Mark Appleby

Today’s Green recruitment policy - “we will confiscate family heirlooms from destitute refugees fleeing war.” bsky.app/profile/sund...

I can only assume that Shabana Mahmood has given up all hope of ever winning the Labour leadership.

I similarly assume Labour is giving up on holding almost any of its seats in the Scottish parliament next year. Or about half of its inner city councils.

The Grift Bubble A Political Theory of American Collapse

"The Grift Bubble: A Political Theory of American Collapse"
"Those who work against the grifters... may be acting from love, or from law, because they know that these things are real. And so they should also know, in acting thus, that they are the patriots."
snyder.substack.com/p/the-grift-...

I do hope those sensibles telling me that Labour's new policy was fair and sensible are enjoying Tommy Robinson's endorsement of it this morning.

That's who you've joined.

Tommy Robinson.

On incompetence Much of our political culture is fundamentally incompetent.

New Substack: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/on-incompe... Parts of the Labour party and BBC simply don't know what their jobs should be.

Nandy sinks Telegraph sale… is Paul Marshall waiting in the wings? US investment firm RedBird was all set to finally buy the title - until the culture secretary said it would need to go through a public inquiry

Little @thenewworldmag.bsky.social diary scoop – word on the street is Lisa Nandy’s intervention sunk the Telegraph sale to Redbird.

Meaning the Labour culture secretary has defended the Telegraph’s independence more fiercely than the BBC’s this week…
www.thenewworld.co.uk/rats-in-a-sa...

Mahmood expected to axe permanent UK settlement for asylum seekers The Home Secretary is expected to announce asylum seekers can only stay in the UK temporarily.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Labour is like some primitive creature who only has a single response to stress.

In Labour's case it is to do a racism.

Pathetic.

Today is the 50th day of strike action by junior doctors over the past two years, despite their 28.9% pay rise, while the NHS remains trapped in permacrisis and patients suffer

Hundreds of thousands to lose heat pump subsidies in Reeves’s budget plan Exclusive: chancellor plans to fund energy efficiency levies via warm homes plan as part of drive to lower energy bills

This will kill the heat pump market.

And that means cuts in investment in the whole system: tech, skills, supply chain, business investment.

And the subsidy is not a *benefit*, it's designed to equalise the choice between gas and electric.

www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

In 2015 I wrote that Trump, Grillo, Corbyn and UKIP were the revolt of people who hate being told it is more complicated than that. Tim's lovely piece discusses populism and the aversion to the cognitive effort needed to dismiss convincing-sounding bullsh1t. Free link above 2/

Russia’s first autonomous humanoid robot staggers and falls on debut Go home, comrade clanker, you look drunk – and worryingly angry A semi-autonomous humanoid robot said to be Russia’s first such machine has fallen over within seconds of facing the public for the first time.…

Russia’s first autonomous humanoid robot staggers and falls on debut

The Roman figure Trump most resembles is not Caeser of course. It's Marcus Licinius Crassus. Used his public position for mass extortion. Cared little about people, only his own wealth. Obsessed with precious metals.

He did meet with a sticky end when forced to drink molten gold. Different times.

The Prescott memo flunks the impartiality test | The Observer

Good piece by David Aaronovitch on the Prescott dossier: observer.co.uk/news/nationa...

DON’T LET ELON GET HIS HANDS ON IT.

Milan prosecutors investigate alleged ‘sniper tourism’ during Bosnian war Groups from Italy and elsewhere alleged to have paid Serb soldiers to shoot Sarajevo residents during siege

The allegation here is that wealthy tourists paid to be able to shoot human beings. Perhaps killing wildlife wasn't enough for them. If true, psychopathic scarcely begins to cover it.
www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...

Conservative Shadow Culture Secretary Nigel Huddleston tells GB News that the BBC should "grovel" to Trump.

Amazing how many British 'patriots' are spending their time telling our national broadcaster to prostrate itself before a hostile foreign leader

at one point in his life, Andreesen invented the graphical browser. Ever since then, he has done his level best to make sure that rather than this, his obituary will read "That Shitco Guy".

"Hey, student, we saw you from across the bar and really dig your vibe. Can we buy you a drink?"

Over the weekend, one British institution saw off the populist right - the National Trust, whose members once again swatted away the Tufton Street-funded 'Restore Trust' lobbyists

Today, another British institution, the BBC, is in grave danger from Trump, Farage & co

bsky.app/profile/sund...

Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show Meta projected 10% of its 2024 revenue would come from ads for scams and banned goods, and it internally estimates that its platforms show users 15 billion scam ads a day, company documents show.

Meta take in $16 billion a year from running scams www.reuters.com/investigatio...

I agree with Jennifer Lawrence in the New York Times

The 'Great Noticing' Era Ever since Labour came to power, the British media has started to notice a whole series of problems they spent the previous 14 years completely ignoring

How ever since Labour came to power, the British media has started to notice a whole series of problems they spent the previous 14 years completely ignoring
www.adambienkov.co.uk/p/the-great-...

Ultimately, a reckoning is coming. There has to be an honest conversation with the public. The Budget is just stage one.

The problems are not just resources but can't be resolved without them.

These aren't unique to the UK by any means but have been exacerbated by stupid politics over a decade.

Flashing Red Why the criminal justice system should be top of No. 10's "shit list"

The theory of change thus far has been: push systems harder and they will deliver. The problem is numerous public systems are fundamentally broken:

- Criminal justice
- Local Government
- Housing/planning
- Tax
- Trade relations
- HE
- Childcare
- Some benefits

open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/f...

This is like the alternate history in which Kim Philby became head of MI6.

While US polarisation predates social media it doesn’t really predate the end of broadcasting impartiality

Basically the US has been living with social media style partisan bias for decades, and now Europe is catching up (with similarly disastrous consequences)

Will policy makers now respond?

Insane data from Germany shows how social media is geared towards more fringe political views. The left bar shows the share of uploaded videos by party on TikTok and the right bar shows what videos are shown in the feed. Social media loves the extremes and is NOT a fair mirror of reality.

Hundreds of thousands of people, dead because of a decision made by the world's richest man

BBC really burying the lede there

Elon Musk's $1tn pay deal approved by Tesla shareholders The richest man in the world will get hundreds of millions of new shares if he hits his targets.

It is both ethically wrong & fundamentally anti-democratic for one man to command this much wealth and power.

States spent centuries trying to tame the power of over-mighty subjects. The rise of the global barons is not compatible with democracy as we've understood it.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...