Oli Sharpe

People are no longing objecting to PR because they thought it would allow the far right to win - Reason: The far right are winning under FPTP and could become the government on less than 30% of the vote. They are already in control of many councils. People have had a reality check!

If I was @zackpolanski.bsky.social, I would be pointing out to the BBC that whatever model they use to justify giving Farage & his boot-lickers season tickets for every BBC show under the sun must surely now treat Green Party politicians in exactly the same way. Might even be one for the lawyers...

Want to stop Farage with your vote? At the moment you can’t – and Starmer must fix that | Polly Toynbee The PM’s in-tray is overflowing. But he can’t afford to neglect the real issue that is distorting our politics and the way we live, says Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee

“The FPTP voting system was the fortress sustaining the old parties, but “small” parties have stormed the walls. YouGov finds that Farage could become PM on a 23% vote. Voting has become a fruit machine with random results when tiny shifts bring cascading seats”
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

The two-party system is dead. How long can first past the post survive?

5 political parties separated by only 9 percentage points. An election under FPTP would be a complete lottery. It’s time to upgrade our democracy, the current electoral system is not fit for purpose. #PR

Blocked Britain Britain's water companies borrowed billions, paid it out to shareholders, and let the pipes rot. Now we're told there's no money to fix them. But the engineers exist. The materials exist. The need is overwhelming. What's missing isn't money. Money is just the record of a decision. Britain isn't broke. It's blocked.

Britain's water companies paid out billions in dividends while the pipes rotted. Now we're told we can't afford to fix them.
The engineers exist. The materials exist. The need is real.
What's missing isn't money.
Britain isn't broke. It's blocked.

😎3 Things That Went Right This Week😎

💬Google has launched a data set in 21 African languages—existing AI chatbots don’t “speak” any now—in an attempt to include the continent in the AI boom.

2026: Chairman of Reform UK says the Green party issuing leaflets in Urdu is appalling

2016: In 2016 Vote Leave published leaflets in Urdu, Punjabi and Hindi

Labour MP Clive Lewis doesn’t hold back on the Gorton and Denton result in this interview with ITV

Hope this series does for water what the Post Office drama did for Horizon victims.

The scandal of privatised water is even bigger because it affects everyone.

The common theme is clear: powerful corporate entities are exploiting us all.

Time to bring water back into public ownership.

Good blog post 👍

One tiny detail about the 2013 paper / graph you highlighted is that it assumes that management / business / finance and computing and engineering will not be automated

Of course, (re: Jevons paradox) some automation of these might not lead to less jobs, but still a pre-LLM view 🙂

Policy making in an Elysium scenario On Wednesday evening I was fortunate enough to attend the Annual dinner of the Society of Business Economists. The keynote speaker was the Ignazio Visco, Governor of the Bank of Italy,  who gave a …

Given we're all looking again at what might happen if AI wipes out firms and areas of employment, re-upping this blog I wrote back in 2015 looking at fiscal and monetary policymaker options.

principlesandinterest.wordpress.com/2015/11/12/p...

ICE Whistleblower Ryan Schwank.

"ICE is teaching cadets to violate the Constitution"

The BBC just remade Lord of the Flies — the story that taught generations humans are fundamentally savage.

But when it ACTUALLY happened in real life? Six boys shipwrecked for over a year built a functioning society.

Chakrabarti: We’ve basically created a federal jobs program to terrorize people through ICE. What if we used that instead to actually develop things — to build things people want?

It’s the same with foreign policy. We’re spending all this money dropping bombs in other countries—no one wants that.

Whoever wins in Gorton & Denton will do so on a small minority of the vote.

Thousands of voters will be left unrepresented - and thousands will know they didn't even vote how they wanted in the first place.

In 2029, this could be the case in most seats. Scrap First Past the Post now.

Obama: "The rogue behavior of agents of the federal government is deeply concerning and dangerous ... the sort of behavior that we've seen in authoritarian countries and we've seen in dictatorships, but we have not seen in America."

This is why electrification means more energy security:

In 2024, ~81% of EU electricity came from locally sourced fuels (57% excluding nuclear). Just 19% relied on imported fossil fuels.

Fossil fuels are mostly imported.

Source @ember-energy.org

An utter tragedy. Science solved this problem, but a bunch of charlatans fucked everything up and brought it back

Once again, a reminder that the "free speech" crusaders were always cynics operating in bad faith

Stop Palantir taking over our public services! Our public services aren’t for a secretive profit-hungry US tech firm. Sign the petition to tell the Government to scrap all contracts with secretive US tech firm Palantir.

Palantir, a US spy-tech firm, has been given access to millions of NHS patient records.

Its founder has said the NHS should be 'ripped up'.

Join me in calling on the government to end the dangerous Palantir contract.

you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/st...

Electricity, the automobile, radio, TV, computers, the internet—all changed the way we live.

But they pale in comparison to the revolution AI will bring about.

The question is: who benefits? It must work for working families, not just billionaires.

Don’t miss this 👇🏽👇🏽

This made me ugly cry 😭

I will never claim that he was perfect…every president in my lifetime has pissed me off for one reason or another.
But…dammit, I’m so tired of the constant feeling of uneasiness and uncertainty 😔

Raskin: "I want the whole country to look at this. This is the attorney general of the US whose job is law enforcement. We've never had a witness who has misunderstood our rules and been unable to conform his or her conduct to our rules before. Excuse me."

Wetherspoon boss urges pubs to back Reform By Henry Saker-Clark The founder of Wetherspoon has urged other pubs to back Reform UK. Sir Tim Martin, chairman of JD Wetherspoon, said Reform's plans to slash beer duty would help the sector move towards "tax parity with supermarkets". Nigel Farage's party announced a series of proposals to support pubs last week. They included pledges to cut VAT in the hospitality sector by 10 per cent, cut beer duty by the same fraction. Reform also said it would reverse the recent rise in employers' national insurance contributions (NICs) for the sector and gradually remove business rates for all pubs. The party has said it would fund this package with around 23on, which it plans to secure through reinstating the two-child benefit cap, except for families with two British-born parents. In a lengthy stock exchange filing yesterday, Martin (inset) told industry leaders "there's no question that this initiative would utterly transform the competitiveness of pubs" He said: "By eliminating the tax differential between supermarkets and the hospitality industry, and restoring margins to devastated businesses, these changes would enable pubs to regain some, or all, of their lost trade. "You would think that this offer from Reform would have been greeted by a crescendo of enthusiasm, ecstasy and support from the licensed trade and its supporters. "However, surpris-ingly, initial support has been underwhelming, at least from the great and the good in the hospitality industry" Last month, Labour announced additional business rates support for pubs. The announcement was a U-turn following complaints from pubs about rates changes in November's Budget.

Multimillionaire Brexiter, Tim Martin, urges pubs to back Reform. Just like he urged the country to vote for Brexit. Too bad if it makes you poorer. Too bad for the children he’ll push back into poverty. Tim wants more money. And he couldn’t give a shit about the cost for everybody else.
(iPaper)

This can be the site for breaking news, if journalists choose to break news on it. It is as simple as that. And that is not utopian. It is precisely what has happened the last week or so. If you weren't on BlueSky, you were late to each development.

Sort of extraordinary that there is only one obvious precedent for a prime minister winning a landslide election victory and then seeming like toast just two years later … and it’s the election *immediately* before this one.

Bricks or digits? What really limits the government's ability to spend? Listen to this first in a series of podcasts on 'The Self-Financing State' – and let me know what you think.

What really limits the UK government’s ability to spend? This short podcast offers a surprising answer.
open.substack.com/pub/frapacio...