Jamie Baxter

Sky‑high living costs 💸🏙️
Childcare they can’t afford 👶💰❌
Burnout & poor work/life balance 😩💻⏰
Rising crime 🚨
Far‑right racism 😡
…and yes, the weather 🌧️☔🌪️

Notice what they didn't say:

❌Because taxes are too high
❌There’s too many immigrants

3/9

I've interviewed expats all over the world - this is why people are leaving the UK Living in Lisbon, my body is no longer in fight-or-flight mode. Other expats who have left London for warmer, safer climates feel the same

Rather than report biased junk as many do, assuming the reason is whatever policy you don’t like, a reporter from the i Newspaper had the radical idea to actually ask those leaving why they're leaving.

inews.co.uk/inews-lifest...

What did they say? 👇2/9

How to get your sugar rush this Christmas

David Miles (of the OBR) at the Treasury Select Committee: Reeves’ speech was not inconsistent with the OBR’s assessment.

We Brexiteers must acknowledge the costs of leaving Europe Breaking free from the EU has undoubtedly deepened the UK’s malaise, and it’s no use denying it

The economic damage Brexit has caused is undeniable - even Brexiteers are now admitting it.

https://www.thetimes.com/business/economics/article/we-brexiteers-must-acknowledge-the-costs-of-leaving-europe-p3mhqd66f

Hey @erinbiba.bsky.social I hope this finds you

Murray knows far more about rugby than I do, but from my neutral’s point of view albeit one affected by watching the game in a raucous bar in Barcelona, the reason that Ireland stayed in that match was by repeated cynical infringements. I can’t blame the ref for giving cards, What else can he do?

My hot take is that people in UK are voting Reform because that is easier than admitting to themselves that the neoliberalism policies that we have followed since Thatcher was elected don’t work.

Good morning to Brazilian reporter Manuela Borges, who’s been waiting eleven years for this petty moment. ❤️ 🇧🇷

C’mon Scotland. Let’s boogie all night long

Getting Britain out of the hole A plan for the UK economy

I'll share some more specific thoughts on it later, but please do have a look if you can.
It was an extremely DIY endeavour - lots of late nights spent wrangling charts, editing each other's prose, even learning how to build a website from scratch - so I hope it sparks plenty of debate!

New business idea: safety deposit box scheme based in Calais

This foul weather has meant that my boycott of American-made products until the numpty has gone has had to have a bit of a break

He’s had a cracking half

The main takeaway from these accidental prison releases is that the people of Finsbury Park are grasses

Mamdani Proves That Americans Want What We in Europe Already Have On the warning signs we recognize and the hope we share

“Trump represents a return to a past that Europe barely survived. We lost tens of millions of people learning that lesson.”

theplanet.substack.com/p/mamdani-pr...

The Essential Guide to Pub Etiquette — Pellicle It was the writer and politician Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) who famously said, “ Change your hearts or you will lose your inns and you will deserve to have lost them. But when you have lost your inns ...

The Pellicle Essential Guide to Pub Ettiquette!

Already noted as curmudgeonly by @boakandbailey.bsky.social, we prefer "righteously bothered."

Table rezzies, bogey-filled tissues in empty glasses, rounds and more, all documented for posterity.

www.pelliclemag.com/home/2025/10...

With the success of Mamdani in New York and the rise in the polls of the Greens in UK are we seeing the tipping point in demographics where the young, more progressive voters, who have been ignored for years, now outnumber the older voters as this cohort dies out?

Train hero who saved passengers during attack named The rail worker credited with saving multiple lives is named as Samir Zitouni.

What an absolute hero Samir Zitouni is - doubtless he saved lives that day

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

Of course much of this was devolved out to the East India Company which only managed to administer it by virtue of becoming the biggest corporation in the world and terrible cruelty to the people they oversaw. Is this a clue as to their preferred direction?

Look. The point I was making is that the English football team has gone DEI mad and is now unrepresentative of British society as a whole. There should be more overweight, middle-aged, unfit, clumsy, one-footed Scottish numpties like me

(If I were writing British politics as an episode of The West Wing, I'd have Starmer activate the "Hail Mary" option of saying he'll rejoin the EU in a second term. Re-polarise the electorate along Brexit lines and hope the shifts in demographics/material reality force a winning coalition.)

That a judge feels the need to say this to a head of law enforcement shows how batshit mental America has become. Best stay clear and hope there is enough resistance to force a vote in 4 years time

I have a friend who claims that he ordered a Dry Martini in a bar in Germany and was handed three of them

In fairness to Sarah Pochin it must have been very difficult for her to phrase her racist views less clumsily under the pressures of a live programme

Roasted a chicken for lunch and now the carcass is bubbling away to make a stock. I don’t know a more soothing smell

I’m not an expert in judge led inquiries but I note that the last one into child sexual abuse took over 8 years to conclude

For context, the Tories would have wanted to deport my Mother who fell in love with and married my Father, a Scotsman, and lived here for 60 years, never working but raising three sons before she died. Horrible racists cunts. I’m beyond angry

Harveys Old Ale