MAKERFIELD DAYS by @Will___lloyd A season of superlatives was dawning over Makerfield, a collection of peri-rural suburbs, former pit villages and  towns spread beneath Wigan. The vote was seismic. Historic. Make-or-break. The chance of a lifetime. Andy Burnham had staked his political future and the future of the Labour Party on a single vote against Reform UK’s Robert Kenyon, a plumber and former army reservist, burdened by a digital fossil record of embarrassing remarks about women. Makerfield was a constituency that, like Wigan itself, like so many other places with largely white, Brexit-voting, working-class populations, was speeding to the right. Win or lose, mayor or prime minister, Burnham was being run close – terribly close, given he was the most popular Labour politician in the country up against a man who, as one union apparatchik put it to me acidly, was “only as good as the last podcast he listened to”. The constituents of Makerfield – trying their best, frowning at their bills, staring at Facebook, feeling uneasy in blunt ways that were hard to articulate in front of journalists – had woken up one morning to find themselves the most psychoanalysed population in Europe. Greater claims began to be made as the race went on. Makerfield was not simply Makerfield. It was, a prominent pollster argued, all of Britain: “A snapshot of the country in miniature.” And what kind of country was that? I knocked on doors for several weeks. I drank in dust-furred community clubs and backstreet pubs. I ate half a dozen meat pies. I tried to speak to the Afghans and Kurds who adorned Wigan town centre in the middle of the day. I bumped into a squad of absurdly young men canvassing for Restore in the poorest parts of Abram. I watched the crowds at the women’s rugby league in Orrell and spoke to formidable local dignitaries who had spent decades trying to keep the area’s head above water. Burnham and Kenyon didn’t really interest me. Makerfield would be forgotten in a few weeks' time. The circus, self-involved and self-serving, would move on. Yet the people here matter. What interested me was not the race, but what was happening in people’s heads in Bickershaw and Platt Bridge and Hindley – what was happening to all of us right now that meant you could meet people seized by apocalyptic fears of race war and depressed social democrats living on the same street. I have been sent all over the country in the past two years, trying to take its temperature, check its symptoms, diagnose its ills. I found that it was becoming harder to speak about the surreal things I saw and heard in a straightforward way. Every reporter I knew who was not too blind to see what was going on was struggling in the same way. They suffered from the same queasy, plunging intimation about where we were heading. I was tired of writing and speaking about the country like it was a “normal” place full of happy “normal” communities and cheeky “normal” Brits. Nothing I saw or heard seemed “normal”. Everything was changing. Britain is a country where it’s easier to imagine where the next pogrom will happen than how a new high-speed rail line will be built. And I am sick and tired of the six-figure salary newspaper columnists who deny the country is broken on X while masked men go door to door in grand old cities, looking for homes and people to burn. Were they daft? Did they think they were clever? Illustration by The Red Dress

'We will make further statements in July about VPNs and further restrictions' Technology Secretary Liz Kendall told #BBCBreakfast she will outline more details next month about the social media ban on under 16s in the UK - as well as additional restrictions on Virtual Private Networks, curfews and chatbots bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2ky…

I’m only occasionally harsh on Kendall talking about technology (see the £1.1bn for ‘AI Hardware’) because I thought she was being asked about things outside her brief. I now see her job is Technology Minister and I want to apologise. I should have been more harsh, more often. This is a ‘Harold Shipman, Minister for the Elderly’ situation. Dangerously dim, and with objectives in opposition to the brief.

'We will make further statements in July about VPNs and further restrictions' Technology Secretary Liz Kendall told #BBCBreakfast she will outline more details next month about the social media ban on under 16s in the UK - as well as additional restrictions on Virtual Private Networks, curfews and chatbots bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2ky…

'We will make further statements in July about VPNs and further restrictions' Technology Secretary Liz Kendall told #BBCBreakfast she will outline more details next month about the social media ban on under 16s in the UK - as well as additional restrictions on Virtual Private Networks, curfews and chatbots bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2ky…

"Interdire les VPN", c'est ne rien comprendre à ce qu'est un VPN. Un VPN, ce n'est pas un produit, c'est un principe. Un tunnel chiffré entre votre machine et un serveur que vous choisissez. Votre trafic ressort avec l'adresse de ce serveur, point final. C'est de la cryptographie et du routage, rien d'autre. Or ce tunnel chiffré, c'est exactement la même brique technique que le HTTPS de votre banque, le SSH de n'importe quel développeur, le réseau interne de n'importe quelle entreprise. Le chiffrement et le tunneling, ce n'est pas "le truc des hackers", c'est le socle de l'internet moderne. Donc "interdire les VPN", au sens littéral, ça veut dire interdire les tunnels chiffrés. Et interdire les tunnels chiffrés, c'est casser le e-commerce, la banque en ligne, le télétravail, bref tout ce qui fait qu'internet fonctionne. Vous ne pouvez pas tuer l'un sans tuer l'autre. Maintenant le concret, celui qui fait que c'est déjà perdu. Il n'y a pas "un VPN" à bloquer. Vous louez un serveur à 5 euros par mois chez Hetzner, DigitalOcean ou AWS, vous installez WireGuard ou OpenVPN en trois commandes, et vous avez votre propre VPN sur une IP que personne n'a sur sa liste de blocage. Un gamin de 16 ans fait ça pendant la page de pub. Vous pouvez bloquer les IP des fournisseurs commerciaux connus ? Ça ne change rien à l'auto-hébergé. Pour aller plus loin, il vous faut un pare-feu national avec inspection profonde des paquets et liste blanche de protocoles. Autrement dit la Chine, l'Iran, un appareil de surveillance de masse. Et même ça fuit en permanence (Shadowsocks, V2Ray, protocoles obfusqués qui imitent du trafic HTTPS classique). Le choix réel est donc binaire. Soit votre interdiction est du théâtre, contournée en 48 heures. Soit vous construisez une Grande Muraille numérique, et même Pékin n'arrive pas à la fermer complètement. Le fond du problème, c'est que ces gens légifèrent contre l'arithmétique. On ne vote pas une loi contre les mathématiques. Le tunnel chiffré existera tant que le chiffrement existera, et le chiffrement existera tant qu'internet existera. Des bureaucrates qui n'ont jamais écrit une ligne de code de leur vie décident d'interdire une primitive cryptographique qu'ils ne savent même pas définir. Ils ont déjà perdu. C'est le poulet sans tête : ça continue de courir, mais la décision est déjà tombée.

Meanwhile, in the real world, Macron has championed Mistral as a sovereign frontier model and the UK has none:

This is also something often ignored by people making cross-country comparisons. Other European countries with relatively high levels of social housing, like ours, all have social rents set much closer to market rents. It's ~70%-80% for Austria/Denmark/Netherlands.

Finished 17th and were a whisker away from relegation by the way. Not a single soul can convince me that PSR wasn't made protect the big 6.

I once talked to a Mistral researcher who told me that even internally everyone just uses Claude Code or Codex. I asked him how does the company survive given that it's models are so far from the frontier and he told me that Mistral hovers up contracts with all the major EU enterprises like Airbus and BMW. Likely with French government backing. It is remarkable that the Germans and the English are letting the French get away with this. It seems both countries are too caught up with their own domestic issues. If there were actual competition like in the Chinese ecosystem I imagine EU AI sovereignty might be somewhat of a realistic prospect.

Something worth acknowledging in considering the (im)practicalities of the proposed nighttime social media curfew is the significant number of 17 year-olds at Scottish universities. Their classes may be timetabled until 6pm, and some learning resources may be on YouTube.

🚨Labour confirms ID requirement at device level - VPNs useless.🚨 By forcing Apple and Google to verify age at the device level during phone setup… Keir Starmer’s government isn’t protecting kids — it’s building a surveillance infrastructure. The OS itself will restrict platforms like TikTok, Instagram and X, making VPNs largely useless because the block happens before any traffic leaves your phone. 🚨Once every device carries a verified age profile, authorities gain an easy route to identify users through legal requests to tech firms. This is digital ID by the back door, sold as child safety. Classic Labour: expand state control first, ask questions later.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ thetimes.com/uk/politics/art…