One of the claimants in this case ks quite… something. Yes. Quite a few jaw-dropping bits in this where it gets even more startling

www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWH...

"You know, the tweets your Spads wrote for you. Oh, you did them all yourself?"

They're yet to demonstrate that they understand that's a question.

The BBC are Twitter-brained enough to have put out multiple push notifications over this.

Which is presumably downstream of there being no real mission, because otherwise it would have been clear what gets prioritised and what has to wait for the next session?

A lot of things click into place when you realise that, as much as people try to pretend otherwise, reducing immigration in the age of Ryanair is a significant spending commitment and therefore demands for lowering immigration or reducing migrants' rights are demands for a luxury good

It simply should not be possible to make a steam train out of our marginal taxation rate graph.

Tough on cosmopolitanism, tough on the causes of cosmopolitanism.

A firm commitment to keeping all three out of the UK - for far too long, frothy coffee has mocked us with impunity

You gently run your hand through the rack. You can feel it—pure cotton, rich wool, Irish linen. The plump buttonholes are handsewn; the buttons attached with a firm shank. You flip the price tag over. It's affordable

You buy the jacket and go home, which is only 15 mins away. Your apt is $600/month

And Congress does have precedent for refusing to seat newly elected congressmen when they were part of the minority party and won narrowly enough that the result was in doubt. My worry would be that they try to do that at scale and in cases where it wasn't close.

I would say that we should get them to play a game with a more realistic model of politics, but I'm worried if we did then they'd just start making discreet inquiries about whether Bludish immigrants are unpopular in the Red Wall.

It's particularly weird because the government does a lot of private polling and focus groups and complaints about the price of a weekly shop surely come up a lot in those?

Everybody thinks Lisa Nandy is just sulking, nobody has checked the bottom of the Leeds & Liverpool Canal.

There hasn't even been much movement on the supply chain, where shortages in construction material are a real problem and one that probably does not need you to import the bulk of your workforce to fix it. We hear occasional supportive noises about modular construction and not much else.

Would argue it's far from Conrad's best book anyway.

What do you mean? Approval was 13%, it's not 14%. That's a whole 7% increase, if we extend that out logarithmically Starmer will be more popular than God by Christmas.

Which is a substantial difference from the way we historically dealt with private infrastructure in the UK, where the company going bankrupt and the government getting a cheap asset was very much a feature rather than a bug.

You'll never get a job at the Economist with that attitude.

Given that property tax only starts being an income stream once the property is inhabited and infrastructure costs start much earlier, I'd suggest that there probably needs to be some frontloading.

We don't pay water rates in Northern Ireland. Which means that a) the costs implicitly have to be made up via property rates and b) NI Water is so badly funded that we can't build houses because NI Water don't have the budget to give them sewerage connections.

That's... not how nationalisation traditionally works?

They are aware that we had water and electric bills prior to privatisation, right? It doesn't just become a service like the NHS (nor should it - surely everyone can see the incentive issue there!)

Yes, I do think that talking about the housing crisis as a single thing misses the point, because it's actually a bunch of different crises in different areas and the one that is most total (London) is also atypical. National approaches only take you so far.

Sure, but I think when we have high housing costs and a persistent problem with inflation, I'm not sure we want to signal to the 75% of landlords who don't do annual rent increases that they can get away with adding 3% every year.