"Being progressive is when you can't ever truly be British except by unsullied blood for at least 6 generations"

Progressives don’t call the King “German” thus implying an ethnic component to British nationality challenge: IMPOSSIBLE

In 1925, Westminster abolished Kent’s ancient Gavelkind inheritance customs, along with other customary rights affecting land and inheritance. The abolition of Gavelkind had already been attempted in 1836 when a Bill was introduced, but Kent was so indignant, it was dropped.

In my culture we love freely associating on the basis of individual interests instead of on the basis of kinship ties ☺️

“Capitalism emerged when people began discovering that wealth could be created rather than merely captured”

Yes, Stalin was against the British state’s present-day policy of wage compression, understanding that it destroyed worker incentives.

The War on Low Pay (led by the likes of @resfoundation) is, in practice, a war on wage differentials. Relative prices are necessary to allow markets to function and clear properly. This is why the labour market is screwed up!

This is less a genocide than a return to the traditional state of affairs of the northern Muslim Caliphate of Sokoto raiding, enslaving, and murdering the pastoral peoples of the south - similar to Sudan. Imperialism ended it, and freed millions from slavery... for a while.

This keeps on happening. It's a shame that, aside from Orban's Hungary and sometimes France, no western country shows much interest in the persecution of Christians across the wider Middle East. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm4g…

A more radical idea than artificially hiking wages and hoping that sorts it out would be to bring down the artificially elevated cost of living. Which means cheap, reliable power, lowered taxes on employment, and total planning reform to allow homes to get built.

A reminder as we see minimum wages hiked again that you can't stand in a bucket and lift it.

More broadly; > We think we're a rich country > We see prices rising, assume that means growth we're not participating in > We see taxes rise and public services/realm worsen > We see very rich (often American) and very poor people on TV and social media It's extremely for any populist to draw their own shapes with those dots. Pick a villain, blame them, get everyone angry about it, promise a political revolution and a reckoning for the bad guys. But productivity has been frozen for years. We're not producing more £££ per hour worked. We've expanded the population without building new capacity for them. We've allowed infrastructure to rot, and underfunded capital investment. We've thrown hundreds of small, but cumulatively huge regulations over everything. We have an ageing population. And fundamentally, we have the delusion that policy decisions which make the nation poorer should not be allowed to make *us* poorer. We want carve outs, protections, subsidy to protect us from the consequences of the policies we've collectively chosen; minimum wage hikes, triple locked pensions, rising welfare, subsidised energy bills or tickets to attractions. Costs have risen - the pound is not what it was 20 years ago, so imports are more expensive. We are exporting less and earning less money to pay for the things we want to buy. Other countries are getting wealthier, and we want to keep up with them, but without doing anything to achieve that. As Tom says, we pile expenses and restrictions on instead. So if costs rise, and our productivity doesn't, we're going to get poorer. If you protect pensioners, and you keep raising the minimum wage with no more wealth, you just squeeze the middle and higher earners. Our costs of living seem to keep rising, because we have placed pressure on housing, energy, and public services without corresponding increases in wealth to pay for it.

Wildly, this appears to be broadly true. There's a very small tail of extreme high earners, but there's a crisis of wage compression killing productivity and ambition. Not sure how you sell "lower/freeze min wage, abolish tax cliffs for higher earners" to an electorate, though.

There’s basically no price differentiation in the entire bottom half of the labour market and then people act surprised when gluts and shortages emerge. Obviously, when all jobs pay the same, people will choose between them based solely on factors like which jobs are nicer to do.

Almost everything Burnham says in this piece is a lie. - We didn't get a "harder" Brexit than what was mentioned in the Referendum. We left with the most comprehensive trade agreement the EU has ever signed. - The small boats crisis didn't emerge because of losing "returns agreements". While we were in the EU we were a net-, recipient of illegal immigrants from these agreements, the small boats crisis has emerged because of a global surge in illegal immigration and pull-factors like our human rights laws. - Immigration within the EU was not "revolving door". It has been permanent, and significantly more than estimated at the time. Over 6 million people have come here on the EU Settlement scheme, double estimated. The Prime Minister is dishonest and cynical, planning to hand border control to the EU, and likely pay them British taxpayers money while he's at it.

This 260-year demographic timeline of Poland’s Jewish population reveals the devastating scale of the Holocaust. Source: buff.ly/MEHJWla

At least nine people died and 40 were injured in a terror attack on a church in Hamoud, Jordan, on Friday. Mourners had gathered for a funeral at St George's Greek Orthodox church, and three gunmen arrived in a pickup truck, detonated a small explosive device outside the parameters of the building and opened indiscriminate fire shouting 'Allahu Akbar'. The CCTV footage reveals the perpetrators facing no resistance and fleeing. ✍️ Kunwar Khuldune Shahid Article | spectator.com/article/middle…

More than 60 Christians killed in Ethiopia 'massacre', church official says bbc.in/4swbUDS

Absolutely delightful anecdote here. Idealism is a second hand marketplace