The lawless London story propagated by Donald Trump, Nigel Farage and an army of AI social-media personalities is a test case of the ability to impose a manufactured political narrative on an uncompliant reality www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

Happy Royal Mint embassy day

First time back in Hong Kong in three years. Complicated feelings. I still love the place, it endures, I don’t regret leaving

AOC: This has now become what we feared most about ICE for a long time—that it would be used as an anti-civilian force with no accountability. At the end of the day, what we saw today was a murder, and murders in cold blood need to be prosecuted.

Martin Chivers and Terry Yorath RIP. Two names that are among my earliest football memories

“No, Officer Pryzbylewski, he did not piss you off. He made you fear for your safety and that of your fellow officers.”

This is the time of monsters

Not for the first time, this is reminiscent of what the Chinese Communist Party-controlled government did in Hong Kong, where everyone who protested, no matter how peacefully, was subsequently deemed a “rioter”

before Metropolis (1927) there was ✨“Metro-land”✨ (1910) I think we need to fundamentally rethink our megacities, but that requires thinking about our history, economics, infrastructure, colonial power, cultural pressures — while still retaining some creative imagination and hope for the future 😭

A 1930s horror of urban sprawl shouldn’t be dictating Britain’s housing policy in the 2020s www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

He used his positions to enrich himself. Is that bad now?

The free speech people really don’t like the wrong kind of free speech

Top comment on the FT story

Polesdon Lacey is overflowing with people who simply cannot believe it is closed on a normal winter’s day @nationaltrust.org.uk Nothing on the web site when we set off 1.5 hours ago. I’ve spoken to other people who have traveled similar distances. We are all flabbergasted

Utterly pathetic, @nationaltrust.org.uk

It's New Year, so time to look back and forward. These are 10 things I think we need to recognise in 2026. It’s a response to what I think are profoundly damaging mistaken assumptions I’ve heard and read from practitioners, journalists, and analysts in 2025. Warning: very long🧵

Very much all of this. The many Brits bashing the capital are very useful idiots for overseas efforts to undermine the country imho. As I've said before, it's time to push back at the nonsense

RIP Isiah Whitlock. Another cast member lost from the greatest TV series of all time www.theguardian.com/stage/2025/d...

Brilliant forensic tracing of the shadow Chinese fleet used to evade sanctions on Russia’s LNG www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...

Martin Thorley's "All That Glistens" is a salutary tale on what happens when an open and money-driven political culture comes into contact with a highly disciplined, strategically minded and secretive one-party system www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

Good interview in the paper, this. I think Sadiq is right: London 'needs' to be less successful than it is for a bunch of political arguments here in the UK to work, hence the fictions being invented about it:

The decade of renewal has not started well. When the policies of left and right prove equally impotent, we should look more closely at the machinery. Loss of state capacity is Britain’s biggest challenge www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

America, land of the free, where they ban books, just like China does and the Nazis did. “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” www.bloomberg.com/opinion/feat...

The tactics bear a striking resemblance to those of private parking management companies ie proceeding straight to threats and intimidation with no good faith process for challenging claims www.theguardian.com/money/2025/d...

“Your words will disappear. Your house will disappear. Your name will disappear. All memory of you will disappear.” Sansa Stark’s last words to Ramsay Bolton come back to me for some reason

Best China Books of 2025 @chinabooksreview.com: great list with @emilyzfeng.bsky.social Dan Wang @evadou.bsky.social @patrickmcgee.bsky.social Barbara Demick and others. I just ordered the book by Minxin Pei. Huge thanks to @vicshih.bsky.social for including me chinabooksreview.com/2025/12/18/b...

Beyond belief He Recorded China’s Detention of Uyghurs. The U.S. Wants to Deport Him to Uganda. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/15/u...

“Truth, though powerless and always defeated in a head-on clash with the powers that be, possesses a strength of its own: whatever those in power may contrive, they are unable to discover or invent a viable substitute for it.” - Hannah Arendt www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

What an incredibly brave man

This is the weirdest photo I’ve seen in quite some while

X est un réseau néo-nazi organisé et orienté pour promouvoir des contenus néonazi. En restant actif là-bas, vous ne luttez pas (et surtout pas à armes égales) mais vous contribuez à le légitimer en lui donnant un vernis de pluralisme. C'est comme écrire pour le courrier des lecteurs de Rivarol.

Great column on dentists from Sarah O’Connor at the FT How can you be a “net contributor” when a shambolic bureaucracy prevents you from becoming one? www.ft.com/content/f4e5...

How can you become a “net contributor” when a shambolic bureaucracy prevents you from doing so? www.ft.com/content/f4e5... Why Britain doesn’t have enough dentists

British universities’ reliance on Chinese fees fuelling self-censorship, say academics www.ft.com/content/a123...

This is so disgusting.

“They can announce to the world that the people still believe in the system, believe in the government and believe in the pro-establishment party,” said Mr. Yam, who now lives in Britain. The problem is that the people very obviously don’t www.nytimes.com/2025/12/07/w...

Why bother to participate in this #XiJinping #JohnLee political sham? It is by no stretch an election.

“We are the largest single market — do they want us to close it?” - European diplomat No, Beijing thinks it can make the EU eat it. It’s up to the EU to prove them wrong. Get serious about protectionism or accept accelerated deindustrialisation. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

“just because it’s stupid doesn’t mean it won’t inherit the Earth.”

They have learned nothing. They will squeeze and squeeze and squeeze until they get another reaction, all the while blaming pernicious foreign intervention for the situation they themselves have created hongkongfp.com/2025/12/05/h...

My dad abhors any negative comments about immigrants. Asked him recently why he’s so strong on it: ‘Because we’re always happy to take the rich and clever ones. Which means it’s not about disliking immigrants. It’s about disliking the poor and vulnerable. And that’s a bad human instinct.’

Hong Kong’s “improved” patriots-only democracy at work. Mass apathy and resignation

The Four Seasons Total Landscaping Peace Prize.

Love every word of this www.ft.com/content/ccbe... Maga’s strange rage against Europe

"In his final drive for power Hitler had considerable financial backing from a fairly large chunk of the German business world...What good [that] eventually did these politically childish men of the business world will be seen later in this narrative." -The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, p. 242

More property taxes are coming. Fair enough. Britain’s Mansion Tax Won’t Rest at £2m says @mbrooker.bsky.social www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

Surreal, obscene, shameless Fifa to award ‘peace prize’ after Donald Trump pipped to Nobel www.ft.com/content/7781...

Fact-checking is bad. Everyone has the right to choose their own facts 🙄

This is going to be a cliffhanger like the China super embassy in London. Which way will it go?