one of the funny things about this awful advice is it would basically guarantee a Reform majority at the next election.

A Reform govt will absolutely destroy the UK's fiscal position, along with plenty else

would be very happy to take the other side that.

Markets won't have a meaningful response if Burnham becomes PM until/unless they actually launch an inflationary budget.

These kind of statements, especially when in 'campaign' mode, are very heavily discounted

They will just... break things. Things we treasure. Things we depend on. Things our lives will be much more difficult without. They will just break them, and laugh, and blame foreigners and wokists.

Make sure you absolutely do not skip the part of this interview with Cass Sunstein where he defends his relationship with Henry Kissinger by saying “he was nice about my Star Wars book”

also a state has totally different incentives to private investors and should be happy not making, even losing, money to expand abundant, cheap clean energy production

Agree there, although I also think production for solar ends up so commoditised it's easy enough to reroute over time (arguably already seeing that dynamic for EVs in Europe)

Totally agree with that.

Also stupidly I didn't clock this is chat from VCs (not public mkts Investors) which puts a different spin on it. Of course a bunch of western VCs went to China once and then decided to give up on clean tech funding forever

Take the point elsewhere here about looking for innovative western firms taking a different approach.

but I think that framing accepts that current western renewable firms are at a tech + cost disadvantage. Which is why even saudi is buying solar from china not the states or europe

isn't the point that the western firms have hard budget constraints and have to compete with a bunch of chinese firms that don't?

hey you can't expect him to research his columns

looking forward to the whiplash when Trump invades Afghanistan again and we join to support the 'humanitarian intervention'

I think what I'm saying is, it would be so nice if we tried something for a change

A huge and ongoing problem for the UK (and EU) is that its elites don't want to accept the nature of its relationship with the US, how dangerous that is due to the authoritarian turn in the US, or do anything about it.

So having anyone prominent, even Nick Clegg, say this is very positive

The National's coverage of the far-right lately has genuinely endeared them to me in a way that little else over the years has. It is the only newspaper to approach this exactly as it should be approached, which is by going on an unapologetic attack against it.

I mean there's still a very important distinction between your show is cancelled, you get banned from social media, etc because 1) people hate you vs 2) the state will favour corporations that restrict your speech and plausibly harm those that don't

A vain, immoderate faith in these institutions made it possible to overlook the fact that their vitality was gone. The machine could still be heard clattering along, so no one asked if it was still doing its job” - Carl von Clausewitz on Prussia in 1806

I was genuinely shocked by just how antisemitic a lot of the right immediately went with their conspiracies about Kirk getting shot

A lot of this stuff could have been avoided if more mainstream/influential liberal institutions had simply told these people to Fuck Off much sooner

that meme of the us stabbing itself while china and europe look on in horror but they're all stabbing themselves

Increasingly really think that we might be in a slow-motion civilizational breakdown as people prove psychologically incapable of dealing with the complexities of modern life.

... They've actually not drawn a crowd much larger than the pro Israel marches. This is not a movement with mass support.

In a showpiece event they have been trailing for weeks, with the added publicity boost of this week's murder in the USA (which was all over British social media) they still couldn't get more numbers than Trans Pride. Not only are they smaller than Palestinian solidarity marches...

Of course the other big effect of slash and burn deregulation is to make anyone who invested in good business practices feel like an idiot as they get out competed by lower cost cowboy operators

another of the things I will keep saying is that we have an elite impunity problem and nothing will improve until and unless we change that

the "tax the billionaires" political refrain is Good Actually in part because it is a call for the people at the top to actually be constrained by rules informed by the public interest, a virtue that fingerwagging correctives about how much revenue such taxes would *really* generate doesn't address

an underrated source of instability over the next few years is Israel's continued desperation to start a full-on regional war

Tice is politics by retired people for retired people

we are clearly experiencing a crisis of elite accountability.

the rise of far right politics might seem like a response to this crisis, but it's not. Instead it represents total nihilism towards the concept

This Epstein birthday book, which is regrettably online and accessible, would in a normal world compel the resignation and/or arrest of everybody in it. And as of right now, the utter depravity displayed therein is the floor for how bad the details might get.