Median UK voter in 2026, as predicted by Hugh Laurie some decades ago:
Had to spend time in Essex yesterday as I’m hoping to work and live there. Went to look at a house and came away feeling sad. Fully 1/3 houses in the street had Reform or “I stand with Nigel” signs outside. At the end of the road, a Haven camp. Turkeys voting for Xmas. How they are USED!
Happy 12th anniversary of the day Kim Jong Un visited the lube factory.
Oh dear gods, public procurement is hard enough for the purpose of public procurement, let alone as a device for economic policy.
Lucy Fisher@lucyfisher.ft.com · yesterdayEXC: UK govt is “stripping back” onerous public procurement rules in pro-growth shake up of system, Louise Haigh tells FT Overhaul will make job creation/skills development the only ‘social value’ requirement for biz competing for Whitehall contracts worth £90bn annually www.ft.com/content/9878...
Brilliant letter from Stuart Thompson to Jeremy Clarkson about his comments that benefit claimants should write weekly thank you letters to tax payers detailing how they spend their benefits each week.
They say they hate “wokeness,” but what they really hate is empathy. Because once you start caring about other people’s experiences, inequalities become harder to ignore, and privilege becomes harder to defend.
1/3 Strip away the theatre and Reform UK is a billionaire-backed project to dismantle the public realm, shred regulatory protections and hand what remains of state power to capital. It’s plain to see – just follow the money.
Just imagine the shape of that curve. It’s only going one way 🤘😎
Akshat Rathi@akshatrathi.bsky.social · 3d agoA few weeks ago, the world crossed a major solar milestone: 3 terawatt installed. Why did no one notice? 0.1 TW to 1 TW: 120 months 1 TW to 2 TW: 29 months 2 TW to 3 TW: 19 months Gift link to the story 🎁🔗 www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
452/ With the US strategic defeat by Iran, what are the long held assumptions that must be revised? "All the foundations of the unipolar world have vanished. " @policytensor sums up what we have learned since February. Hard to disagree with any of them.
Power is most jealously guarded by those that never earned it.
It was always unlawful, under the Highways Act 1980. But I don't suppose Suella would know that, being a lawyer, MP and former Attorney General.
Think about the wasted time between 2011 and today and rage at Cameron, Osborne and their stupid successors. Fiddling while Rome burned. www.theguardian.com/environment/...
New solar panels in Great Britain at 15-year high as fossil fuel costs soar
Boom in solar farms and home installations in first half of 2026 began shortly after start of US-Israel war against Iran
theguardian.com
🧵On @thenewsagents.co.uk yesterday, school closures and the lab leak theory were offered as two examples of legitimate questions that were hard to ask. Both have in fact been asked constantly since 2020. But here's a thread on why I think they were wrong and dangerous on school closures 1/12
Geopolitics and Security Studies Center analyst Dionis Cenusa on the Ceuta crisis: “The timing chosen for this hybrid warfare operation was not accidental… 1/
Why did the British government suppress a report warning that ecosystem collapse must now be treated as a core national security threat? That’s what Caroline Lucas explores in a column for the Nerve and in her new podcast When Nature Becomes A Security Threat, from The Rest is Politics.
New from me: Until recently, the gap between comfortably-off and just-getting-started could plausibly be crossed in a decade or two of hard work. Growth in asset prices means that’s no longer true: even a lifetime of striving doesn’t offer a realistic prospect of feeling you’ve “made it”.
In case anyone was in any doubt as to the US government’s allegiances… in fact, I am a little surprised the US hasn’t yet proposed military aid to Russia
Warspitefella 🇬🇧🇺🇦@warspitefella.bsky.social · 6d agoConfirmed today, the US DOD sent a letter to Congress in May informing them the $400m in military aid to Ukraine, approved by Congress will be withheld The funds will be used for domestic priorities such as the Golden Dome Missile Initiative & that the aid will not be released till 2029 @nachomdeo
6am-11am is that narrow window where British posts do well on Bluesky. Early bird, and all that American auto posting deluge mildly stemmed- stand by for flooding!
“Obviously not blowing up is sort of like task number one and two, or whatever” There must be a way to power the grid with Schadenfreude, the force is so strong with this one www.ft.com/content/620b...
How Leopold Aschenbrenner, the ‘golden child’ of the AI trade, was laid low
The $20bn hedge fund manager’s wild ride ended with a call to Ken Griffin
ft.com
Allister Heath in 1940: “We’ve lost the war against Germany. Time to scrap the RAF.”
Many in the migrants' rights sector have been warning about exactly this. AI is absolutely not suitable for being used in asylum cases. Not only because of the risk of "hallucination", but also because it is unable to deal with the nuance and complexity. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...
Home Office used ‘AI hallucinated’ information to refuse asylum claim, judge suggests
Upper tribunal unable to find document cited in case and claims it is ‘analogous to relying on bogus evidence’
theguardian.com
SIKORSKI: Russia used to be a rival of China, and now, with every passing year, it is becoming more of a vassal of China. Remember in the 1950s, when Mao Zedong visited Moscow, Stalin kept him waiting for three weeks, I think. And now, I think it would be the other way around.
I say this with nothing but love in my heart for the fatherland but can you imagine any other country looking at wildfires and thinking "quick, get a philosopher on the line"
We basically have to treat Musk, and his companies, in the same way we would a hostile state actor.
Sunder Katwala (sundersays)@sundersays.bsky.social · 2w agoElon Musk, owner of X, has called the editor of the Economist "a traitor to the West, plain and simple" after her recent interview with him. He now argues that "anyone who opposes remigration is a traitor" Musk has been socialising violence since Aug25: "fight or die, that's what it comes down to"
I will just say that the last time we had a figure like Elon Musk in our politics — Henry Ford — he was defanged through a combination of (a) rejection at the ballot box, and perhaps more importantly, (b) absolutely crushing consumer boycotts
Sunder Katwala (sundersays)@sundersays.bsky.social · last wk.Elon Musk's politics are indistinguishable from Paul Golding of Britain First [except Britain First is more coded on violence, while Musk has been more openly pro-violence as inevitable, necessary, legitimate since Aug 2025] The main pro-Hitler YouTuber "Zoomer Historian" is encouraged.
This specific graph is the kind of thing that should motivate radically effective government policy. The fact that the FT (!!!!) are pointing this out should cause sleepless nights across the capitalist world
Joel Suss@joelsuss.ft.com · last wk.I've written about the troubling, decades-long decoupling of pay & productivity growth The textbook says these should grow together, but reality - far from perfect competition - means capital has captured more of the economic fruits AI risks widening the gap Link 👉 as.ft.com/r/a188bb54-b...
