Just announced: Iceland has urgently moved up its referendum to join the European Union - to 29 August. A reminder: 🇮🇸 is in many ways already a non-voting 🇪🇺 member because of the EEA. This would give them voting power to shape the laws they have to follow.

"...war in Iran is very unpopular. Not merely negative-number ... but worst-ever-support-for-war-when-it-started unpopular. With just 38% of Americans in favor, support for bombing Iran is lower than retrospective support for the war in Iraq was in 2014." www.gelliottmorris.com/p/polls-us-i...

I see Farage is off to Mar-a-Lago to talk down Britain and suck up to Trump. There's nothing patriotic about cheering on a foreign leader whose illegal war is sending British families’ energy bills through the roof.

The problem for the govt is it is the govt. The truth will out: savings won’t arrive, costs will. And then the electorate will be angry at the betrayal, and rightly so. All of this is grimly predictable yet here we are with the most senior people in politics playing a dangerous game of make believe

This is worth a bit of attention too. Tamworth has been extremely two-party for a long time, and here we have Con and Lab on third and fourth.

🚨NEW BLOGPOST🚨 Is British politics becoming riven with sectarianism? Are we the next Lebanon? Does dodgy bloc voting dominate our elections? Many are saying "yes" after Gorton & Denton. But it doesn't reflect any of the evidence. www.joxleywrites.jmoxley.co.uk/p/sects-on-t...

On the one hand, a clearly deranged lunatic in the White House starting a dangerous illegal war on Iran with already-serious repercussions for the region and world... Or having a pop at Keir Starmer. You just knew which side the Right would come down on.

Hegseth: "The dumb, politically correct wars of the past were the opposite of what we're doing here. They had vague objections with restrictive, minimalist rules of engagement. No more."

Opposition leader Kemi Badenoch writes to the Prime Minister to say that tripling and quadrupling settlement times to 15 and 20 years "are a good start but should go further" Settlement taking that long are very niche positions among the public - British Social Attitudes - but popular among elites

BREAKING: Kemi Badenoch says the Tories will vote for Labour’s immigration reforms “in the national interest” if Labour MPs try to vote them down

One of the big global policy debates to come - national sovereignty in the age of global markets. An issue that has been bubbling around for many years (see e.g. Newman Farrell Underground Empire) but Trump is bringing to the surface inadvertently.

He's going to try and make Marco Rubio President of Iran isn't he? (As if he'd heard of Mojtaba Khamenei before this week).

ending her career lying about an orwell quote while the entire room is getting news notifications about how she’s been fired and clearly doesn’t know it, perfect

Trump: My war has a clear objective which I've already achieved. I have killed the Epstein story. New Private Eye on shelves now. ➡️ Subscribe: checkout.private-eye.co.uk/SingleItem?I...

Ukraine and Russia carried out another prisoner swap today, but the war in the Middle East is delaying the next round of peace talks with the United States. meduza.io/en/news/2026...

It wasn't an experiment with open borders, as some new research will show on Monday

Two weeks until Trump claims the Iran war would never have happened if he’d been president.

Impressive timing by Shabana Mahmood for today to be the day she announces her asylum policy 'inspired by Kristi Noem'.

Reform UK and the Greens are hoovering up financially insecure voters. My piece this week looks at the return of Britain's class politics (with a twist) www.economist.com/britain/2026...

Bit late to be asking that question!

If you can, listen to Armando Iannucci on BBC Radio 4 - Strong Message Here share.google/oIENFTOaBps6... Brilliant take on Trump and Iran.

I’ve spent years, decades, obsessing over the Bush Administration’s Iraq WMD lies, writing about them, debunking them. I can think of no lie about Iraq WMDs told by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al that comes even close to the enormity and absurdity of this lie from Donald Trump.

"When crazy people have nuclear weapons bad things happen." US President Trump displays a rare moment of self awareness.

Quietly, calmly and forensically, BBC just dismantled the Trump communications shitshow on Iran. No hyperbole, just laying out an unprecedented military, diplomatic and reputational shambles. Worth a watch. (🎥 BBC News/BBC Verify)

Again, Farage, Badenoch and their fellow travellers on X are wildly out of touch with the public on Iran. Even the majority of Reform supporters oppose their position.

German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul: “Spain can rely on solidarity from the EU and Germany. We will not let ourselves be divided.”

Deluded. Labour lost about ten points during the course of the 2024 campaign. A strategic triumph it was not.

Reform UK will be using scrapping the 20 mph limit as a key Welsh manifesto pledge. There’s been a 11.8% fall in road casualties in the 18 months since it was brought in. The majority of 16-34 year olds support the 20 mph limit. Another case of Reform being out of touch with future generations.

This, from @alanbeattie.bsky.social - and the broader point I've made before - Trump isn't creating the new global order so much as blustering around the emerging one in which China's global economic rise continues www.ft.com/content/8dc2...

Here’s a graph of my pension. It’s a relatively risk adverse, & divested from fossil fuels etc. You can’t predict fluctuations in the market, but it’s a good illustration how much damage is being done to people’s savings for the future by one man repeatedly doing stupid things.

If it does drag on, more questions are going to be asked about Trump pulling out of the JCPOA nuclear deal too. That's the reason why this was ultimately a war of choice.

Email just sent to today @ bbc . co . uk #R4Today

Jansen Ganesh is on fire in this column on the UK’s role in the Iran conflict www.ft.com/content/eaee...

Finding the US and Israeli emphasis on how many sorties they’ve flown and how much munitions they’ve dropped quite Vietnam-era-press-conference-esque.

FT comments section this morning - saying what everyone else is thinking, right?

Beautiful from Private Eye on the massive toddler-tantrum that Matt Goodwin and Reform are having, because they got whooped in Gorton and Denton.

Am sticking with my bet that the right is reading this wrong and that the majority of voters are not at all unhappy Starmer has upset Trump by holding back from a war whose purpose and end game no-one seems able to define.

Gonna pitch this to a paper as "DEADLY NEW SOCIAL MEDIA CHALLENGE DARES ONLINE LEFTISTS TO GET AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLERS DRUNK"

Suspect this has a lot to do with him being de-selected by his local party in favour of an Asian woman.

Latest substack on Iran by @snellarthur.bsky.social is a must read substack.com/home/post/p-...

In the midst of the crisis in the Middle East, Spanish PM Pedro Sánchez has stood out as the sole EU leader to directly challenge Trump over the war against Iran.

Like on other Middle East issues, European governments don’t agree on this war because of strategic differences of view, national political cultures and internal coalition poltics. But as long as it’s a second order geopolitical issue for Europe they’ll be able to manage this disagreement.

The number of commentators/journalists salivating at blaming Starmer for ruining the “special relationship” is genuinely pathetic If anyone ruined it- if it even really exists- here’s a reminder of who did it.

Westminster Voting Intention: RFM: 29% (+1) CON: 19% (-1) LAB: 18% (-4) LDM: 14% (=) GRN: 14% (+3) SNP: 3% (+1) Via @moreincommonuk.bsky.social, 27 Feb - 2 Mar. Changes w/ 20-23 Feb.

Conservative shadow chancellor Mel Stride has claimed the UK’s youth unemployment is “the highest in Europe”. This is not correct. The UK’s youth unemployment rate is higher than the EU average, but some European countries have higher rates fullfact.org/economy/mel-...

Someone on Sky interviewed John Bolton ealier, putting his Iran hawkishness to one side, since Trump had him arrested (and before) he's *very* funny on Trump: "What do these comments mean for Starmer?' JB 'I've no idea, take two aspirin and go to bed, and call me tomorrow when he's changed his mind"

'Perhaps the biggest question for Merz, however, is whether the appeasement is working'. Quite the choice of words . Not sure it's fair - we don't know what was said in private. The optics of the public meeting were, as so often, a cringe. www.politico.eu/article/frie...

Trump Attacks Iran. How Operation Epic Fury unfolded… The new Private Eye is out now.

Merz on Trump: "I told him Spain is a member of the European Union and as such, we will only negotiate a customs agreement with the USA jointly or not at all. And there is no way to treat Spain particularly badly here; if anything, we will all come to a common result, and that includes Spain."