This is kind of incredible. @TomMcTague' analysis is obviously correct, but he writes as if people on the left haven't been saying exactly all this, and putting forward the necessary programmatic solutions, for literally years (including, like, me...in his own magazine).

Further to Blair. Literally every honest sensible person in all the main parties privately agrees with all these propositions: - welfare spending is too high and is throwing good people on the scrapheap - defence spending is too low - the triple lock is unsustainable - without cheap energy we cannot exploit the AI revolution - we should be investing in EVERY form of energy: renewables, nuclear and the North Sea - migration needs to be controlled to boost social cohesion and because the boats look like a huge failure of the state - any new relationship with the EU will be imposed on us until we are stronger and cannot involve the closeness some desire without freedom of movement - we are deeply embedded with America in ways which the public does not understand and cannot be told and however joyous it makes us feel to hate Trump, disengagement at the deep state level is not only wholly unrealistic but also undesirable - Whitehall needs a total overhaul so specific project expertise and political appointees can be brought in quickly Blair basically says all that. The one thing he doesn’t say and which the same group of people agree on is this and it’s something Blair left behind: - judges and quangos have too much power, are unaccountable and without redressing the balance in favour of parliament it is very difficult to do anything big fast - the bare minimum that needs to change in this regard is to reform judicial review and planning law so we can put building and economic growth ahead of newts and NIMBYs None of that above really ought to be up for discussion. It is all common sense but not one of our politicians will publicly say all of it Whatever you think of Blair, engage with what he’s saying not how he makes you feel. The bare minimum we should expect from any leader is that they have an analysis of the current situation and a plan to deal with it which is as coherent and realistic as his intervention. Pretty well every critique I’ve read so far has failed to meet this requirement. Over to Andy and Keir and Kemi and Nigel and Zack and all the others

Ed Balls: you know who capped prices? Stalin.

EXC Andy Burnham is expected to back Shabana Mahmood’s immigration reforms as he fights to win the Makerfield by-election The mayor is understood to be supportive of the proposals to limit legal and illegal migration Story with @kiranstacey theguardian.com/politics/202…

Google announces it will now prioritize AI-generated answers in search results over human-written website articles • Search will be centered around a reimagined ‘intelligent search box’ • Starts next Tuesday (via @TechCrunch)

I've gotten a lot of comments like this, so forgive me if this isn't very kind, but I'm at my limit. If you're a serious academic, you've spent a lot of time looking at citations, and you know they often contain errors. You know that it's very common for professors just to copy citations they found in other papers and put them into their own papers because they need a lot of citations to look credible. Given that this is going on, it's kind of silly to think that we should have a kind of death penalty for having an LLM, hallucination mistake What you're doing is virtue signaling and pretending that citations are somehow sacred to what academics do, when in fact they're mostly just poorly put up window dressing. You're being dishonest. Perhaps with yourself, perhaps with me.