Imagine you're in a weird romcom where Paul Hollywood is your rival. Do you go "let's have a bread baking competition" or do you emphasise your own relative strengths? Because that in short has been the central problem with the traditional two's approach to anti-immigration voters and Reform UK.

Matt Beard was a ‘special’ man who helped transform English women’s football www.nytimes.com/athletic/664...

Good morning. Immigration is good. Trade is good. There are nuances but they are narrow enough that free and open movement of people and goods should be the default.

Once again tapping my 'AI is a huge existential threat to the Internet and e-commerce' sign:

"It is not primarily Rachel Reeves’ fault that the public finances are in such a mess, but it’s her responsibility to resolve the problem." Excellent piece this.

The reduction in the number of people coming to the United Kingdom is going to improve Labour's polling, the political debate around immigration and the British economy any day now.

“This policy is a fucking disgrace and will do harm to the people it affects, our economy, our services, and it’s morally reprehensible” is the correct response not “haha your numbers are wrong and it may not even be legal”

Second and maybe more important, it’s the Gastarbeiter trend again in the evolution of immigration politics. The “cheap labour” can still come and fill shortages in ageing societies but on terms that can be reneged at any time.

The claim that reneging on ILR is about “cheap foreign labour” is interesting for two reasons. First, it would also affect (say) people like me with spouses on marriage visas. (Which also means it would be a way to leech even more revenue in visa fees and surcharges.) on.ft.com/4gTvkwF

really dislike that "Boriswave" used to be something you'd exclusively see being used by racist Twitter accounts but it's now made its way to the political mainstream, including today's Playbook headline

also engenders a dangerous complacency where the mass civil society response that is required to actually push back on this stuff doesn‘t happen because people convince themselves “it won’t happen so why should they have to put their heads above water on it“

Occasionally I remember that Sony is actually planning to release a PS6 in the next couple of years, which just seems crazy to me personally.

Had missed this terrific @gideonrachman.bsky.social column last week because I was feeling sick and sorry for myself.

NEW POST This week I'm thinking about the role of music in political conflict. Meet French Resistance composer Elsa Barraine, whose compositions responded to the rise of fascism in Europe "Music would become Barraine's mode of resistance" open.substack.com/pub/leahbroa...

Aries: You only get one chance at life and what a terrible mess you’re making of it.

let’s never do less and stina both starting together ever again

Bother.

PITCH: a dating show based on supermarket baskets 12 singles are asked to do their weekly shop then pick a partner based only on what the person bought

Did she just answer the "what will you do differently in the second half?" question by replying "obviously I'm not answering that" - what a pointless innovation!

Fascinated as to what, if anything, either side could do to get a card from this referee.

fuck me katie reid is a wonder

The “Gorbachev announces reforms” tone of BBC football commentary never fails to annoy me. “Not much in it in terms of possession“, they say as a 55:45 stat flickers up on screen.

Halftime coach interviews: game has gone!

A striking dynamic in British political commentary is the people least likely to write about policy are incredibly prone to say that political parties can solve their problems with policy announcements.

It's bizarre that the question is being asked - the stunts are clearly wildly effective at driving attention! (Plus we still haven't seen the stunts reach their finale, with Ed Davey jumping out of a balloon on the edge of space.)

Please, Arsenal, this is doing nothing for my recovery.

What an awful, sad weekend. Here's my attempt to pay tribute to Matt Beard for @sport.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com/football/202...

Of all the ridiculous “now that we have [x], we don’t need a knowledge-rich curriculum”, AI is maybe the silliest. How else are you meant to know whether it is right or wrong?

Porridge is (the writers say this) a loose remake of Bilko. (You can argue Minder & OFAH are too. As the *only* US sitcom shown in 60s UK, you could argue it was the most influential show for UK comedy full stop, while US sitcoms generated from Honeymooners and I Love Lucy)

A Very Secret Service ~= The Thick Of It and it's very funny to me that I cannot really imagine one side of this equivalence being as vicious with its internal facing politics, and the other side with its overseas adventures

The bleakest cultural difference is that in The Bridge, the heroic cop reports her partner for extrajudicially murdering a criminal and he goes to prison and the show sides with her, in the UK/France remake the cops say things like “ the first duty of every cop is to stand by their colleagues”

Going green: matcha mania takes hold in UK cafés - on.ft.com/426w7Ee

Matcha has been getting more popular for a good few years now but this summer it really took off - with sales doubling in UK cafes vs 2024. 4% of drinks sales are now matcha-based, according to Square payments data🍵

i’m trying to remember which writer told me that, when their sitcom was being remade in america, they were told “the trouble is the main character’s a loser; we’re going to make them more of a winner” and the writer thought “what’s funny about that?” i guess the point is it could have been anyone

And it wasn't even good self-interest! You can draw a pretty direct line IMO from 'Labour being overwhelmed by their inheritance, aggravated by those NI cuts' to 'Reform replacing the Conservatives'.

I stand by my opinion that Community is the American Spaced.

A fun game to play is the 'fake remake', i.e. if you were trying to make this show for a different country's comic culture, what it would spit out as. The British version of ABC's Superstore, for example, is Black Books.

And in both cases after season one the similarities decrease significantly

Comedy is IMO the purest expression of a nation's character, which is why none of the straight remakes really work well even across very similar countries (see, for instance: Call My Agent! - the French version is funny *to Brits*, the British version is funny to no-one).

As a lot of my followers will know, I was really quite poorly last week! Amazing job by everyone else involved to get this piece over the line with an increasingly feverish and unresponsive writer.

My essay in this weekend's @ftweekend.com, featuring terrific charts and analysis by @jburnmurdoch.ft.com:

In addition to Katie's point, what these takes all miss is a lot of people on the centre and left...haven't actually left X. Continues to be startlingly to me how many people just don't *notice* the degradation of their media environment.

In many ways it’s the outdated, antiquated way it’s been built and run now finding itself increasingly in a sea of fundamentally different systems and values. It’s that human desire to fit in, especially in an industry (commercial creative) where toeing the line is a defining skill.

Yeah, they should be aiming forTerrance Dicks but they’re hitting Terence Dicks MP (it’s not often that this comparison is apposite, so I’m going to grab it).

George Osborne was absolutely right that one problem is the corporation has “imperial” ambitions and this leads to it doing things that it just shouldn’t be doing, treating things as competitors which shouldn’t be.

I mean they should really just have a blanket ban on “comment” as a public service broadcaster, but they try and spin it as “analysis” instead and we end up with this drivel. They should just write this stuff up like a match report,- what happened, interview with the manager, Ed Davey passing stats.

I say this as someone en route to Bournemouth (for work) - 'party conference season' is not a relatable or interesting concept to 99.999% of the population and the BBC's job is not to describe the atmosphere of political get-togethers but to explain different party's policies to the general public!

The annual festival of “stop hitting yourself!“ aka the BBC’s commentary on Lib Dem conference.

Polling shows the public expects Labour to tackle poverty, but 60% say they’re going the wrong direction on the cost of living and hardship. Labour’s Deputy Leadership candidates are right to make child poverty central to their campaigns.

Asked by Newsweek whether she thought Tommy Robinson had been "unfairly demonised", Liz Truss says: “Yes, I do.” A Conservative Party serious about ever regaining power would have slung her out long ago. www.newsweek.com/liz-truss-br...