Not a chance👇 Burnham needs to call an election asap & implement The Productive State. He can be Labour’s Thatcher & free us from her legacy.

Otto English@ottoenglish.bsky.social · last mo.

I see people are writing Burnham's political obituary already. It's almost as if they want this cycle of chaos. Personally I want progress and a functioning country and really have had my fill of shitweaselery

👇This paper is the future of Britain - read it & hope again! We need 10 years of this. Burnham should take the risk & call an election👇

Mainstream@mainstreamlabour.bsky.social · last mo.

On Thursday, Andy Burnham won the Makerfield by-election with an offer of bold economic and political reform that had public control and affordability at its core. Bringing that vision to life is vital. Our new paper outlines how we can begin to do that. www.mainstreamlabour.org/publications...

HOPE AT LAST! This paper is brilliant. Keynes, Polanyi, Christophers, Mamdani, Splintering Urbanism - it’s all there. Supply/demand inflation targetting? Just brilliant. Brilliant. I’m sure Haldane will be all over capital inflows & reserve tap for markets. Current acct still a problem but HOPE!

Mainstream@mainstreamlabour.bsky.social · last mo.

💥💥💥 Today, Mainstream publishes our first major research publication, The Productive State: A Framework for Manchesterism, by Mathew Lawrence and Alex Williams. It could not come at a more significant moment. Read it here: www.mainstreamlabour.org/publications...

if you have a chance, start reading / watching @thunen.bsky.social. He's just written a brilliant piece for @phenomenalworld.bsky.social which made me seek out other content. Great 2025 podcast here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tVm... Not just outstanding scholarship, this guy is very funny too👇

Signs of the Times #7 - Empire, Trump, US dollar, and American decay, with Herman Mark Schwartz

YouTube video by Sage4Age

youtube.com

Phenomenal World is brilliant. If you want yawn debates about migration & Brexit then it won’t be for you. But if you want to understand the deep global patterns that lead to populism / Brexit / tariffs / currency collapse then dig in…

Albert Pinto@70sbachchan.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Tired of magazines that sound like this? Read our new online little magazine. First issue of @phenomenalworld.bsky.social 'American Power' is out! Essays on ‘declinism,’ the dollar, the Donroe Doctrine, Iran, Cuba, Brazil, Venezuela, China, the Gulf, and more. phenomenalworld.org/issues/

The thing to remember is that Blair is happy for the UK to be a safety deposit box for capital. That was the New Labour strategy & due to low(ish) debt in the 90s, we could sustain this policy, service the interest & still have money left over for benefits & wagefare. That world ended in 2008.

Ian Dunt@iandunt.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Fascinating intervention, in that it doesn't actually seem to have any strategic intent. Just a verdict handed down from the political Galapagos of the TBI. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

With Palantir embedded with Network Rail and now with SpaceX being positioned as the primary train WiFi provider, we must ask the question: how much control is the US tech industry going to get over our railways?

Can't tell you how long I've been waiting for a mainstream UK politician to say this. www.theguardian.com/politics/liv...

Britain ‘been on wrong path for 40 years’, says Andy Burnham – UK politics live

Greater Manchester mayor says UK needs big debate about ‘how politics needs to change’ as he attempts return to parliament

theguardian.com

An optimistic thread for anyone who thinks these are dark days. The world is changing. Endogenously - the only way it sticks. Investors flocking to green energy heralds economic sovereignty & distributed power in the world to come. A better, freer, more equal world may emerge👇

Albert Pinto@70sbachchan.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Points we make in this essay: Why exactly is this shock different What are policy & mkt response China and electrotech order All energy transitions are driven by geopolitical energy shocks Hyperagency of Consumers who want solar,EV,battery Counterarguments-Oil will win!Coal will entrench!- don't fly

18/ "In the short term, the war raises export income for US oil producers In the longer term, the energy dominance strategy is self-defeating—creating profound volatility, insecurity,& intermittency that militates against investors, consumers, and govts alike" www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/daw...

16/ Trump "has made fossil fuels both expensive and unreliable. People used to worry that addiction to oil made us dependent on Middle Eastern autocracies. ...We have learnt since 2022 that it also makes us dependent on Trump, Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu." bsky.app/profile/ande...

Anders Åslund@andersaslund.bsky.social · 3mo ago

"How the oilman’s president boosted a green transition" "Trump has pulled off an improbable feat: the oilman’s president has made fossil fuels both expensive and unreliable. People used to worry that addiction to oil made us dependent on Middle Eastern autocracies.... /1

9/ Over the past decade there has been a global green industrial buildout as country after country wanted a position in new industries. The problem in the mid-2020s was not factory overcapacity, but a lack of coordinated global demand The Hormuz shock has violently solved that under-demand problem.

Well done Charles. How nice to wake up to old-fashioned diplomacy. Calm, polite but direct in his message. What a lesson in manners to Trump’s vulgar rabble. And someone deserves a knighthood for that Trump bell. It will be mercilessly memed online - which is of course, the point: eyeballs.

When this happened in WW2, I believed we called it the ‘blitz’. If I remember my GCSE history, the people raining bombs on our capital city were seen as the bad guys?

Albert Pinto@70sbachchan.bsky.social · 5mo ago

From Tehran: "It’s catastrophic. The smoke has entered our homes, the flames are still rising and it feels like the sun is shining… The flames are so bright the highways look like it’s day time. So bright but doesn’t feel right... Help please!”

Perhaps this is a good faith post but it repeats the false equivalence of invasion of Iran to defence *against* Hitler. The second problem is to conflate mistakes with reckless abandon of norms. Let us remember that Iran stood down & expressed contrition after bringing down Flight 752 in 2020👇

3/6 It runs a trade surplus because it produces far more than it consumes or invests domestically. In more familiar terms, China runs a trade surplus because it saves far more than it invests, and of course saving is just production minus consumption.

This is beautiful👇

Robert Reich@rbreich.bsky.social · 5mo ago

RIP to Jesse Jackson. His funeral is today. I wanted to share this clip from his appearance on Sesame Street in 1971. His important words ring just as true today as they did back then.

Qatar warns war on Iran could 'bring down' world economies - https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/qatar-warns-iran-war-could-bring-down-world-economies

The people who listen to Michael Hudson will already know that he is one of the most perceptive geopolitical commentators out there - trigger warning: also cantankerous & fervently anti US - but even I am stunned as his ability to predict every move in this war *before* it happened👇

NEW How Palantir captured the Ministry of Defence How a close read of public domain documents show how MoD was commercially colonised by Palantir By me, at FT www.ft.com/content/5207...

UK govt finances better than expected in January. Ridiculous single statistic obsession. Must prioritize public welfare. Unemployment rising, millions in poverty, unfit roads, unaffordable housing, NHS queues, deindustrialization, endemic profiteering. Can't rejuvenate without public investment.

UK government finances better than expected in January

The government took in more from tax receipts than expected, official data suggests.

bbc.co.uk

So SCOTUS, with its fabricated-out-of-thin-air immunity doctrine, has actually made American presidents less accountable than LITERAL royalty.

The New York Times@nytimes.com · 6mo ago

Breaking News: Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly known as Prince Andrew, was arrested in Britain on suspicion of misconduct in public office over his links to Jeffrey Epstein, the BBC said.

America: well we must have extended immunity for the president because we inherited the principle of sovereign immunity from British legal tradition, and... Britain: *arrests the brother of the sovereign*

Lioness Devouring a Man, palace of Ashurnasirpal II (Nimrud, near Mosul), Iraq, ca. 750 BCE

The wheels of justice may turn slowly, but in Britain: sleaze, malfeasance and/or incompetence in office - Johnson, Truss lose jobs Britain: Epstein dealings: Mandelson fired; Andrew arrested US: crickets. Nothing to see here. The rich and powerful do as they please.

First senior member of the royal family to be arrested since Charles I...

Suspect William & Charles escalated this. Lots of unflattering articles about the late Queen’s judgement. They needed a separation strategy.

Ian Dunt@iandunt.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Feeling quite patriotic. This is what equality under the law is meant to look like.

Oh, the grand old duke of york He ██████████████████ He ██████████████████ And he ██████████████████