I've noticed the extent to which "do you need a VPN for that?" has cropped up in general conversations about the Web and has become a go-to nudge nudge wink wink on podcasts. But also, there is a whole world in which this could have been easily anticipated by Ofcom and DSIT

"The United Kingdom is no longer sharing intelligence with the US about suspected drug trafficking vessels in the Caribbean because it does not want to be complicit in US military strikes and believes the attacks are illegal, sources familiar with the matter told CNN." www.cnn.com/2025/11/11/p...

John Le Carre was right about the British establishment and how the alumni of the best schools will sell out their own country for status and money and in particular a desperate desire for American attention

Trump Threatens To Sue BBC Over Misleading Edit Of ‘The Vicar Of Dibley’ https://theonion.com/trump-threatens-to-sue-bbc-over-misleading-edit-of-the-vicar-of-dibley/

Now that Guiliani has been pardoned, he's working on his credentials to be Trump's next choice for NYC Mayor.

The BBC should offer an apology, and then to underline the point, broadcast Trump's speech in its entirety, followed by footage of how the people he has subsequently pardoned responded to it.

Should Gibb be sacked? yes, obviously. He's an abomination of basic journalistic standards. His GB News channel spreads conspiracy theory & disinformation. His Jewish Chronicle newspaper spreads invented stories. He is plainly trying to undermine the BBC so it's as bad as everything else he touches.

The fact that the BBC has made serious culpable errors does not negate the point that there is a real and concerted right-wing media campaign to destroy it. Both points can be true at the same time and the campaign would not end even if the errors did.

The impossible dream some people on the British right are chasing is that you can have a BBC News operation that retreats from detail and expertise, that takes dictation from the government, but this will only create incompetence and failure when it suits you:

So make no mistake, this is a coordinated assault on one of the cornerstones of British civic life from people who want to weaken our democracy. Sadly, the BBC is so cowed it will actively abet them in its own destruction.

I do like how, in the bit of Prescott's memo where he criticises the BBC for editing together different parts of Trump's speech, his own quote of "what Trump actually said" is... edited together from different parts of his speech.

This is a substantive study into the costs of Brexit and adds to the evidence that the cost as estimated by the OBR of 4% GDP is accurate or perhaps an under-statement - which also tallies with people's perceptions. The UK has simply become less competitive.

This looks rather meaningful.

It’s easy to see why Trump wants to destroy the world’s number one news source. We can’t let him. The BBC belongs to all of us here in the UK. The Prime Minister and leaders from across the political spectrum should be united in telling Trump to keep his hands off it.

"They're looking for someone with a thick skin and recent experience of flagship BBC news programming."

So the BBC director general has had to resign because Panorama suggested that Trump tried to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election? Because obviously that never happened …

The far right of a *-different-* country!

I can't imagine a job i'd like to do less. Managing an organisation held to a ludicrous standard by roaring idiots on a daily basis, while the main mediums it uses are all in decline and it's starved of resources.

If someone had told me a year ago, that this could happen in the UK I wouldn't have believed it. Now it's all happening very fast. Even if you consider Cummings as the 'career psychopath' he always was, this is a dangerous new level.

lol

So much of Labour’s comms is just weird and confusing at this point. Surely it’s really, really easy to decide to offer congratulations/support to a wildly popular left-wing candidate who has just pulled off a historic electoral victory

This same question confronts foreign govts as well. Many have been cowed into appeasing Trump due to the very real pain he can inflict in the short term. But with his domestic weakness increasingly clear, a stiffer approach could add more pressure that weakens him even further in the long term.

The BBC headline with "migrants" is already terrible and plays into the far-right narrative. And the solution to asylum-seekers being exploited by criminals is to allow them to contribute by working legally rather than making them survive on a pittance.

🔥

I thought I'd seen everything, but Mamdani using the 2004 Bollywood hit song "Dhoom Machale" as his victory song to close out his speech, on stage alongside his wife and parents (with his mother dressed in a Saree), is *something else* Unapologetically leaning into his heritage, no "triangulation"

From this summer, apropos of nothing. on.ft.com/3ZPr6P3

Things universities can make national news for: - people on the internet are a bit upset about the speaker selection of an obscure student group, - a member of faculty copy-pasted a sentence of boilerplate methods language in her PhD thesis 30 years ago. Things no one cares about: - Bombs.

MiniMax M2 is another open-weights model out of China that feels (and behaves) like a version of Claude Sonnet 4.5…at 8% the cost. www.macstories.net/notes/on-min...

The faux-demographic ‘white British’ discourse that he helped launch in the summer was always going to pay dividends for his Far Right agenda, sooner or later

We're now at "black people aren't British". Open sewer racism. Look forward to seeing him on QT again soon.

BlackRock the latest lender to report losses based on fraud. The alleged scheme used fabricated accounts receivables as collateral for $500mm in loans. Smells a lot like First Brands, Tricolor, and the frauds flagged by WAL and ZION.

I keep being told spending cuts are easy. Honest proposals such as those recently outlined by Policy Exchange show they are not My column www.ft.com/content/f086...

I used my NordVPN subscription on rare occasions before the OSA; now I have it on pretty much constantly. Well done, British government!

It's increasingly obvious that Labour's strategy - call it Starmerism, Blue Labour, whatever - has got it badly wrong. It has alienated the party's core vote while failing to win over those leaning to Reform. There was no shortage of people warning them they were getting it wrong either.

This is an interesting piece but I just read it going “the missing bit is the section on how the internet has fried everyone’s brains”. www.bbc.com/news/article...

Would absolutely make sense if the next stage of the AI cycle -> performative layoffs by big tech to illustrate the labor-saving claims

I'm going to wait and see what they say about it on the earnings call later this week but IMO yes, management thinks they can squeeze management/white collar with AI. Whether that is actually viable or not is TBD. But there's a reason they're cutting there not on delivery routes.

"Amazon targets as many as 30,000 corporate job cuts, sources say" (Reuters) "To pare expenses and compensate for overhiring during the peak demand of the pandemic" "Figure represents ... nearly 10% of $AMZN's roughly 350,000 corporate employees"

Magisterial. This editorial talks about "the long-overdue need for an event space like what Trump is creating." I had to read it aloud in an Ernie Wise voice to make sure that's what it said.

Very funny - the BFI has acquired the Daily Star's lettuce/Liz Truss video for the national archive, because it is a significant piece of British content that deserves preservation www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-...

The first thing she can do is not take office immediately after someone who cut 20bn off national insurance.

possibly the funniest political moment of the year