Several people have said this by @joxley.jmoxley.co.uk is good. They're right. www.joxleywrites.jmoxley.co.uk/p/airport-bo...

The thing to remind yourself is that the triple lock is only a small transfer from today's young to today's old; it is a much bigger transfer *to* today's young (in their capacity as tomorrow's old) from tomorrow's young. www.ft.com/content/9bae...

(I have said this before but) a big problem with the "discourse" is that nowadays even a level-headed and moderately phrased description of contemporary economic and social realities makes you sound like a "radical leftist", something a whole lot of people instinctively reject.

I'm curious why the media sanewashes Trump. Theories: partisan bias (dull); Smith's point that we worship the powerful; a legacy of West Wing causing folk to presume the President is wise; belief there must be depth somewhere; reluctance to see that democracy produces worthless leaders. Or what?

If you are in charge of a small team that makes administrative errors, why should we believe you are competent to run the much bigger team that is a government?

Those people praising that Carney speech & wishing a UK PM could do similar should ask why they don't. It's not because nobody in the UK is as smart as Carney. It's because our system selects against the sort of people who could deliver such a speech.

In a well-functioning market, peddlers of bad products go out of business. In the "marketplace of ideas" this doesn't happen.

This is an example of politicians' professional deformation. They are selected and indoctrinated to be overconfident about the possibilities of top-down control: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/weird-poli...

I grew up during the cold war when the right claimed to support liberty, democracy, western alliances, the rule of law and free markets. It turns out that was all bullshit. What they really support is inequality, monopoly and unlimited power for the rich.

I called for the sacking of all BBC political correspondents ten years ago: bsky.app/profile/toby... This crap does not weaken my opinion.

It might be news to small businesses that the govt is supporting them, but Greg's main point is bang right: serious policies to raise growth will create enemies.

In any other context, requiring a high-productivity sector to offshore the production of its highest value-added exports would be seen as the economic illiteracy it so obviously is... www.ft.com/content/a23c...

Exactly right.

Trump versus reality on the Chagos Islands: 1. UK is not ‘giving away’ the Chagos Islands. It is restoring them to Mauritius having split them off from the former colony when it became independent in 1965. 2. There is a very compelling reason: in 1965 the UN objected …

It might be, though I think the costs of lower consumption are high: a less dynamic economy & more signs of the stagnation that fuels the far right. Trouble is, we don't have a worthwhile public realm in which we can all discuss tough trade-offs in an informed way.

This is really good. Yu could read it as a case for more ethnographic research rather than relying only upon statistics.

AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage | Cory Doctorow

What they should have added is that this is not only an international conflict. Tariffs on whisky, wine, BMWs etc are an attack on US consumers. www.government.se/statements/2...

New substack: what to do with our regulators: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/on-regulat...

This. Talk about BBC bias detracts from the fact that much of its reporting (especially by the egos) is just crap.

What Trump is showing us is that huge numbers of people who think of themselves as leaders (tech bosses, Infantino, Machado, many journos & perhaps some UK pols etc) are completely lacking in dignity & are unworthy of our regard.

The Tory soap opera distracts from more interesting qns: what would a strong Tory party look like? What would be its USPs and its client base? It's not clear there are good answers any more; certainly the Tories haven't found them yet.

This raises an awkward ambivalence towards the state amongst social democrats. "Market failures & inequality require state intervention" vs "concentrated wealth means the rich have captured governments."

If someone can become a chief constable while being this stupid, what does that say about the calibre either of other policemen or of those appointing them? As Warren Buffett says, there's never only one cockroach in the kitchen.

This raises another problem with our political culture. Politicians rarely ask: what is best practice globally? What can we learn from other countries? We're so insular, as I've complained for ages: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/our-insula...

Standard public choice theory says politicians respond to the incentive to get re-elected; that was why I voted Labour. But maybe I was wrong and for some/many their incentive instead is to get a job in tech or finance after a short time in politics. This might better explain UK politics.

What do people in England think about their local area? In this short report I take a look at surveys we conducted with @yougov.co.uk in 2022, 2024 and 2025 to gain some insights... Some key findings...

I'm old enough to remember when Tories were opposed to dumbing down.

Good piece. We've known for years that stagnation fuels the far right (confirmed by this: warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/econ...) The govt should pay more attention to social science & less to its fetish to raise money in ham-fisted ways.

Tories in 2019: Corbyn wanting to disband NATO is irresponsible: www.channel4.com/news/factche... Tories today: Trump threatens to break up NATO - no biggie. These are not serious people.

Nothing unusual in this. As Ipsos have shown for years, voters around the world are systematically wrong about many social facts: www.ipsos.com/en/perils

Nice example of how it's sometime better to be a hedgehog than a fox (to use Berlin's distinction) - to know one important things rather than lots of data. Here's one I prepared earlier: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/against-fo...

The BBC is doing it again. On both the Radio 3 & Radio 6 news it reported Vance's story about that video of Renee Good's murder and denials of it, without telling us the facts. It should have the same approach to weather forecasting: "some say it'll rain, some say it won't. Who can tell, eh?"

At the age of 26, I bought a flat in London.

This BBC drivel was parodied 44 years ago by Alexander Cockburn: harpers.org/archive/1982... It is - literally - beyond parody.

This shows the function of "independent" regulation. It is not to improve the working of an industry, but to allow the government to avoid responsibility.

My and Cosma's version of this with a toy model. Equally, and more on this soon, algorithms do have consequences even if they cannot solely be blamed as villains dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10....

The far right aren't trying to tell the truth. Instead, they say these things to demarcate their tribe of believers from the rest of us. It's a category error to argue about facts with them.

New substack: why politicians should not be like newspaper columnists: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/more-than-...

btw, this is the original bit of writing I did about what being a careworker is like. It was succeeded by a much longer essay for Renewal but I think this piece, written in my head as I rode home from work one April evening in 2020, retains more of the viscerality. medium.com/@bickerrecor...

Amazing wrongness here. 1. If you're arresting 00s of peaceful pro-Gazan protestors, you don't believe in free speech. 2. Even if you do believe in it, it doesn't extend to child porn. 3. You can't debate with fascists. 4. You can put a counter-narrative (if you have one) onto civilized platforms.

I'm hoping that Starmer's publicly supine response to the attack on Venezuela is his equivalent of Arsene Wenger's "I didn't see the incident" - a desire to have his arguments in private rather than public.

This 70s nostalgia is like the yearning for a return of manufacturing or the hopes for civil conflict. All are founded upon an ignorance of what the 70s or old-style manufacturing or violence were really like. The right has become detached from reality.

"We frequently see the respectful attentions of the world more strongly directed towards the rich and the great, than towards the wise and the virtuous. We see frequently the vices and follies of the powerful much less despised than the poverty and weakness of the innocent" - Adam Smith.

It's the hypocrisy that bugs me. By all means go with "might is right"; cynical realpolitik has its place. But don't then lecture us on law & morality. You can't ride two horses with one arse.

"if you are pronouncing a new law that wherever Communism reigns against the will of the people, even though it's happened internally, there the United States shall enter, then we are going to have really terrible wars in the world". Margaret Thatcher, 1983. www.margaretthatcher.org/document%2F1...

If you are complaining that London is worse than in the 80s or 90s without citing the closure of Rock On records in Camden as exhibit A then you are an idiot whose opinion should be disregarded.

Phil Burton-Cartledge on the origins of the "stakeholder state". averypublicsociologist.blogspot.com/2026/01/what...

Venezuela is about to become a peaceful pro-western liberal democracy - just like Iraq or Libya. But I guess all decadent ruling classes are like the Bourbons; they forget nothing and they learn nothing.