/datasets/UKd...

Bracken as it's supposed to be: just one innocuous woodland fern among many. The immense monocultures now so common are a product of centuries of acute overgrazing – usually by sheep – leading to forest disappearance. They're another example of extreme *human-caused* ecological imbalance.

I found this an interesting breakdown of where public spending in the UK goes. It's been shared by the Treasury on Instagram and is for the current 2026/27 financial year.

bradan à linne fadh à frith craobh à coille trì nithean nach meàirle ghabhail o nàdar… —Aonghas MacNeacail, “trì nithean” from Laoidh an donais òig / Hymn to a young demon (Polygon, 2007) #EarthDay #poem #poetry

This is a much more interesting proposal than it first seems even from reading the actual paper (which is anyway v short and simple) >> UK could save £2.5bn by helping banks to buy gilts, says Barclays www.ft.com/content/e351...

It’s amazing how many members of legislature truly do not understand how any part of the country works. Truly amazing.

The fuel shortage has left me depressed about British politics in a way I never have been before, in that not a single party has avoided either saying or doing something incredibly stupid and completely removed from how anything actually works.

Politicians just seem to have given up trying to explain the world as it is to people. It's a huge problem.

Any conversation I’ve had about this (not many - my chat isn’t *that* bad) is met with the entirely natural response that people on £100k don’t need sympathy. But the problem isn’t that they’re suffering, it’s that they are rationally responding in ways which are not in the national interest.

Sorry but this is absolutely mad. Huge failing of all Chancellors for a decade and a half to allow this to happen. www.ft.com/content/c10e... Cut hours and avoid promotions: how the £100,000 tax trap is shaping work

Reform have held on to 7 out of 15 (47%) of the seats it has been defending since the 2025 Local Elections. Retention Rates for Other Parties: LDM: 35/44 (80%) GRN: 8/15 (53%) CON: 16/51 (31%) LAB: 16/70 (23%) Localist Groups: 1/11 (9%) electionmaps.uk/council-by-e...

I am planning on appointing someone who has publicly resigned twice in scandal. They resign a third time in even bigger scandal. The fallout should, however, not include me, the person who made the big call in the first place. Totally untenable.

I'm going to take the rare step of contradicting Ivan Rogers on UK-EU relations. Because relations with the UK per se might not be in the top issues Brussels faces, but they feature in an awful lot of those. Coupled with renewed London thinking means some genuine possibilities.

Really powerful, hopeful paragraph from the latest article in the Atlantic by @adamserwer.bsky.social

Exactly one year ago today:

Economists: If only people understood carbon taxes better, maybe they would like them more Reminds me of the period in climate science where we thought education about the science would change the politics of the problem. www.nber.org/papers/w3507...

in addition to this (which i agree with), something that should put some wind in your sails is that orbán actually *was* the competent competitive authoritarian (relatively) everyone worries about, he had a stronger grip on power than i think trump ever has, and he had it for far longer

christ, not to relitigate It a decade on but it's hard to watch people happily waving Hungarian flags and EU flags at the same time and not think "oh right, almost like it's not that fucking hard to realise that you can have and cherish multiple, complimentary identities"

The end of Orban has been greeted with chants of "Russia go home". It is an irony that this was the sentiment which launched Orban into politics in June 1989, speaking at the reburial of Imre Nagy, the Hungarian Prime Minister of 1956, executed in 1958 theorangefiles.hu/2013/06/20/f...

I’m gonna get a lot of shit but a counter blockade is probably what every classic naval strategy book tells you to do in this this situation. It’s probably what Mahon and Corbett would shake hands on.

Actually agree with this assessment. The counter-blockade makes sense in terms of undermining Iranian strategy of monetizing the strait & allowing them to claim they are the only ones with control over it. And it puts pressure on other countries (such as China) to get involved in finding a solution

interesting read on the track record of the Greens in office as.ft.com/r/ae3bcbc8-f...

Well, I mean, where do you even start…? 🤔😏😂

Scotland's Reform manifesto is opposed to the SNP government in Scotland "welcoming uncontrolled immigration from the rest of the UK". www.reformparty.uk/view-pdf/sco...

‘Dubiety’. Noun. The state of not being convinced that Dubai is a good place to go on holiday. Or visit for any reason frankly. (Even if it isn’t embroiled in a Trump geopolitical clusterfuck.)

TRUMP: “Do everything I ask or I’ll bomb you back into the Stone Age!” IRAN: “How about, instead, you do everything we ask and we’ll call it a day?” TRUMP: “Deal.” FOX NEWS: “Awesome Trump is the world’s most masterful negotiator!”

Nobody assumes the CEO of Toyota must be some sort of brilliant engineer, but we have for some reason developed this collective notion that being a successful tech CEO must make you a tech genius.

Impossible to disagree with a single word that Ben Rhodes (Obama era NSC official) is saying here:

‘Dubiety’. Noun. The state of not being convinced that Dubai is a good place to go on holiday. Or visit for any reason frankly. (Even if it isn’t embroiled in a Trump geopolitical clusterfuck.)

BREAKING: New York Times is reporting that experts are dubious about the legitimacy of the FIFA peace prize.

Details of this are now out: Looks like Government has learned lessons from the rather slack transitional arrangements for the previous (2013) building standards - *individual dwellings* will have to have started before March 2028 to be allowed to use the old regs this time, not whole sites.

So, about those Eid prayers in London... "What's the highest thing in Trafalgar Square?" "Nelson's column, innit?" "And the highest thing on the column?" "Nelson." "And on Nelson?" "His hat." "And the highest thing on his hat?" "That bit that sticks up." 1/8

Sorry what now?! The main objective of the war that closed the (geopolitically crucial) strait is reopening the strait…? 🤔🙄

Having failed to secure the Snickers or M&Ms that were my original objectives, sources tell the Washington Post I will now be refocusing all energy on extracating my hand from where it is stuck inside the vending machine and restoring said machine to the working order it was in prior to my arrival.