@rbrharrison I'm sure they'll find some other ideological nonsense that adds a tiny slither of revenue while squeezing aspiration to the point of no return.
It's a Labour specialty.
@CutMyTaxUK At least Starmer is handcuffed to his manifesto.
If the Labour members get to choose the next PM, the UK economy is heading for a full death spiral.
@techtoby__ There's a lot to laugh at on both sides here.
Screencapping your Rightmove stats - with no context - as guidance for investing in a shaky UK housing market is pretty fucking dumb though.
@DavidDack It's all relative obviously - I've always seen sub-21/22 as good for somebody in decent shape who runs semi-regularly.
Sub 20 is my mental separator of "damn, that's quick".
You've got the US President threatening to "demolish a civilisation" and MAGA-tards complaining that EU won't open their airspace. 🤡
Meanwhile, the global economy...
What a fucking mess this is.
My monologue on The Times at One with Andrew Neil on @TimesRadio on Trump’s War:
Donald Trump woke up this morning to tell Britain to open the Strait of Hormuz without US help and to ‘start learning how to fight’ for ourselves because America ‘won’t be there to help you.’
Well, we learned how to do that in 1940, Mr President, when your country was nowhere to be seen and only Britain stood with its Commonwealth allies to defend civilisation against the greatest evil the world has ever seen.
For those of you wondering if the Atlantic Alliance still has a future, you can stop wondering. As long as Trump is in the White House clearly it doesn’t.
Meanwhile Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio is impatient with media criticism that the aims of Trump’s War are confusing and uncertain. So yesterday on American TV he helpfully listed them.
Write them down, he advised, implying this was the definitive list. So I did:
1. The destruction of Iran’s air force
2. The destruction of their navy
3. The severe diminishing of their missile launching capability
4. The destruction of their factories
Which is clear enough — except that it’s not the list with which President Trump started the war. That list clearly included regime change and the end of Iran’s ability to develop nukes.
They didn’t make Secretary Rubio’s list. Nor did the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.
There is further cause for concern. IF Rubio’s list is now the definitive one, then Trump could claim war aims achieved, victory declared even with Iran still in control of the Strait of Hormuz, still able to develop a nuclear arsenal. Not quite the victory anybody envisaged.
Yet that may well be the route we’re now going down. Late last night in Washington we discovered that Mr Trump was telling aides he WAS prepared to end the war even if the Strait of Hormuz was still closed.
That opening it would prolong the war beyond his deadline. That it was up to the Europeans and the Gulf States to take the lead in opening it because they needed it more than America.
Well, thanks a lot Donald. You start a war without consulting your allies, you change your war aims more often than Keir Starmer performs U-turns and now you talk of ending it, leaving us to hold the baby. Just great.
This matters. Because the longer the Strait of Hormuz is closed the more the global economy faces something close to catastrophe. 1/2
@eadams33@KatieKeithBarn2 Like I said... I've used it for 15 years. It was the best solution for much of that time.
It isn't anymore (for what I need).
I'm going to make some obvious points.
(1) Blowing up all the oil infrastructure in the Middle East is an insane idea, and may well result in a global economic crash and humanitarian crisis unrivaled in the lives of those now living. We're talking about the price of everything everywhere rising, from food to gas, at a moment when inflation was already high. All of that will be laid at the feet of the authors of this war.
(2) The antebellum status quo of Feb 27, 2026 was just not that bad, but we're unlikely to return to it. Expect indefinite, long-term, ongoing disruptions to everything out of the Middle East.
(3) Also assume tech financing crashes for the indefinite future. The genius plan to get the Gulf states caught in the crossfire has incinerated much of the funding for LPs, for datacenters, and for IPOs. Anyone in tech who supported this war may soon learn the meaning of "force majeure" as funding gets yanked.
(4) Many capital allocators will instead be allocating much further down Maslow's hierarchy of needs, towards useful basic things like food and energy.
(5) It's fortunate that all those progressives yelled about the "climate crisis." Yes, their reasoning about timelines was wrong, and much of the money was wasted in graft, but the result was right: we all need energy independence from the Middle East, pronto. It's also fortunate that Elon and China autistically took climate seriously. Now they're going to need to ship a billion solar panels, electric vehicles, batteries, nuclear power plants, and the like to get everyone off oil, immediately.
(6) It's not just an oil and gas problem, of course. It's also a fertilizer problem, and a chemical precursor problem. Maybe some new sources will come online at the new prices, but it takes time to dial stuff up, particularly at this scale, so shortages are almost a certainty.
That said, China has actually scaled up coal-to-chemicals[a,c] (C2C), and there's also something more sci-fi called Power-to-X[b] which turns arbitrary power + water + air into hydrocarbons. But all of that will need to get accelerated. I have a background in chemical engineering so may start funding things in this area.
(7) Ultimately, this war is going to result in tremendous blame for anyone associated with it. It's a no-win scenario to blow up this much infrastructure for so many people. Simply not worth it for whatever objective they thought they were going to attain. But unless you're actually in a position to stop the madness, the pragmatic thing to do is: scramble to mitigate the fallout to yourself, your business, and your people.
[a]: https://t.co/ITat4tmAFd
[b]: https://t.co/bWwiSQcgyt
[c]: https://t.co/FQCqMhy5d3
President Trump and others pray in the Oval Office:
"We pray for wisdom from Heaven to flood his heart. Lord, you will guide him in these challenging times."
Truly fucking typical of a country as broken as the UK that the major talking points of the war with Iran seem to be “we need to push harder for Net Zero” and “we need to tax expats.”