Good thread. And a chance to remind ourselves of this superb piece by John Kay: www.ft.com/content/bfb7...

Pure evil. And they're not even trying to hide it.

Selecting for inadequates Our political system selects in favour of mediocrities.

Seeing the talk about Kemi Badenoch reminds me of an old piece of mine on why politicians are selected to be so unimpressive: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/selecting-...

Bad incentives in politics In politics, nobody has an incentive to promote the public good.

New substack: how bad government is in part the product of bad incentives: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/bad-incent...

The entire Democratic strategy debate — "moderate" or move left? fight or compromise? — is based on a misreading of data. Voters don't think Dems are too progressive; they think Dems are weak. The actual math on what to do about this isn't even close!
New: www.gelliottmorris.com/p/new-poll-d...

Why Biden-era clean energy investment policies had limited political returns | PNAS The Biden Administration enacted the largest federal policy framework to incentivize clean energy and decarbonization in U.S. history. We examine w...

Mandatory reading. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Policy-making as gardening Policy-makers must be more like gardeners than mechanics.

Blogged: some similarities between policy-making and gardening. chrisdillow.substack.com/p/policy-mak...

I've written something on Lisa Nandy's rhetoric of popular empowerment and her record in office. It speaks to a broader problem on the contemporary centre left: politicians seem to think they can say whatever they like, and act completely differently.
modernmediatheory.wordpress.com/2026/02/18/r...

This is good. I'd add that the Labour right defeated the left not by appeasing it but by marginalizing it, in part by not talking about its strong points (a critique of capitalism). So why does it think the opposite strategy will work on Reform? mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2026/02/how-...

At its latest meeting, the BoE's Monetary Policy Committee said Budget measures to hold down regulated prices - including for fuel, electricity and rail fares - would cut inflation by 0.5 percentage points in the next few months. This would help inflation return to the 2 per cent target a year earlier than expected, it added, from 3.4 per cent in December. Inflation data for January will be released on Wednesday. Some MPC members think these measures could have a more lasting effect reassuring households that prices will not keep soaring, taking the heat out of pay talks, and ending a wage-price spiral that made the UK's post-pandemic inflation problem bigger and stickier than in peer countries. But other economists are sceptical of governments' ability, in the UK or elsewhere, to engineer a lasting drop in inflation unless at exorbitant cost.

Another example of how we are returning to the debates of the 1970s, another time when the economy was hit by external shocks, including a POTUS seeking to dismantle part of the post war economic architecture. And traditional policy responses were failing

Is the fall in Reform's poll ratings a mirage? Welcome to the 195th edition of The Week in Polls (TWIP), which dives into the data to see if it is true that the apparent fall in Reform’s support in the polls is simply a mirage caused by changing l...

Reform are now averaging 28% rather than 31% in the Autumn, as @samfr.bsky.social notes & looks at why

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

@markpackuk.bsky.social shows it is a real dip in Reform support, not an artifact of Don't Knows moving around

open.substack.com/pub/theweeki...

Britain Lost 14,000 Third Places. They Were Called Pubs. Is Your Local Next? How private equity reshaped the local and the postcode tool that shows the pubs most at risk.

Amazing analysis of pub closures in the UK, by @laurenleek.eu, and the corporate interests behind them. Some important political and policy implications open.substack.com/pub/laurenle...

Note for sceptics: getting away from "rigid mathematical formulas" & being more "ethically conscientious" needn't mean being less rigorous: see eg Sraffa, Roemer, agent-based modelling etc.

Rethinking Economics, the movement changing how the subject is taught Born of student disquiet after the 2008 crash, the group says it reshaping economists’ education

Rethinking Economics, the movement changing how the subject is taught www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Be more Roy Jenkins on the absence of "win wins", Growth, Labour's predicament

"If you want to set aside resources for your future productivity, that means setting aside consumption" @gilesyb.bsky.social is right: gileswilkes.substack.com/p/be-more-ro... I suspect decades of mass unemployment has blinded politicians to this awkward implication of full employment.

Britain’s worst political scandal of this century The Mandelson affair threatens Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership

Had forgotten until reading @duncanrobinson.bsky.social’s peerless column that Peter Mandelson once publicly said Keir Starmer was too fat.

This is a key point. The Government is sacrificing integration to seek to curb immigration.

Which is absurd and rolling the pitch for further disintegration with a swelling migrant underclass in terms of quality of life and social and political status. Where do we think that might lead?

The Mandelson crisis is a crisis of Labour's leadership project The scandal of the Peter Mandelson crisis and his relationship with the convicted criminal Jeffrey Epstein is immense.

Helpful here, and the trend with these stories is always that it’s much more bleak and dishonest than the official account says it is modernleft.substack.com/p/the-mandel...

Simon Nixon (@nixonsimon) Just published my latest newsletter with thoughts on Trump’s economic victory lap, Kevin Warsh’s fairy tales, America’s embrace of neo-royalism, how to invest through regime change, and why Chinese te...

These are always worth reading, and this one more than most (although I keep misreading rupture as rapture) substack.com/@nixonsimon/...

The GREATEST democratic backsliding than ANYONE HAS EVER SEEN. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

New report: a serious unintended consequence of the Government’s tenancy reforms.

Hundreds of thousands of ordinary tenants will be dragged into an annual stamp duty calculation and filing regime.

This work we @powertochange.org.uk did with @luketryl.bsky.social is a reminder of this potential

What's the best thing to read on what the hell is going on with the Chinese army and Xi purging the entire leadership?

Avoid a basic election analysis error with this one neat trick… Don't build conclusions on voter movements from change in aggregate vote share

Written a short explainer on one of the most common and avoidable errors in election analysis at the moment: building conclusions on how voters are moving from vote change.

Share it with anyone who needs to see it, which includes an alarming number of people in Westminster.

Airing my grievances with wellbeing science We have a streetlight problem

if i could make you read ONE (1) single post to improve your understanding of the challenges of social science in general it would be this one from @markfabian.bsky.social about wellbeing science specifically

profmarkfabian.substack.com/p/airing-my-...

Unlike its members this group never gets old

go.bsky.app/B5X2Tsg

Deprivation of British citizenship and withdrawal of passports In the 21st century there has been a revived use of government powers to deprive people of their British citizenship and withhold UK passports, particularly as a counter-terrorism measure.

I was also really concerned about the entirely possible next party in power until I read "Someone who was born British and has no other nationality cannot be deprived of their citizenship in any circumstances."

commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-bri...

New research!

Austerity and the labour market in the UK.

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Headline result: austerity reduced wages, increased employment rates, and contributed to weak productivity.

1/n

Revealing below-the-line comment on the dire state of the Tory Party on the ground (Source: conservativehome.com/2025/12/18/c...)

Though it's getting lots of attention, the extra tax on £2m+ houses will raise only £435m by 2030-31. Higher taxes on dividends will raise 3x as much, & taxes on salary sacrifice pension contributions will raise 5x as much. Political importance is not the same as macroeconomic significance.