Fufluns🐈‍⬛🥂🇪🇺🇺🇦🔸😷

Cecilia Rikap, a prof of economics at UCL, said similar things were happening around the world.

“Big tech companies artificially inflate datacentres’ job creation and economic impact to please governments like the British one, which are desperate to claim they are making the economy grow.”

Pretty funny that Michael Gove is dunking on me now he’s editor of the Spectator to promote its ‘bias-free’ reporting when as a politician he wouldn’t answer any of my press inquiries on the massive Brexit fraud he oversaw as Vote Leave’s co-convener

Call off King's US state visit over Iran war, urge Lib Dems The party says the planned trip should be scrapped after Donald Trump's criticism of the UK's response to the war.

Cancel the April state visit to the US.

A state visit from our King should not be given to someone who repeatedly insults our country.

This is good on the dangerous absurdity of some of the responses to the war. It's worth noting that 'betrayal', 'humiliation' and 'weakness' are exactly the same terms used week-in, week-out to describe how Brexit was undertaken. This is the embedded political psychology of the British right.

It is absolutely insane that the US appears to have targeted desalination plants first – putting them onto the board. Iran seems to have already retaliated against one in Bahrain. This is one of the most obvious ways this could spiral.

Things look grim in the markets right now, but at least the U.S. economy wasn’t already being propped up by a massive speculative AI bubble that is highly sensitive to rising energy costs.

That Trump repeats calls for Iran's unconditional surrender on same day he's got the defence industrial chiefs round for an emergency meeting on military supplies perfectly sums up his grasp of ends & means.

If your energy needs are met from solar, wind, tidal, geothermal and nuclear sources, backed by copious battery storage, you're far less vulnerable to sudden crazy oil and gas price spikes.

Trump's war on Iran is the best possible ad for accelerating the greening of the economy.

Did baby boomers eat all the pies? John Lanchester on the truth about the generation gap It’s a grim time to be in your 20s, no doubt, but don’t blame it all on older people: being chopped up into ever smaller rivalries only serves the market

“The pollster Peter Kellner has calculated that if the referendum were rerun today, instead of a leave win by 1.3m votes, remain would win by 8m. There’s no historic parallel for the injustice of that.”
#Brexit disaster
www.theguardian.com/inequality/2...

The #SingleMarket was responsible for 41% of the UK’s exports in 2024, and remains the largest trading bloc in the world. Rejoining would eliminate trade barriers for most goods and services, control consumer prices, and allow capital, goods and people to move freely. #RejoinEU

However, more issues remain relevant today. In particular, the ongoing Operation Epic Fury is a US military operation. It will not be possible for the UK to exert any significant influence in its planning. Any participation will be - as it was in Iraq - in subordination to the US. As the Iraq inquiry report noted: "The US and UK are close allies, but the relationship between the two is unequal." Despite the UK providing significant military assets and personnel to Iraq, it failed to exert any significant influence on US decisions.

Would Farage, Badenoch, Johnson, Hannan, Blair, the Daily Mail, the Sun… like to comment on this?
No?
Thought not. Because their own raging inadequacy, dishonesty, arrogance, wrongness and startlingly cynical irresponsibility prevents them from being credible actors in this fireball of menace.

Never forget Robert Jenrick's view about Farage before the opportunist joined Reform

#bbclaurak

When Brexit was slammed for being an act of pure prejudice, all the Brexiters howled about ‘sovereignty’ and ‘taking back control’.
Now, the very same people howl that we should just obey Trump and put our country in the firing line.
They lied about everything. All of it. Every single part.

I was in he hair dressers last week and someone, not me, brought up Trump. I have never seen such unanimity amongst staff and customers that we couldn't wait for him to die. This is in the sleepy Isle of Man, a place that is intrinsically conservative. The popular press is massively out of step.

I think I detest Sam Altman even more than Donald Trump.

Trump is so stupid that no other avenues in life were open to him except those that he fell into.

Altman is just clever enough that he didn't need to become a world-destroying arsehole.

And I despise Trump with the heat of a trillion suns.

Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage want Britain to blindly follow Trump into this illegal war, even though the President has no plan for what comes next.

There is nothing patriotic about outsourcing Britain’s foreign policy to Donald Trump.

Nigel Farage is celebrating Reform UK shady donations, whilst jetting off to Washington.

On the day MPs head to their constituency to do the job they were elected to do.

Pope Leo XIV: “War is never holy!”

Boris Johnson says Keir Starmer has made us an irrelevance on the world stage...

Absolutely insupportable. Labour have a massive majority. It’s a hugely popular issue. To fail to act would be a dereliction of historic proportions, and utterly inexplicable.

Trump's upending of world order makes rejoining the EU much MUCH more urgent, critical and valuable.

As global supply chains crumble and horizons shrink, it benefits us to be as friendly as it's possible to be with the countries that will ALWAYS be geographically closest to us.

For anyone who would like the clip (including George).

Anyway, here we have it black and white that because U.K. has a less significant currency, it needs to pay a much higher interest ras than France and Italy.

Should we be in the €-zone, we can save £30 billion per year on the interest payments on our £2.9 trillion debt.

I see Farage is off to Mar-a-Lago to talk down Britain and suck up to Trump.

There's nothing patriotic about cheering on a foreign leader whose illegal war is sending British families’ energy bills through the roof.

Here’s how we got here (and this is just today’s example):
- In 2015-2016 Trump+supporters in the US and Brexiters in the UK experimented with looking right down the camera at the public and knowingly lying. Not fibs, not spin, not errors of fact, but deliberate, premeditated, calculated lies.
1/

Well I hate to imagine what a *worse* political strategist would do to the polling.

Churchill knew the relationship was never special Eighty years ago, a prime minister faced a a fickle president – and a shifting global order

"If a major burden shift is likely, Britain & its neighbours can try to negotiate a Fulton-in-reverse, receiving back the baton but in an orderly, stable & gradual way, creating a less American not a post-American Europe"
Key reading from @patporter76.bsky.social
www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2026/0...

If there is evidence of irregularities at some polling stations at the Gorton and Denton byelection, then that evidence should be properly and promptly investigated in accordance with due process by the proper authorities. And that is what is being done. Any denunciations of the election result should thereby await the result of this process. The losing party spokesperson candidly admitted the day after the election that any irregularities were not enough to have affected the result, which was emphatic. But this did not prevent the losing party’s leader from loudly promoting grave allegations of sectarian voting, corruption and dishonesty. Yet if the irregularities are not upheld on investigation as invalidating the result, it is unlikely that those findings will be shouted about. And such a response is irresponsible. Parts of the United Kingdom have a history of sectarian violence. Parts of the United Kingdom have histories of racial tension. Responsible politicians should not exploit such allegations for partisan advantage. Making such allegations is to play with fire, literally. Responsible politicians should be careful to avoid subverting the very fundamentals on which a functioning democracy rests. Such “poisoning of the wells” is familiar to those following the politics of the United States, and it lay behind the lethal violence that took place in Washington DC on 6th January 2021.

New

The poisoning of the wells

Why discrediting election results without waiting for due process is unhealthy for a democracy

This week's Weekly Constitutional by me at @prospectmagazine.co.uk

FT comments section this morning - saying what everyone else is thinking, right?

Reform fury as someone else wins by Our By-election Editor Tim Shipsink The losing candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election, Matt Goodwhinge, has demanded an immediate re-run of the election on the grounds that he lost comprehensively to someone else. "It's totally unfair and rigged," said Goodwhinge. "I shouldn't be required to sit there and suck it up, just because I lost." Mr Goodwhine continued, *I can't believe that all those voters I demonised failed to back me. Especially after I was endorsed by Tommy Robinson and ten million Russian bots on X. "We have clear evidence of family voting, where people voted in order for me to stop deporting their families." Mr Badloser concluded. "I'm the victim of colour prejudice. They didn't vote for me simply because I'm not green." Reform leader Mr Farage, speaking from a sun lounger on a rock near the Chagos Islands said, "It's a tragedy that the people of Manchester won't see Matt in Westminster, but my constituents don't see me in Clacton either." PLUMBER DEFEATS MATT GOODWIN Photo of Hannah Spencer with speech bubble saying… I've stopped the cock

Beautiful from Private Eye on the massive toddler-tantrum that Matt Goodwin and Reform are having, because they got whooped in Gorton and Denton.