The fact that immigrant children of basically every ethnicity outperform native-born Americans in standardised test is so well established it has a name: the immigrant paradox.

Polanski here exhibits classic main character syndrome, as in believing that others are only ever responding to us as opposed to pushing their own agendas.

What really strikes me is their utter inability to see how this sort of language is not just morally wrong, but very clearly helps their opponents.

Journalists are desperate to write 'young people are voting for Reform stories' even though the data simply does not back it up.

It’s weird that news organizations like the BBC are covering this as if it’s a real thing with a real process behind it—and not clearly some nakedly invented “participation trophy” by a corrupt organization to curry favor with a corrupt and easily manipulated man-child. www.bbc.com/sport/footba...

This is pretty much exactly like a European saying the United States should be abolished, so that the governments of individual states can better represent their people. It’s a take, you’re entitled to it, but what’s it got to do with you, buddy?

Really great piece this. But the thing is, none of this is a secret. This is the world we’re now living it. Yet we’ve still just managed to go through an entire budget process that barely referenced any of this important context or to make any provision for us to respond. Time to wake up.

“There is a risk that the focus on the second strike and specifically the talk of ‘war crimes’ feeds into the administration’s false wartime framing and veils the fact that the entire boat-strikes campaign is murder, full stop,” sagt @becingber.bsky.social — völlig zurecht.

We have this cycle over and over of people panicking over the assumption that Trump can reshape the global order when the more likely trigger for global crisis is Trump generating disorder in America that collapses the US. Europe needs to prepare for a post-American world.

This is a good piece and I agree with all of it. But I'd add that a lot of Americans on encountering Actually Existing England come down with a version of "Paris Syndrome" - a widely recognised phenomenon described as....

This whole thread on the US‘s new national security strategy is worth reading, but this point on its incoherence and self-defeating nature is important

The new National Security Strategy is a propaganda document, designed to be widely read. It is also a performative suicide. Hard to think of another great power ever abdicating its influence so quickly and so publicly. It will be worth following the reactions around the world, not just in Europe.

Worth following @shashj.bsky.social for insights into the US’s new national security strategy published overnight. It’s a real window into the bizarre parallel world in which its authors live.

The Trump National Security Strategy is an act of vandalism against the things that actually make our country strong, safe, and prosperous.

US national security strategy. Something sure is unrecognisable here, but it’s not Europe. www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/u...

Farage has been dismissing evidence of Russian ties to the Salisbury Novichok attack since 2018 🧐

Good and important piece by @robertshrimsley.bsky.social highlighting why the government needs a sense of urgency that it sadly lacks

There was a time when Americans would have laughed at this sycophancy. And that would have been all of American history before now.

The madness of our justice system in full. We complain about prison overcrowding and end up releasing a load of people early, then put two men in prison for cutting down a tree.

A: Who gives a fuck apart from racists? B: His figure is wrong. 71.2% of Glaswegian children speak English as their first language. C: So that's 28.8% who speak it as a second and I'll bet you they speak brilliant English and that it's much better than most Reform voters I've met online.

Brilliant

Essential thread

The budget debate we should actually be having… www.thetimes.com/article/646f...

Good. Bye bye. Off you go. But again, they haven't 'defected'. They're not MPs. They just joined Reform online like any member of the public can.

if only there was a recent speech where the chancellor could have made this case to a packed House of Commons 😉

A lot of people need to hear this. @jayrayner1.bsky.social is 1000% correct. on.ft.com/4rnR3lb

This is right. Budgets are essentially works of fiction. We spend ages analysing things that will most likely never happen.

Keep reading that No 10 denies the Chancellor misled people ahead of the Budget, but they don’t seem to have an alternative explanation. We’ve all seen the timeline and the evidence. What else is there? Did she just not read the OBR documents?

“A European intelligence agency distributed a hard-copy report in a manila envelope to some of the continent’s most senior national security officials...inside were details of the commercial and economic plans the US had been pursuing with Russia, including jointly mining rare earths in the Arctic.”

It takes a special kind of right-wing British political party to literally sell black shirts. Are you going to tell them? Or shall I?

I hate that this is necessary, but it is. So it’s good that things are moving. www.politico.eu/article/euro...

"I do think this budget creates an opportunity for the Conservative Party," says Jon Sopel. "You could see the reinvention of the Tories as a Thatcherite party, saying it must stop the ballooning size of the state, and demand a fundamental reform" www.thenewsagents.co.uk/article/i-ho...

Utterly surreal that a key part of the pre Budget narrative from the government hasn’t been ‘Russian planes keep buzzing the Essex coast, US support for NATO is looking shaky, and thanks to the Tories our army fits in Old Trafford - that’s why we need to raise taxes’.

"Brexit, in other words, is both cause and consequence of a lot of what is going on in our politics today." 🗣️ @anandmenon.bsky.social of @ukandeu.bsky.social – based in the Policy Institute – recently gave his reflections on the "Brexit Revolution" for the Mackenzie-Stuart Lecture at Cambridge Uni

The movement to destroy liberal democracy is international, and so must be its defense

beginning to believe I would actually vote for a dead pigeon on a stick if it just promised to restore the fuel duty escalator

"My beloved working class" - i.e. the one that exists in his head, but in real life has always rejected this particularly ugly strain of 'you don't deserve commercial television, nice holidays or little luxuries' whenever Labour have taken it to the public.

He seems genuinely unable to explain what a Kamala Harris Panorama episode should have reported, given she did not actually lead an insurrection against the Capitol. And yet it's a point he keeps returning to as if it's one of his best.

*Dandles grandchild on knee* “Yes, junior. It is funny looking back. But in the olden days someone decided the right way to mark the birth of Christ was to have amateurs edit the country’s foremost current affairs programme.”

The honest budget speech... "This year we're putting pensioners ahead of growth. We're prioritising reform voters over growth. Incumbent businesses. Tax advisors... And the party opposite can complain, but they did exactly the same thing. In UK politics, this is called change"

The plan says that "A dialogue will be held between Russia and NATO, mediated by the United States." This implies that both Russia and the Trump administration don't see the US as part of NATO in any real sense. That should deeply alarm every other NATO state.

The UK has the most progressive tax system in the developed world, argues @jburnmurdoch.ft.com As @duncanrobinson.bsky.social wrote for @economist.com, the Tories created "an unbelievably progressive tax system". on.ft.com/3JPv6dP economist.com/britain/2025...

With Nigel Farage currently on track to be the main beneficiary

Complete madness that the UK seems all too keen to replicate

“Delighted?” Ok then… I fear they have no idea what they’re doing.

100% this. Media is not the same as comms.

In a similar vein, Theresa May should have stuck to her social care policy. She'd already taken the hit for it, so she might as well have at least addressed one of the most intractable problems in British politics

If someone has travelled thousands of miles, paying everything they own to an exploitative people smuggling gang, risking their life in a deadly channel crossing, I do not want to be the person who takes their last valuables – a mother’s necklace? A gift? – from them. And nor should the rest of us.

The biggest divide in British politics atm isn’t left vs right or open vs closed. It’s action vs inaction. Voters just want a govt that does something. Not sure they always care very much what that is. But have an idea and stick to it. A long way of saying, I think @igmansfield.bsky.social is right

After several years of chaotic populism voters hoped for some calm efficiency. Instead the govt became obsessed with being in permanent campaign mode despite a huge majority. Starmer was elected to provide boring competence. This is the opposite. 6/6