If you step back, it is truly extraordinary that so many people went to such great lengths and broke so many conventions and risked their political careers and the only outcome of all these efforts and risks was appointing a washed-up old spinner to an ambassadorial post
That Ganesh thinks this is 'strange', given the threat from Russia and the unreliability of America, says more about him than the EU. Calling these 'external favours' simply reveals deep naiveté. A typical failure to recognise that European integration is as much about security as economics.
So much of Labour's history since the 1990s seems to consist of things go wrong after finding jobs to keep Peter happy
The entire country has seemingly hallucinated an ultra woke 2024 campaign that featured a far left progressive candidate who lost in a massive landslide election. None of that happened!
He also glibly cites the “endlessly rising welfare budget” as a reason for insufficient defence spending. If we want higher defence spending, we will need to raise taxes to pay for it.
Without energy efficiency, the EU would need — and pay — 31% more for energy today.
Since 2000, efficiency has removed 265 Mtoe of demand from the market entirely.
The best protection against a price shock is not finding cheaper oil and gas. It's needing less of it.
www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/4833...
Over ten years ago I reviewed a book predicting the Professions like law would be drastically disintermediated by the advent of AI. My strong suspicion that they would not was based on their market power and control over their commercial environment... 1/
Chris was that rare thing....a successful business leader who understood the purpose of politics and pressed for a fairer society. He was also warm, witty and clever. RIP
1/ This Yanis Varoufakis screed made me so angry the only way I can salvage my day is to go through it line by line as catharsis.
You are welcome to come on the journey toward my aneurism with me.
An angry h/t to @sianushka.bsky.social for bringing this into my life.
unherd.com/2026/04/why-...
no offense to the hungarian people but i’m sorry, the idea that hungary is some last bastion of “western civilization” is absurd. can’t overstate how much this post-liberal, national conservative nonsense makes you sound like a putz
This is a great piece setting out why it's not just the backward-looking aspect of Labour's settlement proposals that are a problem - "the UK spent 75 years building something genuinely worth having: a track record of successful integration. And now a Labour government plans to blow it all up."
I'm a big fan of the triple lock. But this defence of it is stupid: there's no need to play off old against young (quite the opposite; the thing about the lock is that it benefits younger people more), nor to pretend that the lock is only affordable if we cut other benefits.
over on Twitter an economist I used to think was halfway sensible is still utterly obsessed with the idea that decisions on North Sea licences are the number one issue with regard to this energy crisis, and I honestly don't get how people become this deranged.
One story among many. For it is a simple fact that businesses in the UK face higher barriers to trade than their counterparts in all of our neighbours.
This is a political decision to favour independence over integration made and denied by successive governments including this one.
The Daily Telegraph's April Fools story is somewhat revealing about the newspaper's personal and relentless obsession with Ed Miliband
I get why people say this, it's powerful, but he did start with camps. Dachau opened in March 1933, the book burnings were 2 months later. He purged the judiciary in April 1933. Nazism was a violent movement from the start, street violence was crucial from day one, even before he got to power.
The 2025 numbers are really striking.
www.kielinstitut.de/fileadmin/Da...
Strikes me as an absurd threat, either we need the 4000 new training places or we don’t
Sen Mark Kelly, a retired Navy pilot, sharply criticizes Hegseth here:
“It’s not the way somebody who claims to be a person of God—a religious person—should think,” Kelly tells me, adding that war is an "ethically complicated thing" for the "serious warfighter.” 5/
newrepublic.com/article/2083...
The Prime Minister’s plan for immigration will keep people working in key industries like care in temporary status for a decade or more, it will keep people in insecure work, make them more easily exploitable, poorer and marginalised - when did that become the policy of a Labour government?
This incoherent word salad is the best Mahmood's defenders can do.
Apparently there are too many immigrants here so we need remigration, so we need to extend the period to settlement (??), but net migration may be negative and we may have too few migrants (??)
www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/...
Is it any wonder our media ecosystem is such a mess? The guy in charge of the supposedly impartial watchdog is slagging off the BBC to the right wing Telegraph - which is hostile to the BBC - & defending the fact his organisation has let GB News act share misinformation and constantly promote Reform
The entire article is damning, and the depressing thing is that it likely would have forced Hegseth out even during Trump's first term.
Councils are actually spending significant sums on carers, but much of this money flows to private firms. Typically, councils pay around £35 an hour, while the carers themselves receive only £14–15. A massive misuse of funds.
I’m sure Mark Rutte will be happy to explain why this is actually a ‘huge favor’ Donald Trump is doing for us in Europe. Source for the quote above is here. www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...
But as you say, who cares what they think.
Point is Irish food doesn't get stick from Americans or others. The NYT even does pieces like this on Irish stew, which they would never do about the identical (British) stew: www.nytimes.com/2025/03/17/d...
Significant day for UK trade policy. With the announcement of the EU-Australia FTA the UK now only has an FTA where the EU doesn't with Malaysia and Brunei as part of CPTPP. The EU meanwhile has a deal with Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay that the UK doesn't.
Le Pen arriving in Budapest, Trump endorsing Orbán, Vance on his way, Netanyahu also calling for a pro-Orbán vote.
I have never seen the European and wider (ironically) global far-right publicly uniting to swing behind a candidate in a national election in Europe so far:
You don’t have to caveat your condemnation of the burning of an ambulance.