John Rendel

Absolutely insupportable. Labour have a massive majority. It’s a hugely popular issue. To fail to act would be a dereliction of historic proportions, and utterly inexplicable.

And they should throw in electoral reform and stronger social media regulation at the same time.

Great thread.

Either PR or AV would be a major step forward, so there’s a pragmatic case for going for whichever had the better chance of winning popular support in a new referendum.

The one on the left es más como un burro

Christopher Harborne has cemented Reform’s status as a mo... New political donation rules won’t stop him giving as much as he likes

In the second half of 2025, one man accounted for almost 40% of all money donated to political parties in the UK: a crypto-billionaire who lives in Thailand.

Britain desperately needs to rewrite its party funding rules.
observer.co.uk/news/the-sen...

Different hands …

Yeah.

One worry, beyond those in your piece is the East India company analogy. Land, expand, pay-off various reformarajahs to secure further territory, fund a paramilitary force of racists and then merge with the imperial power that wants to protect the monopoly value being extracted.

Do you take Anthropic’s comms at face value? They seem the most value based of the big AI but who knows how much of this is positioning.

Either way, his email is obviously true in respect of the actions of their competitors.

It’s all a bit more urgent and pragmatic for them these days …

A suspiciously round number too …

Perhaps. The key thing is that his position places principle over short-term pragmatism and I hope/optimistically expect that to serve him well at the next election.

And if I am being naive, then at least it will serve him well in the eyes of history.

Maybe but the mid-terms are around the corner and Trump’s power could ebb fast. Keeping him on side for 18 months might end up being the right balance.

Trump should back-off criticising Starmer.

Starmer may be a slightly ineffectual leader but he’s our slightly ineffectual leader.

And he has more moral backbone in his little finger than you might find in the entire mar a lago resort.

The poor chancellor. Just when it looked like she could start to report some good news …

Yep. Sadiq Khan is absolutely right to hone in on authenticity as being the key and the big thing that is missing. Voters can sniff out inauthenticity miles off.

Also, massive sandwich.

Is war, peace?

Trump seems to have timed this attack to avoid flooding the news space, ensuring the Clintons got maximum embarrassment from their deposition. Dark days.

Maybe it’s an LLM spewing them out for him?

Right. FPTP is producing governments that seem illegitimate to voters. That must be a big part of why it’s so hard to govern atm.

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The problem is power asymmetry not misalignment. ‘Misalignment’ is just the other side of plurality.

“I have searched the depths of facts not yet verified.”

"The voter is always right.“
A 🧵 about a popular yet misleading sentence, the nature of representation, and a personal argument that got me thinking about (British) democracy.

Exactly. The ‘re’ in the word representative is critical to the system’s effectiveness.

Most importantly, if asked, voters would agree that they want their leaders to use their values and professional judgement to lead (including making unpopular, longtermist decisions) not follow opinion polls.

Whatever you do, don’t think of a big, orange elephant.

Does the data back that?

Bad Bunny has secured the concept of love for the woke liberals. Game over.

If you trust the trust enough to manage the school, you should trust it to oversee spending RISE funding appropriately. The moral hazard (trusts letting schools struggle in order to access funding) isn’t a major issue as trusts are strongly incentivised to see all their schools do well.

It would make much more sense for the government to give RISE funding to the MAT overseeing a school in need of RISE. Gov. could agree a set of clearly defined goals. If the Trust fails to improve the school, the school should be moved to another Trust.