We haven't had neoliberalism for decades. Instead we have a system where central banks suppress risk, governments rescue failure and taxpayers absorb losses. Gains are privatised; risks are socailised. This isn't capitalism; it's the opposite. thetimes.com/comment/columni…

🇺🇸 Zuckerberg says that in 5 years you will have a personal AI that knows your life and does the work for you. "Everyone is going to have an agent that really intimately understands your goals and everything around you and can help you get stuff done." He means one assistant on money, health, the house, the calendar, running in the background all day. Meta wants that agent sitting inside the apps people already live in, so it becomes the way you get through a normal day. Writer: Lucas

when Anthropic released their Functional Emotions paper, I gave it to Claude and asked for a song. tonight I asked Opus 5.5 to create a video for it. and it's breathtaking.

A woman, physically assaulted by a baying mob of angry Reformorons while their cult leader @Nigel_Farage laughs on from the podium. Please share, this is who Reform are.

A personal statement on my suspension from Reform

EXCLUSIVE: Keir Starmer’s allies accuse Andy Burnham of appointing a divisive cabinet designed to reward those who brought him down. One says it immediately breaks Burnham’s pledge to be inclusive and run a broad church. Another says it’s dangerously hubristic and creates enemies who will come back to haunt him. A third says there is no policy justification for the top appointments. Burnham’s allies insist the cabinet represents all factions and regions. But in a striking response some of Starmer’s allies are saying men have got the top jobs and that it cements a north-south divide. While some see John Healey as a safer pick as chancellor than a left-winger, a Starmer ally says he’s been misunderstood and he’s actually the fiscally loosest possible choice because he wants a massive increase in defence spending. There is a lot of negative briefing about Wes Streeting, an arch anti-Starmer plotter, over his lack of defence experience. Former soldier Dan Jarvis losing his job is particularly upsetting people. Ed Miliband, another key plotter, as foreign secretary is causing a big reaction. Some are confused because he faces a very difficult task winning round the Trump administration that openly dislikes him. And it’s angering those who were appalled by his infamous decision to block action against Assad. There are also early signs of discontent on the left over Shabana Mahmood’s reappointment as home secretary. Lots of Burnham supporters on the left abstained on the immigration bill last week assuming she would be moved. They will want her to water down her more hardline immigration policies. Some on the left are also disappointed Miliband wasn’t made chancellor, saying Healey will want to focus spending on defence and is hardly a transformational pick otherwise. bloomberg.com/news/newslette…

Brilliant!!

Tribune has a new podcast! Barnaby Raine hosts postscript, a series of conversations on the future of the left amid the slow death of Western civilisation. Episode 1 sees Barnaby and @adam_tooze debate whether liberal politics can save us now.

If you’re voting in Makerfield consider the Peter Principle: people rise to their respective level of incompetence. Burnham has been a good Mayor but that is the best he can do. And if he loses today he gets to keep that job. Today’s leader in @CityAM news.uk.cityam.com/story/243…

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