Keir Starmer is so not the prime minister the UK needs during the breakdown of the post-war liberal order. A man completely lacking in vision, despite regular donations of spectacles.
Starmer slashes aid to fund major increase in defence spending
These are my principles. If you don’t like them I have others.
Starmer and Lammy absolutely craven on Trump today.
Sir Neville Starmer and his foreign secretary are flying out to Washington to meet the Musk-Trump co-presidency at the MAGA Laager. Will they be back with a piece of paper bringing peace in our time?
The right are doing with “net zero” what they did with “woke”. Woke is “freedom, fairness, community” - few are against that. Call it “woke” and you have something to attack. Net zero is “efficient transport, comfortable homes and workplaces, low cost energy”. Few were against that until “net zero”.
Instead of producing migrant deportation porn to show how out of ideas it is, the Labour government could take a leaf out of Trump’s “stick it to the elites” book but actually do something useful with it - like nationalising the water industry, starting with Thames Water. The finance-rentier oligarchy and tbeir economist-apologists would vomit more shit than a Thames Water sewage farm about how contrary this is to the rules and norms of the “free market”. But rather than a destructive, Trumpian bearding of elites, renationalising water actually is a good idea and a net win for the country that is opposed with specious ideological justification by a group of greedy rentiers.
Well, know we know: “ensuring AI is open, inclusive, transparent, ethical, safe, secure and trustworthy, taking into account international frameworks for all … [and] … making AI sustainable for people and the planet” is “not in UK national interests”.
Timothy Snyder, getting the ongoing coup in the US about right.
The new world they imagine is not just anti-American but anti-human. The people are just data, means to the end of accumulating wealth.
Liberal democracy just died. It’s been on life support for some time now. And when the alarm sounded, when the patient flatlined, did we call for the crash-cart? No, we ambled down the corridor to get fresh coffee.
Q: What will Labour centrist politicians do now that the collapse of neoliberalism into the degenerate matter of oligarchic authoritarianism is inevitable?
A: Leverage their networks to secure lucrative consultancies to revolve into at the end of their one-term government.
Preparations for Winter Lights
A gull keeps Bird Boy company
An English to English translation error in Windows 11
When a marginally less incompetent government begins the long, slow slog to address irregular maritime arrivals, we shouldn’t be surprised the right pivots to “grooming gangs”.
In the past I’ve used terms like “deep state” or “uniparty” on short-form media as a lazy shorthand. Whatever small use these terms had, they have now been fully captured by the manipulative conspiracist discourse of the hard right. I won’t be using them anymore. They are doing more harm than good.
I’m testing something - excuse the noise.
I have come to believe that stationery is hard.
Let’s start with the 2mm clutch pencil. The Staedtler Mars Technico 780C Clutch Pencil has its faults, but has fewer than its competitors. It is the best 2mm clutch pencil. It is easier to get the black one. Try to get the blue one, which is simpler.
I can’t use LinkedIn. It makes me feel too ill.
Owen Jones nails it here.
Here is the basic truth: the Labour right ran out of ideas long ago. For the permanently crisis-stricken Britain that emerged after the 2008 financial crisis, they have no solutions
The bigger problem is that this is true of the entire UK political class, not just the Labour right.
Crikey, Apple, for £150 quid couldn’t you at least have offered backlighting?
Burt Reynolds, Peter Falk: same actor, right?