This is an unforgivably stupid situation. It is an astonishing own goal to try and drive student numbers down to move an immigration number that in turn is totally ignored by the anti-immigrant head bangers.

you’re not alone.

I think this starts at the top. Tory and Labour govt politicians spend too long accommodating and supporting anti immigrant sentiment. The islands of strangers speech being a particularly eggregious example.

Honestly, one of the funniest tweets I've ever seen.

A friend of mine who was TA’ing for an AmLit course found a copy of Moby Dick a student had left behind. It had only one marginal annotation, around page 100, that simply said “whale is important.”

So Villa win the Europa League but West Ham get relegated Mixed week for David Cameron

May 2026 has been a month of endless humiliations for Putin. This is what the Kremlin does to try to cover up for it: engage in terrorism. A 🧵about Putin's nightmare month. bsky.app/profile/savc...

For example, Toby Young said he thought Tommy Robinson may have sometimes crossed the line, but was unsure about that, and asked if there were examples of what he had said that was prejudiced or racist. Can be surprisingly common view among some media/political elites, never mind the general public

He hates his kid so much — and is so averse to being at an event that's about someone else — that he is literally pretending he'll work to avoid the wedding. You know he's really pissed about having to cancel his golf trip to establish the lie that he's working.

On Newsnight, fall in net migration was attributed "spectacular ... Shabana Mahmood at Home Office obviously making some real changes happen there" by Helen MacNamara, former dep Cabinet Secretary. Net migration data (Jan-Dec 2025) not impacted by Mahmood becoming Home Sec on 6th Sept 2025

FFS Burnham repeating the mistakes Labour made already

"'You don't know Sherlock Holmes yet,' he said; 'perhaps you would not care for him as a constant companion...He is a little queer in his ideas-an enthusiast in some branches of science. As far as I know he is a decent fellow enough.'" Happy birthday Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

I submitted an FOI request, and found out that the UK's Sovereign AI Fund doesn't check whether the companies it backs adhere to copyright law. Sov AI's Chair has said publicly that they will "only invest in companies that follow [copyright law]" - but we now know they don't check this. 🧵 1/6

So the country gets what.....a change of glasses ?

And this is how they report "equal lowest number of small boat arrivals by this time in the year for five years". The one-year comparison is in the standfirst but in the story it's the 11th par and there's no mention of a five-year low. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

You'd think that someone this rich wouldn't feel the need to lie for money. But you would be wrong.

Google seems not to realise that I do not use Google search so that Google can tell me things. I use it to get to other, more reliable sources of information. You'd think we'd be starting to chafe at the control big tech companies have over what we see.

And although I am nobody's idea of a Comms Guy, it seems to me that the whole appeal of the greens is the perception that they believe in something rather than twisting themselves around electoral strategy. When your brand is sincerity it really doesn't pay to try to be clever.

Despite endless problems with dodgy candidates, Reform's crap vetting procedures persists. But then again, if your outlook is fundamentally nasty, you'll attract nasty people.

LOL

Why today’s “conscious” chatbots are cardboard cutouts—and why that matters for the likely end of our multi-trillion‑dollar bubble. Tech leaders are talking about large language models as if they’re on the verge of consciousness, even as those same systems can’t keep their own timeouts... 1/

Something remarkable and magnificent about the continuety and determination of these #GeorgiaProtests

Really not odd to focus on undoing a policy that lowers GDP/head by probably > 4%!

This is such a blatant abuse of economics/data I will assign it in my Data Analysis course next term..

I accidentally stopped a $600m US tax fraud. The British fugitive behind it now says he’ll sue me for $120m. It sounds like a joke - but there are 3,000 victims. Thread:

I used to just ignore and block the AI hucksters. I'm replying now.

New from me: Five years ago, I criticized a San Francisco TV reporter for getting her facts wrong. Ever since, she and her allies have alleged that I was part of a conspiracy to end her career. That narrative just got a boost with her new book, which is being promoted by some powerful tech people.

"I need the most on the nose statement of populism you have"

I see Simon Heffer, in Michael Gove's Spectator, is once again repeating his lie that Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech wasn't about race.. I debated Heffer recently (at the Oxford Litfest) - here's what I said. archive.ph/bqKZF

A strong contender for the most impactful joke I ever saw on normal TV as a kid. Short, perfect, and ingeniously stupid. A high watermark of the smart-dumb gag!

Must we keep holding our politicians to such impossible standards?

BAN THE PERVERT GLASSES

eg I’ve been experimenting with how to do original reporting in a video format on various platforms. You go “cool, 1.3m people saw a video I uploaded to TikTok in two months!” Oh hang on it earned me £135 in that time and is a massive loss leader, I should just be churning AI ragebait instead.

I know there’s a lot going on with the Labour Party, but it is all in the bounds of democratic politics. This however, paid collusion between the leaders of two political parties in the run up to election, if true, is a scandal of staggering propositions

A similar conversation was going on on my Facebook recently, and it was vastly enhanced by Martin Wolf (we are FB friends) descending on the thread to point out that the baby boom is a demographic fact and all the other categories are marketing nonsense 😁

Retractions never get proportional attention. This one should.

Not only do Substack platform Nazis; they lie about how easy it is to leave the site and take your subscriber list with you (as I did last summer). Every time I get one of these, it's Substack's fault, and it threatens my livelihood. This will tell you why: tomcox.substack.com/p/an-explana...

I first noticed this chapel in the open-air museum at Karnak a year or so ago and was immediately struck by a very odd feature: on the inside there is a long text in large hieroglyphs bearing the names of Ramesses II, but cut sideways into the rock… Full post: www.instagram.com/p/DYKd0_-DHN...

As someone who has to worry about writing stuff that people will actually read, I've learned the hard way that a story like "Trump is grifting billions off crypto schemes that are probably illegal" will get no reads on it. That's because this story doesn't make readers feel good about themselves.

“The State wouldn’t provide funding for the security of Nigel” Tice says to #bbclaurak . Why would the state provide security if Farage , as he has said himself, was a private citizen not even considering running to be an MP when the £5m was given?

This is what normalisation looks like.

observation test for your inner 8-year-old. Can you spot the 6 creatures hidden in the picture? From Treasure magazine, 1965 Official answers coming soon (Even if you don’t reply, could you please ‘like’ or share this one?)

Every mf wants to say they take responsibility, no mf wants to take responsibility

If Reform do as well as expected, I'll be reposting this on the hour all day tomorrow.

1%. Yes ONE. Of current Reform voters would consider voting Labour. Yet Labour has spent a good chunk of its energy appealing to this void, this vacuum, this abyss. Enough to make you weep.

The beautiful humming bird that shimmers when the sunlight shines on its beautiful illuminating feathers!

idk what the gilt market is actually worried about, but they should also be worried about the damage that a Reform or Reform+Tory coalition govt could inflict on the economy and on democratic processes.