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Sir Ian Mckellen delivers a 400 year old Shakespeare pro immigrant monologue. It will probably fly over reform heads though..
youtube.com/shorts/uec_u1Mnz… via @YouTube
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EXCLUSIVE: After a months-long investigation, Channel 4 News’s FactCheck team has obtained a dossier of new files on UK arms export licences to Israel.
max blunt retweeted
I'm loving this performative ignorance about the Byline investigation.
The point about these sort of analyses isn't to find some "hidden hand" or nefarious plot (although there are some hidden and anonymous actors), but to make plain how the most stupid and wretched moral panics are actually made.
What the Byline investigation shows is that there is a very short pipeline from online agitator accounts (often anonymous), boosted by a collection of wingnuts and swivel-eyed weirdos, to the mainstream press (like the Jewish Chronicle), which transforms the rantings of loons into a "serious issue" that leads to people like Misam Harriman or Gary Lineker getting made into monstrous racists who must be blocked from public life.
Which is not to say there can't be hidden hands, of course. One of them was Labour Together and the secret projects of Morgan McSweeney - projects that succeeded because they tapped into and then were amplified by this same network, and benefited from this model of "panic" building.
But it is striking how, when you understand this (very small) ecosystem of actors, you start to see how many of our moral panics around antisemitism - going after Lineker and Harriman but also Michael Rosen, anti-Zionist Jews, the British left in general - stem from the work of 50 or so terminally online screamers who shouldn't be taken seriously at all - yet repeatedly drive media cycles.
And, yes, when you really dig down, the key issue is almost always about how scary lefties criticise Israel's apartheid, war crimes and genocide, and raising the cost to people with public profiles doing the same.
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THE DIGITAL ENCLOSURE: HOW DATA CENTRE GROWTH ZONES ARE PRIVATISING BRITAIN
And why the Burnham Manchester model is already the template.
Strip away the branding. Enterprise Zone. Freeport. Investment Zone. AI Growth Zone. Silicon Heartland. The same model keeps reappearing across five decades of British economic policy: a public-private partnership that borrows democratic legitimacy from an elected body while handing planning power, land, and crucially public money to a private developer or a small cluster of them. The vehicle changes name every decade. The transfer of control does not.
This matters because PPP sounds procedural, a funding mechanism, a line in a council report. It is not neutral. It is the specific legal instrument through which zoning authority, energy allocation, and increasingly whole town governance functions move out of the reach of voters and into corporate boardrooms, dressed up as regeneration.
What we are living through now is a mutation of that instrument. The original Private Finance Initiative, introduced under John Major and industrialised by Gordon Brown, was at least legible. Individual hospitals. Individual schools. Individual prisons. The contracts were visible, the assets nameable, the scandal eventually documentable. Philip Hammond killed it in 2018 because even a Conservative Chancellor could no longer ignore what the National Audit Office confirmed: PFI was a racket that had saddled British taxpayers with nearly £200 billion in liabilities for infrastructure worth a fraction of that.
europeanpowell.substack.com/…
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This is very important and something that needs to be really emphasised ahead of the Milburn report.
The Fonagy report is excellent, rigorously evidenced, devastating on the socio-economic-psychological causes of youth mental illness, and written with a striking humanity and sensitivity. Fonagy writes as a mental health professional who plainly cares deeply about people (including young people) and sympathises with their struggles. It is a rare and unexpected document, quite moving in its own right. It argues forcefully that the mental health crisis is real and offers a diagnosis based on a concrete understanding of its complex routes.
Milburn is not a mental health professional. He's a Blairite politician and administrator turned millionaire consultant with a penchant for Blairite reforms: who compresses complex behavioural pathways into a the idiot logic of the market. He was appointed by Starmer after Starmer had failed to push through devastating cuts to disability and welfare. Milburn's report will be the second bite Labour takes at this cherry.
The pre-briefing by Milburn shows he cares little for the disabled and those with mental health issues. If he did, he wouldn't be giving piecemeal briefings to the right-wing press about cuts that will inevitably make the anxieties of disabled people soar. It's cruel and thoughtless.
In the tale of two reviews, Fonagy should be the one we consider and talk about and digest, but I bet you've never even heard of it; and I bet it will be Milburn's review that drives government policy and media coverage and creates the "common sense" position.
The Blairites are back with their chainsaw, this time taking aim at the first generation that has come of age under austerity, Brexit, housing price spirals, inflation and ecological collapse. Their victory is not certain, and they will have to be resisted. Fonagy gives the evidence of why and how.
Labour ordered two reviews. Clinical expert Proffesor Peter Fonagy found youth mental illness is real and cutting income worsens it.
Politician Alan Milburn, who has no medical background, wants to cut disability benefits anyway.
Why listen to Milburn over Fonagy? @andyburnham
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That winning moment ❤️🏴
#CymruAmByth
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In Haiti, they told the Haitian people the Clintons came to save Haiti.
After the earthquake in 2010, the world watched Port au Prince crumble, and then the saviors arrived. Bill Clinton became the UN Special Envoy to Haiti. Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, controlling America's aid. And the Clinton Foundation was right there, raising money in Haiti's name.
Husband approving the projects. Wife controlling the money. Foundation collecting the donations. That was a family business.
The world pledged 13.5 billion dollars. America pledged 4 billion. It was supposed to rebuild a nation. Instead, it rebuilt bank accounts in Washington.
Less than 40 percent of that money was ever spent inside Haiti. Only 2 percent of US aid ever reached Haitian organizations. The rest went to American contractors, foreign NGOs, and the UN: a circle of friends getting rich off someone else's tragedy.
Caracol Industrial Park, their great flagship, their promise of a New Haiti. Three hundred million dollars of taxpayer money, built on prime farmland. Farmers were kicked off their land to make room for it. They promised 65,000 jobs. What Haiti got was 10,000 low-wage sewing jobs for a South Korean company. Bill and Hillary cut the ribbon and smiled for the cameras. Haitians called it a sweatshop.
They promised hundreds of thousands of homes. They spent half a billion dollars on housing, and they built 6,000 houses. Years later, millions were still sleeping in tents, with no water, no electricity, and no roads, while the Foundation kept fundraising.
A company called VCS Mining, with a Clinton Foundation donor sitting on its board, suddenly got one of the rarest things in Haiti: a gold mining permit. In a country where those permits are almost impossible to get. Donate to the Foundation, get a deal in Haiti. That was the deal.
Haitians don't call this mismanagement. They call it theft.
Billions came in, cholera brought in by UN troops killed 10,000 people, and Port au Prince still has no reliable water, power, or roads. The Clintons left with their reputation intact. Haiti was left poorer.
This is how the liberal elite works. They find a poor Black country, use it as a charity poster, fly in, take photos with crying children, raise billions, hand the contracts to their friends, and then blame corruption in Haiti when nothing gets built.
The real corruption was never in Haiti. It was in Washington, and it was in the Clinton Foundation.
If a Republican had done this, it would be called a crime. Because the Clintons did it, they called it philanthropy.
Haiti didn't need saviors. Haiti needed to be left alone to rebuild with its own money.
The Clintons didn't save Haiti. They looted Haiti.
t.me/fmazhindu
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@EJShone93 is one of the best investigative journalists looking at the the world of lobbying firms and "strategic advisory" outfits.
Depressing if predictable read about what people like McSweeney and other advisors have done since their gigs ended in failure.
opendemocracy.net/coining-it…
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This is shameless beyond belief.
The WSJ was one of the key papers pushing the spy story from day one (which now even the Office of the Director of National Intelligence says is "not entirely accurate and over-torqued", edition.cnn.com/2026/11/12/p…) and, along with other outlets, running one of the most blatant character assassination campaigns in modern corporate history.
And now that this campaign succeeded in pushing Jensen out, they survey the wreckage they helped create and write that "maybe that was China’s plan".
You couldn't make it up 🤦♂️
From @WSJopinion: Jensen Huang’s resignation from Nvidia was necessary, but it also does regrettable harm to the company and America’s AI industry. Maybe that was China’s plan.
on.wsj.com/4k9p4V2
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For those working in the caring sector, as care workers, as nurses, as teachers, David Graeber made this video for you and your workplace.
Healy can’t add up, it is impossible for AI to “bolster wages” when AI needs to make $2 trillion a year to survive, only way that can be done is to sell to businesses who will cut their workforce.
It’s going to trash jobs and the economy.
EXCLUSIVE:
Britain needs to embrace artificial intelligence and invest in data centres because it will offer the country a "productivity revolution" and bolster the wages of ordinary workers, the Chancellor has said
In an interview with The Times John Healey, the chancellor, said that artificial intelligence "is coming whether we like it or not" and that Britain needs to take "maximum advantage" of the opportunities it offers
He said that artificial intelligence has the potential to draw investment to Britain on a "big scale" and argued that Britain needs to develop its own "sovereign" artificial intelligence to bolster economic growth and national security
Healey believes that the improvement in productivity the technology brings will filter through to everyone. On Wednesday he discussed the artificial intelligence "revolution" with Kevin Warsh, the chairman of the US Federal Reserve, during a visit to the UK. Andy Burnham, the prime minister, also briefly attended the meeting.
Healey said: "He [Warsh] believes we're on the edge of a productivity revolution and transformation with AI.
"We had a good discussion because he sees this as not just potentially bringing benefits to the super-rich and big tech, but already in the US, signs that it is increasing, raising the level of productivity, therefore the value and the wages of many ordinary workers. It may be that we're starting to see some of that in some of the detail of the growth figures today in Britain."
He added: "I think the signs are it's a revolution already underway. The challenge for policy makers and I think the change for investors the challenge for investors and business is how do we make the most of this for Britain, and in doing so reassure people about the steps we can help take against the risks that they quite rightly also feel and see."
Healey said that Britain can learn from the bitter debates over the "free for all" of new data centres in the US by ensuring that they have the support of communities. In the Budget he announced a new data centre “covenant”, which will require owners to invest in local communities, create jobs and protect water supplies in exchange for priority access to the national grid.
He said: “It [artificial intelligence] is coming, whether we like it or not. Many people are already using it, I want to avoid the free-for-all on AI and data centres we’ve seen in the states.
“So where NHS health data is used with AI, I want that data in Britain, not in data centres abroad. Where AI is used for our security, I want that data in Britain, for Britain, not abroad. To do that, we have to develop more data centres. I’m ready to back them if they provide the community benefits and can help build public trust.
“If we haven’t got the independence, we haven’t got some of the control and sovereignty on our AI capacity in the UK, then we will find that we can’t provide the level of confidence, the level of security that I think people are rightly wanting, and we can’t make the most of the big economic opportunities that are there.”
thetimes.com/uk/politics/art…
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