Matt Bishop

All Reform need to do now is replace Farage with Boris Johnson and they've pretty much got the band back together

Brilliant restaurant. There are also about a million other places there that you just fall into that are pretty much as good.

UK being ‘colonised by immigrants’, says Man Utd co-owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe Britain’s seventh-richest man, who vocally backed Brexit then moved to tax-free Monaco, also hits out at people on benefits

The Man United team last night fielded players from Belgium, Portugal, France, Brazil, Argentina, Ivory Coast, Slovenia, Cameroon and the Netherlands. One of the two English players has Ghanaian heritage. They'll all be delighted to hear this. www.theguardian.com/business/202...

Court Orders the Netherlands to Protect a Caribbean Island From Climate Change

As the world heats, places become increasing unliveable. Who pays? #NomadCentury

SPERI Blog - Progressive taxation All posts

Wrote this over a decade ago on £9k student fees and much of it still holds. The question is not “why should non-graduates pay for people to go to university?” but why have those who went for free offloaded the cost on to today’s young people: speri-blog.sites.sheffield.ac.uk/blog/2013/pr...

Plenty of French politicians simultaneously serve as mayors, both local and regional, while holding seats in the national legislature. Chirac was Mayor of Paris and a Deputy in the Assemblée Nationale and Prime Minster (and an MEP at one point).

Danny Boyle et al have absolutely nailed the 28 Years Later trilogy so far: it's really hard to see how these movies could have been any better, utterly breathtaking from start to finish

The US hasn’t been truly hegemonic since the 1970s

It's 2026 and we still haven't got to the bottom of the mystery of who, exactly, is telling students not to use subheadings in essays

Strong, if questionable, thesis statement, but lacking a genuine puzzle. Overwrought sensationalist writing. Low 2.2 at best.

The word “essay” doing a lot of heavy lifting here

There's an alternative timeline in football history where Man United never re-signed Ronaldo and Solskjaer is still the manager, delivering regular top-four finishes and decent attacking football with a team featuring lots of academy players

A new, terrifying sound “I thought Venezuelans had already heard every sound the country’s violence had to offer. But this was something new — terrifying in its unfamiliarity.”

While many argue that dangerous criminals must be treated as such, and that this strategy is essential to suffocating Maduro’s regime, the truth is that this was yet another example of how Venezuelan suffering has been normalized, minimized, and tokenized …
globalvoices.org/2026/01/05/a...

Insightful podcast

Wrong Opin

‘Rebranded plantations’: how empire shaped luxury Caribbean tourism Research shows that the British colonial wealth extraction system still influences the region’s tourist industry

www.theguardian.com/news/2025/de...

Haiti's Dire Condition--December 2025 See this video.

open.substack.com/pub/johnacar...

youtu.be/yBFIz_N3wqY?...

Unimaginable pain and fear…and no end in sight? What are neighbouring Caribbean islands doing? What will they do? How long can this continue?
@janvoordouw.bsky.social
@strongercaribbean.bsky.social
@susangoffe.bsky.social
#Haiti

Loving all the pictures of groaning American Thanksgiving tables and wondering why stuffing our Christmas turkey with marshmallows instead of boring old chestnuts and caking our spuds in maple syrup has never caught on.

Up nice and early for day three of the Ashes test. Wonderful way to spend a rainy Sunday winter morning. Should be a belter.

Has there ever been a British footballer as criminally underrated as Scott McTominay?

Social Democrats in Denmark suffer sweeping election losses PM Mette Frederiksen’s centre-left party loses control of Copenhagen for first time in more than 100 years

So it turns out that demonising migrants and making it nigh-on impossible for refugees to gain citizenship isn't a great vote-winner for the left, after all www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...

Small point, but the Coalition didn’t seek to reduce the deficit nor did they achieve it. Their goal was to *eliminate* the deficit in a single parliament and they failed spectacularly while continually moving the goalposts and seeing debt rise by hundreds of billions more than envisaged.

Not sure where this institutionally biased left-wing BBC was hiding during the Brexit and Corbyn years

Farage says small business owners who thought Brexit would cut regulation have been betrayed – UK politics live Reform UK leader claims that burden of regulation is worse than before the referendum

Er no, small businesses were betrayed *by* Brexit which pulled them out of a market of 500m consumers www.theguardian.com/politics/liv...

I’m old enough to remember when Liverpool won the transfer the window, everyone else packed up and went home and all the bookies paid out before the season even started

Incidentally, this was explained by my brilliant A-Level Economics teacher in the late 1990s: we shouldn’t view the railcard price as discounted, but rather the normal price; whereas it’s the absence of the railcard for business travellers that allows their prices to be drastically inflated.

Because business travellers could exploit them and the rail companies wouldn’t be able to extract the enormous additional economic rent (or push very price-sensitive travellers onto off-peak trains).

Price discrimination to segment business travellers on expense accounts away from everyone else. You can basically get a railcard for any possible composition of travellers except a mid-career working-age individual.

Companies that allow you to sign up for a service online should be legally obliged to make it easy for you to cancel online too

It shows just how far editorial standards have fallen at the BBC when its flagship radio news programme can describe Zohran Mamdani — a man espousing the kinds of post-war consensus policies pursued by even right-wing governments until the 1980s — as a "radical left-populist"