Kientha

Says so much about the state of politics when so much of the centrist response to the PM raising EU relations is to say this is all terribly hasty and wouldn't another 10 years burying our heads in the sand be better while the populist right propose smashing it up further.

What is the BBC's justification for maintaining this level of coverage of Reform now it has slipped into third place?

The rush to speculate that asylum seekers are responsible for every crime in the news is a sort of opportunistic informational terrorism. Until it’s disproved it stokes fear and hatred. When it is disproved there are no adverse consequences and they know that they only have to be lucky once.

disagreeing with Urdu election material is silly. the more interesting question is why Polanski is campaigning in Urdu in a constituency with hardly any Urdu speakers

We like to assess tax cuts by the "bang for the buck": the amount of GDP growth that each pound of tax cut creates. Here's our updated rough and ready estimate for fifteen different tax cuts: Universities UK's proposal is right near the bottom.

One reason England does so well is our second generation immigrants outperform their peers which is not true in most OECD countries. We are also very good at integration. And it's v sad that this is never acknowledge in debates on immigration.

It’s really weird reading weird supposedly pro small business stories when you run a small business. This paperwork is not what bothers you! It’s a minor annoyance! It’s the taxes on hiring young staff, the cliff edges, and the sense your fellow small companies aren’t paying any tax at all.

He was listening. He said "yeah, that was great" when the fake US donor described paying for the polling, and that it was "a very modest investment". And, unprompted, "front page of The Times". www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I can't remember a clearer smoking gun than that Channel 4 News footage. Nigel Farage and his senior aides all filmed discussing apparent plans to break the law by funnelling foreign money into British politics, plans which at least partly went ahead. A criminal investigation surely must follow

This is pretty catastrophic and I'm not sure how either of these companies reverse the trend. It really appears the AI bubble is based on the whims of maybe a few hundred companies spending money on two companies to justify five companies spending money with one company.

New immigration stats show that the numbers of asylum seekers in hotels is down to 16k - falling 50% in a year. Small boat crossings down 23% in the year to June. Numbers waiting for initial decision down from almost 180k to 40k.

The backlash against tech (coming for driverless cars as much as data centres) seems to have surprised governments as much as the changes caused by it in the first place... begging the question as to whether policy makers need to be getting out more www.ft.com/content/a30e...

V bad BBC coverage. Graduate vacancies may well be down - perhaps 5% or 10%) Little/no chance down by 50% - and it is absurd to have listings on one website being down 50% as evidence for this headline from the national broadcaster One for BBC Verify + FactCheck www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

This article must have been written at least a couple of hundred times now, without anyone ever making a convincing argument for it. £100,000 puts MPs comfortably in the top 4% of earners. How would putting them in the top 0.5% instead make them any better representatives of the remaining 99.5%?

I think we need to be talking more seriously about the gap between polls and reality. All part of the social media effect (the intl reputation is the obvious marker here, deranged US culture warriors do not reflect the hordes of visitors)

No one wants this! Westminster has redicalosed itself against net zero targets. The public has not! These policies are popular, not least because the public only has to look out the window to see the need for climate action.

Was just watching HF's report and he is still peddling the line "there is some confusion". Reform said that Essex Police advised Farage there was a credible threat against him. Essex Police went on record to say that they did no such thing. The only people "confused" by this seem to be journalists.

Since when do the UK police have a role in sentencing and prisons policy? This is overreach All I can see are groups objecting but not suggesting alternatives

As with so many part of the UK public realm, there's a graph and it shows "something happened in 2010 and we became a society with lesser public capacity to respond to unexpected challenges"

The boats they are using are bigger but the overall number arriving is smaller. This is what a successful enforcement policy would look like - more boats are getting stopped forcing change of strategy by smugglers - but you would not know this from the alarmist bbc “LARGEST BOAT EVER” push alert

I have enormous sympathy with people angry that the political vandalism of our prison system is forcing the (even earlier) release of prisoners. It is a scandal. But deciding who does and does not get released on the basis of the volume of public outcry at their crime is the road to madness.

And good luck finding businesses to offer meaningful work experience to hundreds of thousands of 14 and 15 year olds. As ever a failure to acknowledge that our big challenge with vocational ed is our labour market.

It's not just that they got it wrong it's that believing the original shows such a fundamental misunderstanding of the immigration system.

In November, a lobbying firm approached me and asked to pay me to write articles critical of the Building Safety Regulator for newspapers. Filmed undercover, their staff admitted secretly paying reporters for copy in British newspapers friendly to their clients: www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

lmao if your reaction to the prime minister committing to abolishing rough sleeping is "this won't play with the median voter" then you really have drowned in the cult of savviness

All of Burnham's big Cabinet moves so far (keeping Miliband out of the Treasury in favour of Healey who wants a big defence spending hike and keeping Mahmood in the Home Office) look designed to please the right-wing press. Let's see how it works out for him

This is a genuine shame. Timpson was a rare example of an “industry expert” parachuted into government that was rooted in genuine expertise and integrity. With a prison brief burdened by cost cutting and punishment rather than investment and rehabilitation, Timpson feels a particular loss.

Just briefly on that unbelievably stupid Falklands thing iandunt.substack.com/p/football-e...

i say this as an extremely avid video game enjoyer: gamers are easily the worst consumer base on the face of the planet, incomprehensibly entitled and insufferable about a miraculously accessible product and industry

Her murder is tragic, I just don't think we can have a sensible policy debate about how to protect MPs in a context where, notionally, one of the parties is arguing that the Tories should pay lifelong protection for, say, Giles Brandreth.

You'd think the intelligence services having to raise the national terror threat level because of a surge in Nazi terrorism might have been a bigger story

It is NOT a “loophole” that Commonwealth citizens who have been permanent UK residents since before 1973 cannot be deported. It was Parliament’s deliberate decision in the 1971 Immigration Act. It is based on hundreds of years of free movement between the Commonwealth/Empire, abolished in 1973.

This is why @stephenkb.bsky.social is right the BBC shouldn't do comment. Their rules on impartiality make it impossible not to do "on the one hand" caveats to the point of absurdity.

Nigel Farage has just claimed that men in London are too afraid to wear watches in public, which is just transparently nonsense

Every single political party or potential new leader... but I can get growth through... magic beans... and not being the useless other people who failed.

Also: the unspeakable hypocrisy of these people saying refugees should 'pay their way'. We have spent years, decades actually, begging the Home Office to let asylum seekers work so their could have some meaning and material advantage in their life, to no avail.

Weird how the right both believe Thatcher's council house sale is the best policy in history and that anyone who benefitted from it is bad and wrong.

No it is not an "unwritten rule". It is a possible choice that is not made 66-75% of the time Yes: 1955 (snap, success, then failure) 2017 (11 months, failed) 2019 (6 months: success, then failure) No: 2022, 2022, 2007, 1990, 1976, 1963, 1956, 1937.

I hate to break it to the European diplomat quoted in @politico.eu this morning, but increasing the return rate will make no difference to the far right. They will just move on to demanding forced remigration. It’s not like there aren’t hundreds of examples of this already.

"If we don't adopt AI, we'll get left behind! China is adopting AI on a wide scale, we can't afford to lose out." New research done on Chinese students using AI found that in the short term, scores go up, then long term, students do on average 20% worse on exams.

This is no more about the details of immigration policy than the progroms my great great grandparents fled were about Jews committing crimes. It's straightforward racist violence and it needs the strongest possible response.

Everyone on X and elsewhere who called for a violent response should be charged with incitement. Everyone involved in the pogrom should be locked up with exemplary sentences. Govt should make it clear that will be the response in future anywhere else. Enough.