This looks rather meaningful.

While going through the proofs for "The British General Election of 2024" (out very soon!) I came across this - Paul Johnson of the IFS's verdict on Labour's manifesto last year. Labour's current attempts to claim the need to break their tax pledges was impossible to forsee don't stack up

It's Reagan that makes it

The story of how a dilapidated Hammond Organ and the Shipping Forecast gave Blur the perfect ending to a perfect album. timworthington.org/2024/07/10/l...

Not first order news... but interesting Bank of England Decision Makers Panel out today (a survey of companies that MPC members watch) 📉 Employment expectations turn negative (albeit slightly), 1st time since Nov 2020 📈 Wage, CPI expectations tick higher (latter highest since Dec 2023)

Incredible

Meta earns $3.5 billion every six months from showing Faceboon and Instagram users 15 billion “higher legal risk” scam ad impressions a day, internal documents state. That haul vastly exceeds how much the company expects regulators To fine it for running scam ads. www.reuters.com/investigatio...

“We will never use the main tax levers at our disposal no matter how bad the fiscal picture gets” is a terrible message to give when you’re reliant on the confidence of bond markets. The political cost of not doing dumb things is surely a cost worth paying especially since they’re already unpopular.

🚨🚨This is stellar investigative journalism by @kaitlintosh.bsky.social and @michelleinezsimon.bsky.social on how #elonmusk is boosting the #british right. 🧵 news.sky.com/story/the-x-...

i mean, gilt yields are pretty well behaved for a situation where apparently everyone in the City thinks we're gonna default on.ft.com/43eNFhX

Drop me a line if you: 💁have an interesting story to tell ⚠️think an issue needs national press attention ☕️have insight into big institutions or powerful people 🙊heard interesting rumours or gossip DM/Signal in bio @reuters.com has a long history of protecting sources

Today I'm back from an extended period of paternity leave. Trying to remember what the Bank of England does. Thank you to the makers of 'Kojak', 'Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares USA' and 'Four in a Bed' for the past few months.

Democrats sweep first major elections of second Trump term - www.reuters.com/world/us/ele...

What an absolute hero Samir Zitouni is - doubtless he saved lives that day www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

🚨Budget preview🚨 The upcoming Budget is a make-or-break moment for the Government. Read our preview of the key decisions facing the Chancellor now⤵️ buff.ly/XPioKOp

This strange photo has popped up as a "10 years ago" memory on my phone.

I can’t stress this enough: you cannot understand politics without reading this paragraph about why there’s no such thing as a 1/3rd pound hamburger

Lol I just asked Grok whether Grokipedia is more neutral than Wikipedia and even it can't lie about this

Elon Musk is once again inciting violence on British streets because the government has taught him there are literally no consequences for doing so. They even carry on using his far-right social network to promote government policy as he does it. The absence of backbone is *astounding*.

In the first half of this year, the income of President Trump's family business soared 17-fold to $864 million, based almost entirely on new crypto ventures that have been a magnet for overseas cash, a Reuters investigation found. www.reuters.com/investigatio...

I think this is the weirdest story I've ever reported. www.londoncentric.media/p/terry-ball...

Interesting and grim. I guess we move to a world where only videos from verified social media handle or verified handles of trusted media brand are taken at face value. Everything else might be fake.

🎃

Good news www.theportugalnews.com/news/2025-10...

I've been working with Demos to turn the Verification, Deliberation, and Accountability (VDA) Framework into a report that lays out how it can be used to diagnose the state of democracy and build solutions around building the capacity for those functions in institutional and public spaces.

What Bastiat called the "broken window fallacy"; a pretty shocking indictment of GDP measurement. I wonder how this compares to other countries www.bloomberg.com/features/202...

A policy this expansive would certainly mean mass stripping of permanent residence status from people with ILR (including pensioners and parents of British children) on a scale far beyond anything any democracy has ever done before. There is no public support for such an extreme policy.

This, this, this. If journalists don’t scrutinize this and explain it properly now then they have failed on their duty and will bear a share of the blame if such policies are enacted (most of the public oppose them and don’t I think realise what is being proposed yet).

MSNBC captured the crowd from the Boston "No Kings" rally:

Some casual Francophobia from ChatGPT

̶N̶o̶.̶ ̶N̶o̶.̶ ̶N̶o̶.̶ Yes! Yes! Yes!

Liz Truss finding that rare polling 0%

This deserves more attention than it has received. Gove: "we were too anxious as a government to secure those deals in order to show that Brexit was working". Exactly as so many of us warned at the time, and as the government denied at the time. www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/country-and-...

Teeny house guest brought in by the cat last night.

'When authoritarians seize power, it is crucial to recognize courageous defenders of freedom who rise and resist,' the Norwegian Nobel Committee said as it announced Maria Corina Machado as the winner of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize

Hamilton warned that without Senate confirmation, a president might appoint officials "who had no other merit than that of being in some way or other personally allied to him, or of possessing the necessary insignificance and pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of his pleasure."

Trump’s war on the left: Inside the plan to investigate liberal groups - www.reuters.com/legal/govern...

Excellent point

Reuters/Ipsos poll finds strong majority of Americans oppose Trump’s use of soldiers as cops, also “Trump's approval rating on crime fell in the latest poll to 41% from 43% in a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted September 5-9.”

Airbus A320 ousts Boeing 737 as most-delivered jet in history reut.rs/3IyvEEl

This photo from Portland by @reuters.com's Carlos Barria 👌

Some of London’s poorest areas could see their share of the children’s services funding formula halved under Labour’s plans to reform local government grants. By me, for Politics Home: www.politicshome.com/news/article...

What an admirably clear statement from the Jewish Leadership Council, especially when all of those involved must surely have been dealing with so many other urgent challenges in safety, security and grief + shock today before having this further divisive and distracting intervention to address too.

None of the proposed two-child limit options are as efficient in lifting children out of poverty as fully scrapping the policy. Fully abolishing the two-child limit should be the starting point of any successful Child Poverty Strategy. Read more➡️ buff.ly/DyvTYGN

One funny thing in OBR forecasts & maybe a reason to be more fiscally cheerful: they assume markets are right about high future borrowing costs (compare to Europe), but separately assume that inflation will be 2% and nominal pay growth very low. Fiscally the worst of both worlds, but not consistent?

Interesting line in the Wikipedia profile of New Zealand psychologist Nigel Latta, who died the other day aged 58.

I do not understand what Labour think the immigration system is for. I accept there are many possible answers here but what is their ideology that drives this?

The biggest puzzle in the UK economy is why non pension savings are so high For decades no one could get Brits to save. Now they won’t stop. That this has happened without a recession shows UK economy under last and this govt is not the basket case I read about

You don't have to be in hock to bond markets. You just have to have tax and spending plans that wouldn't melt the calculator of a seven year old

I do feel a bit like I am going insane today, in that the sheer number of 'government sources' going 'Andy Burnham's plans don't add up!', I mean, true, but lads, can we talk about how similar they are to *your* plans?