"Outside the pandemic, if you are looking for a job, you are competing for the lowest number of vacancies in the last 10 years."
@maxmosley.bsky.social writes for @lbc.co.uk
www.lbc.co.uk/article/job-...
A certain subset want global development in the abstract but not any change to the hierarchy of national wealth
see also hand wringing about Poland catching up UK economically. okay… why exactly shouldnt that be happening?
Black maternal health awareness week
It's Black maternal health awareness week! Black women are still 2.3 times likely to die in pregnancy, childbirth and 6 weeks after in the UK (MBRRACE, 2025).
Find out more from Five X More: buff.ly/62E66lG #BMHAW26
Expecting to be thrown under the bus as she felt her colleague Michelle Thomson had been a few years previously, she says she warned Sturgeon that “if she took me down, I would take her down with me”. Cherry, “scared and trembling with rage”, told Sturgeon she had a “friendly journalist teed up and ready to go” to expose the fact that her own complaints against senior figures in the party had been ignored by party headquarters. The revelations, she claimed, would expose the first minister as a hypocrite.
anyway this is a pretty interesting little nugget, is it not? transphobic politicians conspiring with friendly journalists to attack political opponents? you'd have been called a conspiracy theorist if you suggested this was obviously going on
Can you steer a ship if you don't know where you're going?
On the need for a vision of the world you're trying to create in order to make policy 👇
wonkwatch.substack.com/p/utopia-and...
Lord Robertson says the government needs to abandon the "lethargic thought process of the post Cold War" era and instead get onto a proper war footing like Ukraine Finally, Lord Robertson says there has to be a national conversation on defence - something that Sir Keir Starmer said would happen 18 months ago. The public needs to understand the threat and to realise that there will have to be some difficult spending choices made for the UK genuinely to bolster its security in a "very very turbulent world" He finishes by saying: "We need the whole country to wake up. The clock is ticking"
It’s striking that none of these guys ever say the need to urgently rearm means we need to, say, sharply jack up taxes on the top 50% of earners. A thing that would surely work, and quite easily too. If it’s that important, then it’s surely a must.
I find it hard to believe that 4% of people have heard of Restore Britain
Can you make policy if you don't have a vision of what the world you're trying to create actually looks like?
We've certainly been trying! New blog on the role of utopian thinking in policymaking, and what happens if you try to do without it 👇
wonkwatch.substack.com/p/utopia-and...
BBC News leading all its bulletins on demands by former Government advisor Lord Robertson for more defence spending, without at any point mentioning his current paid senior role for US defence lobbyists
The Sun's accounts are out and I haven't seen anyone report on them so... *Pre-tax loss of £31m *Revenue down from £296m to £273m (Sub now in the same ballpark as the Guardian) *Phone hacking costs (now into its third decade) of £36.6m *Big fall in audience but still claim to be UK's number one brand
It’s been a long time since the Sun made a profit, which raises questions like “what is the paper’s actual purpose, if it isn’t for making money”.
wonkwatch.substack.com/p/utopia-and...
Can you make policy if you don't have a vision of what the world you're trying to create actually looks like?
We've certainly been trying! New blog on the role of utopian thinking in policymaking, and what happens if you try to do without it 👇
wonkwatch.substack.com/p/utopia-and...
"Wrapped in bloodied bandages, Aline Saeed, 7, barely survived the Israeli strike on her home in south Lebanon last week. She was there to bury her father as hopes of a truce spread across the region, but a new strike killed her infant sister and other relatives."
My hot take is that this reflects changing cultural norms about what’s an acceptable answer to the question “are you happy”
Jesus - I had no idea. Straight secret society stuff
Do Straussians believe that to be literally true? In a conspiratorial way? I had the impression they were more saying only select geniuses like us can actually understand the big books, because we are the inheritors of the intellectual tradition or whatever
Wow can I buy shares???
*takes look at waiting times for ADHD diagnosis*
"how about we do this for all conditions?"
Policy Exchange here implying that there's something nefarious about people sharing tips to navigate the benefits system.
All of this seems like good helpful content to help people get what they need? Rather gives the game away that the point of bureaucratic forms is to put people off.
A bit like how earthquakes get more powerful the longer they don't happen for, the longer 2010s authentocracy goes on, the more powerful the wave will be
The electoral dividend for a political party that says "there's nothing wrong with being middle class or living in, or even just liking, the city of London" is going to be enormous.
People in politics talk about downwardly mobile graduates with total contempt and I find it very confusing.
What exactly are you annoyed with them about?
An entire generation of policy wonks have done nothing in their careers except fight fires and manage decline.
New blog explores what the effects of this might be 👇
wonkwatch.substack.com/p/theres-no-...
Mad that residential Stamp Duty is so damaging and yet raises such a small sum of money.
Plucking a single feather from a goose and breaking its legs in process
They’ve become the default option for… a lot of Tories, no? because they represent the same interests and same people, no? So in that sense are the actually an “opponent” of anything the tories actually want or stand for? Again, my point is if you think of interests, not teams.
If you think of representative democracy not as a team sport, but as a way in which actual interests inside a country seek expression - is there any actual group or interest who are represented by the conservatives who won't be represented by Reform?
Are they wrong?
From an Italian journalist in Beirut.
'Hundreds of people killed, civilian buildings hit'
Thanks Paul!