Best Of

We must stop being in hock only to the bond markets.

No one voted for the bond markets.

https://x.com/ZackPolanski/status/2060784820058235342

They pretty much did vote for them, when they voted in Governments who spent more than they took in tax.

Indeed.

Consistently run a budget surplus and there's little the bond markets can or will do.

And you have fucked up your own private pension system to a certain extent which relies on gilt edged assets for secure liability.

Three considerations on that.

1) We currently are sat on a mountain of debt equal to around 100% of gdp. If we started running a modest surplus tomorrow, say £50bn/pa, it will be literally several lifetimes before we reduce the debt mountain enough to seriously trouble the supply of assets to our pension funds.

2) Gilts were often a key component of final salary pension schemes. They aren't usually nearly as big a component of contribution based pensions, so pension funds now hold far fewer gilts than 30 years ago. Instead a lot more gilts are held by hedge funds, often heavily leveraged, which tends to make the bond markets substantially more volatile than they used to be.

3) If we somehow paid down the entire national debt, and pension funds really need government bonds to hold, there will always be plenty of debt available from other countries, at various prices for various levels of risk, including some very low risk bonds similar to ours.

Kemi is lowering standards, ferfuxake, what a terrible idea.

Builders as Tory MPs? I mean no wonder she keeps on getting mullered in elections.

Badenoch: I want teachers and builders to become Tory MPs

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/05/30/badenoch-want-teachers-builders-future-tory-mps/

'Future Tory candidate selection, she said, would focus on the five C’s – cleverness, charisma, communication skills, conviction and Conservatism.

“I will not allow people who do not share our beliefs to use the Conservative Party as a vehicle to further their personal ambitions,” she added.'

https://x.com/ziayusufuk/status/2060834576822661410

Kemi herself has no achievements of note in her career other than hacking Harriet Harman’s website.

Better than just shittalking people on twitter as an achievement, Zia? He's the online tough guy of the Reform leadership clique, at least Jenrick occasionally has some things to say.

Kemi is lowering standards, ferfuxake, what a terrible idea.

Builders as Tory MPs? I mean no wonder she keeps on getting mullered in elections.

Badenoch: I want teachers and builders to become Tory MPs

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/05/30/badenoch-want-teachers-builders-future-tory-mps/

I'm sure you're not 100% serious about the lowering of standards, but the widening of backgrounds would in general be a good thing. Not to fetishise the working and lower middle classes and assume they'd make better MPs (no reason they should), but doctors and lawyers are more than capable of being utter cretins (twitter has shown this many times), but they get a presumed level of positive quality even when (for lawyers at least) they are not liked or trusted. Whereas a builder might be accused of being sneaky if they are very obviously clever, as if that was a bad thing.

Given on current polls if you are selected as a Conservative parliamentary candidate you only have about a 10-15% chance of winning a constituency at the next general election and becoming an MP, makes sense for Kemi to open the field to a broader range of applicants.

The very high flying KCs and investment bankers and city solicitors and company execs who sought Tory seats and a fast track to the Cabinet aren't going to be deluging CCHQ and local associations with applications this time round

Much data on the Loser here:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/map-shows-states-where-trump-s-approval-rating-has-crashed-most/ar-AA24qgA7?ocid=winp1taskbar&cvid=fa870dbabe884f9be47aee9413538622&ei=12
Key Points
Net approval has declined in every state since Trump returned to office in January 2025.
The steepest drops are in Republican-leaning states, not just Democratic strongholds.
Several battlegrounds, including Florida, Ohio and Nevada, have shifted into net disapproval.
Early pro‑Trump advantages have narrowed sharply, even in his strongest states.
The political map still resembles the partisan divide, but with weaker margins across the board.

It is not obvious -- at least to me -- how he can stop, or even slow, the decline in his support.

Perhaps that's why external actions will be taken.

On the one hand Starmer isn't having to deal with this sort of thing. On the other hand, that's because he's lost all authority after less than 2 years, so they haven't had the chance to get accused of such things yet.

1 June marks exactly eight years since Pedro Sánchez became prime minister of Spain, but with his government and Socialist Party besieged by corruption investigations he is more likely to be plotting his political survival than celebrating.

His musician brother, David, has just gone on trial accused of influence peddling.

Former Socialist prime minister and close Sánchez ally José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has been named in an investigation into alleged money laundering.

And police have raided the Socialist headquarters in Madrid as part of a probe into allegations of a dirty tricks campaign that the opposition has dubbed "the Socialists' Watergate".
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1w21gn340xo?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-gb