James Kane

The sinking Telegraph How the paper that was once the bible of Home Counties Tories has ended up on the outer reaches of prejudice and fantasy

About The Telegraph – by one of its former journalists.

open.substack.com/pub/bangingo...

Yes – although it shows how far we’ve fallen that the success of a chain bookshop owned by a US vulture fund is cause for celebration.

I don’t disagree but you may not be the ideal front man for this policy

Sorry, are you seriously implying Israel would have refrained from providing that info and let its embassy be attacked because it didn’t like UK policy? There must be better examples of intel sharing that would be jeopardised than that… www.thetimes.com/uk/defence/a...

We at @instituteforgovernment.org.uk have coordinated a letter in @thetimes.com today in which numerous individuals and organisations call on the government to withdraw its mistaken rules which are having a serious chilling effect on civil servants speaking in public…

Keeping an eye on things An editor's note by Joshi

If you live in or near Manchester, and/or if you care about great local journalism and wish you could find more of it, you need to read this from @joshiherrmann.bsky.social

manchestermill.co.uk/keeping-an-e...

Parliament should be able to impose Trump-style travel bans, says Badenoch – UK politics live Tory leader says lawmakers should have the ability to bring in such measures on ‘a country-specific basis’

It's been a while since I checked my understanding of parliamentary sovereignty, but I think it… already can?

www.theguardian.com/politics/liv...

Maybe "their voters" are not aging homeowning social conservatives who happened to work in manufacturing 30 years ago?

Hard to see the EU as geopolitically serious if it does this.

This also happened in the 2001 election in the UK.

it is insane that we use FPTP for this ... and mad also that people in the Labour Party see it as cynical, pragmatic and hardheaded not to be interested in changing the rules

Re-upping this for Sunday since everyone else is again talking about how ridiculous FPTP is becoming for local government.

Strange new world | Andrew Orlowski | The Critic Magazine An impatient group of young, self-confident, AI-obsessed policy wonks is trying to re-shape Britain — inspired and funded by American tech billionaires.

A very funny takedown of the very weird and not a little disturbing Anglofuturism thing - pleased to be quoted in it. thecritic.co.uk/issues/may-2...

New study reveals wealth inequality was never inevitable A recent study published in the journal PNAS is overturning traditional wisdom regarding the origins and inevitability of wealth inequality

This is good stuff.
archaeologymag.com/2025/04/stud...

My particular hatred is fast casual restaurants (mostly in US) that refer to “your protein”. No, chicken, pork and tofu are not interchangeable nutritional units to be inserted into a dish ad lib.

The EU is likely to treat any suggestions for European reform from Nick Clegg with the same respect it treated suggestions for European reform from JD Vance

Curiously, it’s also directly opposed to what was generally believed to be the UK’s interest pre-Brexit. For a country with a large deficit on goods trade counterbalanced by a services surplus to sign up to a customs union without free movement of services is … a choice?

You should tell RGW about this

Clips from this series are now part of a Christmas tradition in my house. Members of my family can quote sections of her classic speeches verbatim.

The position on collective responsibility re assisted dying does seem a bit odd. In eg Brexit the govt had a position, but ministers were allowed to dissent from it. Here the govt doesn’t have a position - that should make it more straightforward for ministers in favour & against to make their case

“Arrogantly capitulating” is a phrase and a half.

@torstenbell.bsky.social is right, see my substack - timleunig.substack.com/p/how-to-pre...

I have visited a fair few food factories and always had the same feeling: they are cold, noisy, sometimes smelly. On the other hand many of the workers seemed to enjoy their jobs. Hard to know whether automation will increase or reduce aggregate human happiness.

Had never picked up before on the connection between the Arabic word for “definite article” (lām al-ta‘rif) and the English word tariff: both a definite article and a tariff being connected with determining things.

Charles Moore Rachel Reeves’s attack on the family farm is a recipe for a latter-day peasants’ revolt Inheritance tax changes which threaten the rural way of life have the potential to create a coalition of the discontented

Moore has more claim to being a historian than I do, but I don’t think that the original peasants’ revolt was to do with inheritance tax on ownership of substantial amounts of land.

It doesn’t seem like a good long term strategy for individual European countries to resist integration and collective policymaking, and wind up dependent on the preferences of 5% of the voters in Pennsylvania.

Thus devices to get around the outdated but unalterable law like (in England) equity and legal fictions like the common recovery.

Maine makes the curious point in his Ancient Law (I have no idea whether it has been disproved since) that the idea of simply amending the law to harmonise it with changed social conditions occurs startlingly late in most legal systems, where it occurs at all.

Trump Flirts With the Ultimate Tax Cut: No Income Taxes at All The former president has repeatedly praised a period in American history when there was no income tax, and the country relied on tariffs to fund the government.

I miss voodoo economics. The claim that tax cuts pay for themselves was empirically crazy, but it had some logic to it. The claim that taxes on imports don’t raise consumer prices is pure self-serving magical thinking www.nytimes.com/2024/10/24/u...

Can a thwarted career be compensated by a panegyric epitaph?