A boring take: the UK was a liberal market economy before 1979. British social democracy was always relatively economically liberal.

Americans: take the "s" off the end of "Legos" and pop it on the end of "Math" would you. That'd be smashing. Thanks.

o Father I have sinned and weighed in on some tedious online discourse, by which I mean - I defended still loving Hamilton and Parks and Rec in 2026 and still finding both joy and political purpose in both of them: youngvulgarian.substack.com/p/some-notes...

65 per cent of Britons are owner-occupiers. General elections are won in the Midlands. Most people have a middle class occupation. The United Kingdom's comparative advantage is in services. These aren't facts that Philip Gould invented in order to make Labour feel sad.

Quite a fun exercise is to ask foreign economists what they see as your country’s economic strengths and weaknesses. Every time I’ve done that they’ve mentioned British universities in their top two or three UK economic strengths.

Here's my theory: A certain type of politician across the Western world is constantly promising a return to a glory age of mass non-college-educated white male manufacturing employment, and lurching from ONE SIMPLE TRICK ECONOMISTS HATE HIM to the next as their magical solution to delivering it.

In places like the village I live in it's basically a race to see if your kids make it through school before it closes...

Useful chart. Shows - Low earners have substantially improved relative position since mid-2000 - decent wage growth for all recently -but only just recovered to pre-GFC/pre-pandemic levels. - no obvious correlation with immigration except that recent high immigration accompanied real wage growth

Or much of a drop in public support. Fascinating example of elite consensus switching despite popular opinion.

The rollout of high speed internet in Uruguay worsended early childhood development. But not because the kids spent too much time in front of screens, because the parents did. cepr.org/voxeu/column...

That France v England 3rd place playoff is just gonna be both teams sitting on the grass and sharing a smoke.

I still need someone to explain to me with small words and diagrams how this actually contributes to defence and national security www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Keep seeing people walking around in real life holding their phones horizontally in front of them with speaker mode on, shouting from a distance. Have they just watched so much reality TV that they think this is how you make an audio call? It really is much easier to hold it up to your ear, you know

We just in the world of make believe now?

“The buses are actually free this summer for kids so we can all meet up. We can all get a bus into the centre” Love to hear this from young people on the bus out to Hartcliffe (South Bristol) this morning. West of England’s ‘Kids go free’ policy during the holidays is 💪

Referee having to explain to Messi there that actually Argentina offered to cede its claim to the Falkland Islands as far back as the 19th Century.

Remember Streeting's review into whether young people are being overdiagnosed with ADHD, autism, and mental health issues? Well, the interim report is out, and there's a reason the media are silent on it (spoiler: it proves what a lot of us have been saying all along)

Stamp duty and council tax are terrible taxes. Land value tax could replace both - and Andy Burnham has backed it for 16 years. Who wins? Who loses? What happens to house prices? LVT could drive growth. But it isn’t easy. Our model shows its promise - and its problems.

A ton of American discourse about US foreign policy ends up in the Bojack Trap

Reform UK's Zia Yusuf is currently delivering a speech accusing his party's critics of using language that will put his colleagues' lives at risk. In other news, here's Zia Yusuf two months ago

And the idea that this - from "supporters" of Mahmood - is likely to be reassuring to the markets/good for credibility/stability is... bizarre..

The idea that pursuing a restrictionist/illiberal migration policy makes you 'rightwing' economically and therefore more likely to be a fiscal conservative is just such a basic fail on every level.

An addendum. Given that the evidence was that global and domestic supply chains were so responsive that the UK ends up with a glut of PPE, to better quality and much more reliably than it forecast - why does the inquiry propose a domestic manufacturing strategy in the name of “resilience”?

This is a common talking point, but it's just wrong. The place where the impact will hit first and hardest is East Asia. Even so, it's crashing everywhere - Brazil, Jamaica, and Turkey (not exactly bastions of whiteness) have lower birthrates than the US. Chile has a lower birthrate than Japan.

good luck persuading some of them that the closest they got to the war was watching Dam Busters. "i remember bomb damage from when i was a kid." and i visited Warwick Castle with my school, Darren. Doesn't make me a medieval knight.

Care homes should be putting on the beatles and the stones by now. Sounds like a dig at boomers but it's not: residents would genuinely vibe with it more.

I do hope he got to see Montana

This is very much a normal reaction and a reasonable comparison.

That one’s for Lindisfarne.

Kind of perverse backwards industrial policy: we have a winner, how can we turn It into a loser?

I little bit about Teshuvah (repentance in Judaism) G-d forgives sins against G-d, but when you harm other people, you must: • Regret the sin • Stop doing the sin • Act and speak with humility • Act in a way opposite of the sin • Make reparations for the sin to those harmed 🧵

I don't usually write personal stuff, but a few words about my experience of being interviewed by Gary Stevenson. It started with a nice chat, comparing taste in hoodies... then the tone changed. He demanded to know why I'd deleted a tweet criticising him.

and presumably trying to pretend the vote of a very UKIPy constituency should substitute for the ordinary legal processes around failing to declare donations is proper, Serious behaviour

Given the BBC have a largely sensible set of guidelines on the use of quant polling in news stories, including a ban on a poll being a story in itself, it's always so baffling they have next-to-no similar rules on what is ultimately rudimentary qual polling. It's an insane double-standard.

A party’s job is to put forward candidates that win general elections. That’s it. Parties in the U.S. have increasingly used primary elections to do this because of a supposed bonus in democratic legitimacy, but they aren’t a magic key to accomplishing the actual goal. Other ways to legitimize

I once asked a priest to bless a printer that I was in the middle of fighting with and he went "I only bless things when there's a chance it'll take" and then turned and walked out of the room.

Scottish soccer fans have left another gift to the region: a $15,000 donation to a charity administered by the Massachusetts Teachers Association that helps students in financial need.

Now govt is working on retreat from tripling settlement timeline from 5 to 15 years (in practice making it impossible for many to stay post-2028 given other rule changes), it has an interest in showing fiscal impact of u-turn is small (despite its earlier false £10bn spin) bsky.app/profile/sund...

This is classy from both of them. Belgium got the result that justice demanded but Balogun was put in a no-win situation and has handled it as best anyone could

One reason you can be absolutely sure Reform is rotten with financial scandals is that exactly nobody involved in the grift economy they represent works for free or out of a sense of civic duty

hot take: no one actually wants 'authenticity' in politicians: people want a performance that is both competent and has them as the target audience. lots of politicians derided as wooden and stiff are being more 'authentic' than politicians who are personable and likable, who are performing

People getting mad at this, a textbook *good* political answer, what exactly do you want from your politicians?

why are people only ever described as "no-nonsense", what if you're a nonsense person, what then

Excellent debunking of the misleading "white working class boys do worst at school" headline. It's white working class boys who live in poverty (eligible for free school meals), a much smaller group. Also Black Caribbean boys eligible for FSM have similar problems. www.instagram.com/reel/DaQRlWu...

It's also worth noting that one local tax raising lever that Andy Burnham, as Mayor of Greater Manchester, has always ruled out is congestion charging for private vehicles.

And it was given to him by the press! Who got the title wrong! Be worth getting into if he had self-dubbed but he didn’t.

One area of continuity: lifting every teeny stone of the UK tax code to see what comes up, and none of the big ones

'research in the United Kingdom shows that the proportion of people who have “a lot” of trust in science tends to be lower among politically right-leaning groups than those on the left. “Trust in science is politicized and becoming more so,” says sociologist Gordon Gauchat'. 1/2