Looks like Miller never, ever leaves his ivory tower

We (the UK) aren’t in such a war, but what the UK is doing is helping Ukraine to defend itself

So the voters basically say to Trump “we’d prefer a government that isn’t so far-right” and Trump’s reaction is to veer even harder to the right

Because Facebook is designed to be addictive, I guess. Same reason why people smoke even though it’s very unhealthy.

It’s always the ones you most expect

My hot take: people aren’t hard enough on Proton

I know Burnham recently said he wouldn’t hold an election in the next 12 months, but maybe the polling will persuade him otherwise. If the polling is good for Labour then surely it’s a good time to have an election. He could secure a more ambitious manifesto and keep Reform out of number 10 for at least five years.

But of course it would be a risk. In 2017, Theresa May called an election because the polling didn’t look too bad for the Tories, and then during the election campaign, the Tory vote declined while the Labour vote rose.

There’s always Ireland, they speak English and they’re still in the EU.

Not to be pedantic but I think that would be “Breenter”, just like how “reentry” has two Es

An alternative would be “Brejoin”

It’s like running with a bucket of water to a burning man and saying “I’ll douse you, but it’ll cost you 100 bucks”

I agree with you. Successful people often don’t want to recognise how much good luck they’ve had. Childhood privileges that others don’t have, job opportunities that others haven’t had, etc.

If we applied their thinking to every situation, we’d say something like “if a child in Gaza dies from an Israeli bomb, it’s the child’s fault, because they didn’t try hard enough to avoid the bomb”.

Even if a right-winger admits that children can have different circumstances, they might have an attitude of “once you hit 18, we’re all equal, and your effort is what determines your success in adult life”. But that’s not true. Some adults have a lot of privilege behind them, while others don’t. Some adults have health conditions which can be very difficult to manage in some cases, taking up time and money and effort, while other adults don’t have to worry as much about their health.

Google tells me that David Lammy said that in early 2019. Anyway, I think he was right about this bit:

Leaving the EU will not free us from the injustices of global capitalism, it will make us subordinate to Trump’s US.

Sure it would be better if America was doing more to support Ukraine. But I think it’s good news that they are at least allowing Ukraine to have these Patriots, since they are important for Ukraine.

I’m not trying to give too much credit to the US of course. Trump’s administration is terrible. I’m just saying it could have been worse, if the US refused to allow Ukraine to have any Patriots.

their Welsh leader is still in prison for taking money from the Russians. Somehow though, their popularity has not diminished as much as it should have

Reform supporters believe that the idea of Russia being a threat has been made up by the liberal media to distract everybody from immigration. I wish I was kidding.

You could argue it’s a deal that some Brits voted for, but definitely not all Brits of course.

Only 51.89% of those who voted in the Brexit referendum in 2016 voted for Brexit.

In 2019 there was a general election, and during that election campaign, Boris Johnson promised to “get Brexit done”, but only 43.6% of voters in that election voted for Johnson’s party, the Conservatives. So a majority of voters in that election voted against the Conservatives.

It would have been possible to leave the EU while staying in the single market and/or customs union, but the Conservatives chose a particularly hard version of Brexit, cutting more ties than necessary with the EU.

Some Brexiteers suggested that Brexit would be a softer affair, in the lead up to the referendum.

Tory peer Daniel Hannan (formerly an MEP) said in 2015: “absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market”. And yet we did leave the single market, as part of the hard Brexit pursued by the Tories.

But yes I suppose other leading Brexiteers didn’t make details explicit. Perhaps, after the Brexit referendum, we should have had a second referendum to determine what shape Brexit should take. We could have remained in the single market for many industries (similar to Norway/Switzerland/Iceland) or the customs union (similar to Turkey), or both.

Brexiteers are famously supportive of “democracy” so they shouldn’t have had any objections to a second referendum.

Maybe the economy does indeed need fixing. I wonder how many Brits agree with the Lib Dems’ suggested fix, which is to rejoin the EU single market and customs union:

We need to fix our trading relationship with Europe to tackle the cost of living crisis and grow our economy.

Liberal Democrats are calling for the UK to join the single market and customs union, to fix the damage done by Brexit and get our country back on track.

I can respect the fact that they’re more certain about what they want to do. I think Burnham is alright, but his position on Europe seems to be “I don’t know yet; we’ll try to get closer to Europe, but we don’t know what that looks like yet”.

I wonder if it will cost them more trying to defeat the tax, than if they just paid the tax.

They’d probably be okay with that anyway. They probably enjoy paying more just to watch poor people squirm.

I’ve noticed that irony too. For example, in 2024:

Donald Trump’s campaign has filed a Federal Election Commission (FEC) complaint against the UK’s Labour Party, accusing it of “blatant foreign interference” in the US election

And then, in 2026:

JD Vance backs Orbán’s re-election bid in Budapest visit