‘A quiet, radical act’: Muslim neighbours support members of attacked London synagogue After attempted arson attack, communities are determined to remain resilient and open

Read the article to restore your faith in everything. This is why I love the UK, specifically London, specifically Finchley.
www.theguardian.com/news/2026/ap...

Our evaluation of Claude Mythos Preview’s cyber capabilities | AISI Work We conducted cyber evaluations of Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview and found continued improvement in capture-the-flag (CTF) challenges and significant improvement on multi-step cyber-attack simulati...

This paper represents a small but deeply impressive and genuinely important achievement by the much maligned British state in what is probably the most important global issue of our era.

Hear me out ( 🧵) 1/

www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/our-eva...

Lebanon is such a grim example of Israeli hubris and its folly. Israel had countless opportunities to negotiate a stable peace with the Lebanese govt, but time and time again chose invasion and/or mucking about in Lebanese civil wars via exploitable proxies. Why? Two reasons...

The bases should never have been opened to US use. They should now immediately be closed to them. This is patently the case. It is a military power with explicitly genocidal intent. Given how severe that danger is, the reassurances of its military officials about authorised use are insufficient.

"Under a 10-20 year system, a worker would spend a decade or more in which their entire immigration status — and [thus] their family’s home, their children’s schooling, their right to remain — depends on maintaining the goodwill of a single employer. That is a structurally coercive relationship."

Yes - I've certainly come to view my Irish passport differently over the last two years, and in a similar way my (naturalised citizen) partner and I have started to view the potential utility of a marriage certificate somewhat differently as well

It's true I think to the extent that we are generally safer in societies with an ongoing commitment to multiethnic democracy, and what is often meant by solidarity is actually just doing things that uphold that commitment, rather than a transactional "if we have this group's back they'll have ours".

How would we know? The Conservatives in 2019 and Labour in 2024 both ran on impossible promises and most of their partisans have spent the time since complaining that the voters are unreasonable. When was the last chance you gave them to *be* reasonable?

Its really fustrating that Labour has such talented MPs like Polly and Uma - who get the scale of the interlinked challenges we face - and they're on the backbenches while the govt continues to bury its head in the sand as to what is going to hit us.

But behind the scenes, Israeli officials have conveyed a more targeted message. In private calls to local leaders across southern Lebanon, Israeli military officials have assured several Christian and Druse communities that they could remain in the evacuation zone. They have pressed them, however, to force out any Lebanese from neighboring Shiite Muslim communities who have sought refuge among them as Israeli bombardment flatten Shiite towns, according to local Christian, Druse and Shiite leaders who spoke to The New York Times. The Shiites make up the majority of southern Lebanon.

So what this describes is ethnic cleansing www.nytimes.com/2026/04/01/w...

Denmark's immigration lessons for Labour Copying the country's tough stance on migration no longer looks like such a good idea

Does Labour really want to do it like Denmark? I've written about why the strategy is increasingly beleaguered,

www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/728...

Earned settlement: retrospective change is wrong but prospective change is even worse Changing the rules for migrants already here is wrong and unfair but only affects a finite group of people. Extending default settlement to 10 years or more for everyone is a social policy disaster.

Great piece by @colinyeo.bsky.social on Shabana Mahmood's migration reforms - key point: regardless of whether the change is retrospective, tying visa status to an employer for 10-20 years is a very bad idea if you care about integration or labour market outcomes. open.substack.com/pub/wewanted...

The meme-ridden discourse of our era is no longer fully capable of communicating the scale of the crises we face.

This attack has really brought it out but it's been noticeably getting worse for the past few months

The worrying thing is that despite the absurdity this stuff is *everywhere*, on X as you would expect ofc but Instagram comments sections are also full of it.

We unreservedly condemn the abhorrent antisemitic attack on Hatzola - a Jewish volunteer ambulance service which provides life saving emergency care to those of all faiths and none. Our thoughts are with all those affected by this reprehensible act.

British right must not allow prejudice to be masked as principle In history, curtailing religious freedom has only ever been the road to horror — the Tories can choose not to repeat it

Today's newsletter. Cheery topic!

Low Pay Commission Remit 2026: National Living Wage and National Minimum Wage

I missed this: Govt published LPC's remit for the 2027 minimum wage rates on Monday (the rates coming in next month are already set).

Main take-away is Govt wants a more cautious approach to the youth rates. It has dialed up the 'worry about employment' bit of the remit.

www.gov.uk/government/p...

Good thread, this is the key point. Far too many people in British politics seem to not understand that ultimately the thing causing the energy price shock is...the world doesn't have as much energy as it did before Trump invaded Iran, something with real and deadly consequences.

Doesn't mean it won't work but it's a different thing imo!

Still not sure if I buy it as flexicurity, I can see it for removing the 2 year cutoff but otherwise it's still raising hiring + firing costs. Meanwhile ik they have proposals to improve it but even then we're set to continue with one of the least generous UI systems in Europe.

@timleunig.bsky.social clearly someone in the treasury has been thinking about the spinning jenny

A Guardian Live blog entry that says: Reeves asks officials to draw up plans for fiscal devolution Boom! Rachel Reeves then tells her audience that she has asked the Treasury to work with mayors and businesses to develop a roadmap for future fiscal devolution. This plan will be published at this year’s budget. It will set out plans to give regional leaders control of a share of some national taxes – which Reeves points out have long been allocated by central governments. It will include income tax, she suggests. The chancellor says these reforms will begin with places which have the greatest capacity to deliver them and the greatest potential to benefit. She insists that it is “not about new taxes, and it’s not about higher tax”, promising “I will not ask taxpayers to pay more”. These reforms will be fiscally neutral, focused on sharing and retaining a portion of existing revenues with the places that generated them, she says. Reeves promises: These reforms will represent a permanent transfer of power and resources, not another exercise in local ambition. Taxpayers will be able to see what is being delivered with their money and hold local leaders to account for the results, she insists. She calls it “a genuine break with the past”, calling it: A generational opportunity for Britain’s regions to make their own future.

A genuinely big announcement on English devolution from Rachel Reeves today!

As we at @instituteforgovernment.org.uk alongside others have argued fiscal devolution was a missing piece of the puzzle in the government's devolution white paper.

Interesting that in the year of the Mokyr Nobel, the government has gone all in on Bob Allen thought!

Mais Lecture 2026 On 17 March 2026, the Chancellor Rachel Reeves gave the Mais lecture at Bayes Business School.

I think Rachel Reeves’ Mais lecture today does a good job of setting out the thinking behind the government’s growth strategy.
In her telling, it combines planning reform (to get more stuff built) a more active state (to invest in key sectors) and raising labour costs (to get companies to invest)

Word of caution that owners' imputed rents play a big role in that figure, but from the appendix it doesn't seem like using the user cost changes things that much post-covid (it does before)

Figure from Distributional Consumer Price Indices, Jaravel 2026, showing that the middle of the income distribution saw the highest inflation rate from 2020-2022

Great post - I think relevant here is that unlike pre-covid, it was the middle of the income distribution that saw the fastest inflation (from Xavier Jaravel's D-CPI project). www.xavierjaravel.com/_files/ugd/b...

E.g. one of the proposed solutions is expansion of social housing specifically in the "outside the line" areas - not obvious to me without a structural model whether that would lessen the inequality/segregation or entrench it.

And this is v economist of me and quite pedantic, but I do think it matters! I worry the magic feeling of ML makes it easier than normal to slip from description to explanation & policy without interrogating that step.

Yes for sure! I find the analysis v cool & useful, where the blog slightly loses me is when it says "this variable is an outcome rather than a cause" (it and others are both without a causal design), and "these policies would address this" (maybe, but difficult to say without a specified model).