Chris Terry-Enescu

Terrific piece. I had missed that the Reform council in Kent is *already* complaining about tightened visa rules for social care.

It also sort of raises questions about the lefts own approach. OK so if deliverism is dead, why do you think ending austerity will help win elections.

I do sometimes wonder if the British right would be embracing this so eagerly if Nigel Farage hadn't meant that Kemi Badenoch wasn't basically the chief game in town

a cartoon of spongebob sitting next to patrick star ALT: a cartoon of spongebob sitting next to patrick star

Well for one of you at least

It's also that twitter no longer moderates it ofc, but the three feed into one another

I'm not saying you're wrong, but given YouGov exclusively surveys online, this would suggest they've uh confused the survey with a page on a website they should need age verification to see

Wow

Alternatively: securely attach him to a windmill blade

Or did, possibly

Few months later, split announced, interview in the Radio Times.

Rob Grant says something along the lines of "a teenager told me at a book signing that he'd been watching the show all his life and I realised I had to do something else"

Someone I used to know liked to claim to be the catalyst behind the split. At 13 years old he went to a book signing with Rob Grant and gets asked "how long have you watched Red Dwarf" "well all my life"...

Literacy and liberal democracy, I dare say. (The two are of course, not unrelated)

I think linguists certainly feel there's no evidence to suggest they are in any way. The only similarity to any other language they can detect is with some Caucasian languages but that might just be coevolution.

In Argentina people do genuinely do this with inflation figures because no one trusts the official government ones. Consult your local Latin America expert today.

This is an exciting opportunity to be the company that produces the new 'independent jobs numbers' bulletin, that everyone else in the financial markets follows instead of the official statistics.

Yeah, absolutely.

Kathy Cramer writes on this very eloquently. People may well have an imagined hierarchy in which they are, say, working class, but see themselves as having a certain dignity because they're not at the bottom. If groups 'underneath them' become more mobile, does that mean they are at the bottom now.

I think what you're trying to get at is essentially people wanting to have their place in a certain imagined hierarchy. I think a big thing causing the current rise of right authoritarianism is a kind of status threat. Not really to do with capitalism per se except we live in a capitalist system, so

Hampshire has a legitimate claim to be the heart of Wessex too. Winchester was the capital.

I mean we could just call it the Westcountry, like everyone there already does

If I'm being nice, I'd suggest it might be because driving into Bristol is hell on Earth. If I'm not being nice I might suggest it's because of uhh Bristol's demographics not looking like those of its neighbours, shall we say

Yeah I do not feel the 'Heart of Wessex' thing will prove to be a goer

There is also a third council that borders Bristol, North Somerset but the people there so hate Bristol that they've refused to join.

The 'West of England' region, in comparison, is a region composed of Bristol, and two council areas whose voters predominant mission in life is to have as little to do with Bristol as humanly possible

The model fundamentally is modelled on how Greater Manchester operates but Greater Manchester is a city region where there's a fairly strong identity and the councils basically never stopped cooperating after Thatcher abolished the metro counties.

I'm not sure that's actually necessary on that basis. The mayors are pretty good with coordinating with one another, by and large. I do think a problem is that mayors are essentially mediating institutions between local councils mind and some local councils are better at cooperating than others

I think this is frankly what the city mayor devolution agenda does broadly get right though. If you want to create a more regionally equitable UK you need cities which can compete elsewhere in the country.

Tbf California is a smaller component of the US than the South East is of the UK. The US is also very unlike the UK because the UK is basically one megacity whose gravitational force exerts on the whole country whereas the US is big enough to have several megacities and regions far from all of them

I think even if you split it up there's inevitably going to be a region where the best available name is 'South East England' just because of the nature of the geography of England.