Chris Wilkins

Polanski here exhibits classic main character syndrome, as in believing that others are only ever responding to us as opposed to pushing their own agendas.

What really strikes me is their utter inability to see how this sort of language is not just morally wrong, but very clearly helps their opponents.

Journalists are desperate to write 'young people are voting for Reform stories' even though the data simply does not back it up.

Donald Trump: US president named inaugural Fifa Peace Prize winner US President Donald Trump receives the inaugural Fifa Peace Prize before the draw for the 2026 Fifa World Cup.

It’s weird that news organizations like the BBC are covering this as if it’s a real thing with a real process behind it—and not clearly some nakedly invented “participation trophy” by a corrupt organization to curry favor with a corrupt and easily manipulated man-child. www.bbc.com/sport/footba...

It’s Elon’s EU tweet

This is pretty much exactly like a European saying the United States should be abolished, so that the governments of individual states can better represent their people.

It’s a take, you’re entitled to it, but what’s it got to do with you, buddy?

Really great piece this. But the thing is, none of this is a secret. This is the world we’re now living it. Yet we’ve still just managed to go through an entire budget process that barely referenced any of this important context or to make any provision for us to respond. Time to wake up.

Second Strike Scrutiny Obscures Larger Question About Trump’s Boat Attacks

“There is a risk that the focus on the second strike and specifically the talk of ‘war crimes’ feeds into the administration’s false wartime framing and veils the fact that the entire boat-strikes campaign is murder, full stop,” sagt @becingber.bsky.social — völlig zurecht.

We have this cycle over and over of people panicking over the assumption that Trump can reshape the global order when the more likely trigger for global crisis is Trump generating disorder in America that collapses the US.

Europe needs to prepare for a post-American world.

This is a good piece and I agree with all of it. But I'd add that a lot of Americans on encountering Actually Existing England come down with a version of "Paris Syndrome" - a widely recognised phenomenon described as....

This whole thread on the US‘s new national security strategy is worth reading, but this point on its incoherence and self-defeating nature is important

The new National Security Strategy is a propaganda document, designed to be widely read. It is also a performative suicide. Hard to think of another great power ever abdicating its influence so quickly and so publicly. It will be worth following the reactions around the world, not just in Europe.

Worth following @shashj.bsky.social for insights into the US’s new national security strategy published overnight. It’s a real window into the bizarre parallel world in which its authors live.

The Trump National Security Strategy is an act of vandalism against the things that actually make our country strong, safe, and prosperous.

But this economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure. The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence. Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less. As such, it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies. Many of these nations are currently doubling down on their present path. We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation

US national security strategy.
Something sure is unrecognisable here, but it’s not Europe.

www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/u...

Farage has been dismissing evidence of Russian ties to the Salisbury Novichok attack since 2018 🧐

Good and important piece by @robertshrimsley.bsky.social highlighting why the government needs a sense of urgency that it sadly lacks

There was a time when Americans would have laughed at this sycophancy. And that would have been all of American history before now.

The madness of our justice system in full. We complain about prison overcrowding and end up releasing a load of people early, then put two men in prison for cutting down a tree.

Nearly 1 in 3 schoolchildren in Glasgow do not speak English as their first language. This is not diversity. This is culture smashing Reform UK will make this a big issue in our campaign.

A: Who gives a fuck apart from racists?

B: His figure is wrong. 71.2% of Glaswegian children speak English as their first language.

C: So that's 28.8% who speak it as a second and I'll bet you they speak brilliant English and that it's much better than most Reform voters I've met online.

Brilliant

Essential thread

Labour are still not serious about defence PM and chancellor need to fill the gap between soaring rhetoric and pinched reality at the MoD

The budget debate we should actually be having…
www.thetimes.com/article/646f...

Good. Bye bye. Off you go. But again, they haven't 'defected'. They're not MPs. They just joined Reform online like any member of the public can.

if only there was a recent speech where the chancellor could have made this case to a packed House of Commons 😉

A lot of people need to hear this. @jayrayner1.bsky.social is 1000% correct. on.ft.com/4rnR3lb

When I was the DS speechwriter for Theresa, Nick T and I determined we’d use speeches to make big arguments and put ideas at the heart of politics again. And we did. TM made some meaty, challenging speeches. But try getting most political correspondents to report anything beyond the superficial.

This is right. Budgets are essentially works of fiction. We spend ages analysing things that will most likely never happen.

Keep reading that No 10 denies the Chancellor misled people ahead of the Budget, but they don’t seem to have an alternative explanation. We’ve all seen the timeline and the evidence. What else is there? Did she just not read the OBR documents?

“A European intelligence agency distributed a hard-copy report in a manila envelope to some of the continent’s most senior national security officials...inside were details of the commercial and economic plans the US had been pursuing with Russia, including jointly mining rare earths in the Arctic.”

It takes a special kind of right-wing British political party to literally sell black shirts.

Are you going to tell them?

Or shall I?