"The right of asylum is an untouchable provision of the English law" - Roger Scruton. (England: an elegy, p8)

When I was young Orwell's line "if you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever" was seen as a description of communism. Today, it applies to the Labour right.

New Substack: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/on-incompe... Parts of the Labour party and BBC simply don't know what their jobs should be.

It doesn't follow that rejoining will give a 6-8% boost to GDP, as much of the hit came from uncertainty reducing business investment, & we mightn't get this back. If a man's been hit by a bus you don't restore him to health by reversing the bus.

Dead right. I used to advise my readers to never base investment strategy upon forecasts but rather upon the range of possible outcomes; we need resilience in the face of uncertainty.

Millions of people have, probably unknowingly, streamed a dreadful country song created entirely by AI. This is a harbinger of things to come. It's going to get increasingly more difficult to hang on to our humanity, but we have to keep at it. My latest: paulwaldman.substack.com/p/todays-ai-...

Next election's in the bag for the party that promises to shut the power off at ten every night and start a mainland bombing campaign.

Yes I know all economists love a policy trilemma. But what we have now is a simple dilemma: you can pay attention to political reporters; or you can have intelligent economic policy. Choose one.

Turns out that bond markets think there should be more to fiscal policy than looking behind the sofa for loose change. Every day's a school day.

This. It's odd how Labour wants to appear businesslike, and yet there's not a business anywhere that avoids advertising itself whilst telling customers that their rivals have a good product.

NEW The letter the BBC could send back to Trump A proposal for a reply to his $1bn claim By me. Enjoy. emptycity.substack.com/p/the-letter...

Read this alongside Reeves' inability to make a coherent case for her policies and the BBC's atrocious journalism (of which the editing of Trump's speech is but one example) and we have a picture of a political culture characterised by plain technical incompetence.

True. The fact that there are busloads of tourists in Stratford shows that culture is big business. Not supporting it isn't merely philistine; it's also bad economics.

Intelligent question: what, if any, social democratic policies might rejuvenate the economy & defeat the far right? Stupid question: should Streeting replace Starmer? The fact that the political class are discussing one rather than the other is the problem.

There was a time when this would have been seen as a case for relaxing fiscal policy.

The big problem with the BBC isn't so much a bias against left or right, but a bias against understanding: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/being-a-ne... There's little chance that a change of DG will remedy this.

Tesla is a meme stock & Musk is key to it remaining so, just as Kim Kardashian is key to the appeal of the Kardashians. So he's got a lot of bargaining power. This has less to do with car-making than with the economics of superstars. See eg Moshe Adler: pdodds.w3.uvm.edu/files/papers...

New substack: why governments cannot offer competence alone: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/on-compete...

Salami slicing your way to fiscal headroom introduces more tax complexity, likely means poorly targeted measures increasing deadweight costs, raises uncertainty (where might they look to tax next?), and reduces flexibility going forward (pulling all but the obvious levers sends a signal in itself).

On average, more than one prisoner a week has been wrongly released in the last ten years (data.justice.gov.uk/prisons/addi...) Strange how the buck stops with Lammy but not with any of his predecessors. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

NEW: Today I co-published a report with think tanks from across the political spectrum. We disagree on many issues, but share common ground on the basics of UK tax reform. Our tax system is riddled with loopholes and irrationalities, holding back growth. This means that..(1/3)

The case for tax rises is stronger & clearer than Reeves pretends. It's that, given our lack of productive capacity, we have an inflation problem, which means that the alternative to tax rises is either infeasible cuts in public spending or higher mortgage rates.

Of all the things that are holding back the economy, the national debt is not one. That Reeves thinks she should focus on this shows that she's taking her agenda from the Tories, not from reality. www.theguardian.com/politics/liv...

New substack: how the government can raise economic growth: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/increasing...

I see a lot of people on here saying what journalists should do. It's all pish. Journalism is just a job like another other, and an employee's duty is to their employer.

Updated thread on The Lost King film: I’m digging over old ground but I have to challenge Steve Coogan's line. He claims it’s all true (as has Philippa Langley): Langley will be celebrated for her achievement, Richard Taylor & his personal gripes will be forgotten So what’s the real story? 1/15

"Evil or Irrelevant: pick one." > I wrote up why I'd usually prefer to have an 'evil' company succeeding in Leeds than a good one succeeding in London. (But really it's about Stoke-on-Trent). tomforth.co.uk/evilorirrele...

Good thread this. For more, read Karl Hagstrom Miller's Segregating Sound.

Chris is right. Some of these (eg charging for medical appts) aren't cost cuts, but cost shifts. As I wrote here, there are no magic money trees: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/no-magic-m...

Increasingly I think the point of a wealth tax is not to raise money but to create space for raising income tax. The lethal thing in politics is when the compliant middle class feels like they have been taken for mugs; if you want to get money out of them, someone else needs to pay more too.

New substack: the government could pay a heavy cost for increasing military spending: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/some-costs...

The asylum seekers issue could be reframed as one of corporate welfare for failing rentiers. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

"Parkinson’s audience listens, laughs and understands. The exchange between Kenneth Williams and Jimmy Reid assumes a level of cultural literacy and curiosity that television rarely dares to credit its viewers with today." thelionandunicorn.com/2025/10/23/l...

The mistake many in Labour are making is to think in tribal terms. What matters is a question of fact: can it fix the economy & public services? It should do whatever it takes to achieve these, & worry about factionalism later. Whether it can do this is another issue.

Basic economics. Same incentives = same behaviour.

Alternatively, learn enough social science to know selection bias when it stares you in the face.

This is a challenge to Marxist theories of the state. Yes, govt & state are different things, & relative autonomy etc. But even so, the state has not served the common interests of the bourgeoisie.

Even if we ignore the racism (not that we should!) this entails a massive loss of freedom, a hit to the economy & worse public services. That's a huge price to pay for "cultural cohesion". Which suggests these people are irrational fanatics.

It would help our blood pressure if we regarded journalists as mere peddlers of product and propaganda rather than as dedicated pursuers of truth. It's the exceptions to this we should note, not the countless examples.

What we need to do now is to ask what it is about our political culture that caused us to get so important a decision so wrong.

Feature, not bug. The govt needs to shift labour from consumer-facing sectors to public services & investment. Gambling should be among those sectors to shrink. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

This poses the qn: what does it say about our political-media system that it incentivizes people to behave like racist morons? Unless Jenrick has misjudged these incentives, it is utterly damning of the system.

Old-fashioned opinion: the Chancellor's problem isn't so much the public finances as the state of the economy - slow growth & above-target inflation.

The remains of the Burley on the Hill fish ponds, the lost buildings of Hambleton and the graves of Hambleton Wood...

This poses basic questions eg: what is the overall correlation & causality between news consumption & political knowledge? And if the media does misinform folk, isn't the instrumental case for media freedom weak, given that ignorance is a negative externality? www.theguardian.com/media/2025/o...

In A Glass of Blessings (1958) Barbara Pym says the post arrived 2-3 times a day in the run-up to Xmas. Which reminds us that technical regress is a thing: enshittification isn't just for the internet. Here's one I wrote earlier: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/technical-...

Two things can both be true: 1. Many people don't invest as much in equities as they reasonably could. 2. Using the tax system to encourage them to do so would do nothing to boost growth, other than enriching high-charging active fund managers.

Good this. The thing is that Macmillan could be a one-nation Tory because British capitalism then was working for millions. Today it is not. That removes the economic base of one-nation Toryism.

This and this www.theguardian.com/politics/202... confirms that politics has been bought. It's unclear how this might change without big systemic change, given that MPs (unlike other voters) don't vote to make themselves poorer.

As you might imagine, I disagree. Here's a defence of PPE I prepared earlier: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/in-defence...