Ian Tabberer

Born in Leicester, made in the Royal Navy. All views my own.

[Iain Dale 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇬🇧 ⚒️ @IainDale]

Interesting to hear Robert Jenrick repeatedly pour scorn on the Tory Party's and @KemiBadenoch's Eurosceptic credentials. I'll just leave this here.

[Ian Tabberer @iantabbs]

@edzitron Why not make it $1Tn, $1.5Tn, $2Tn. Still the same possibility of actually making this number - zero.

[Sam @SamCKx]

Thomas Tuchel’s record as England manager:

Played 22
Won 17
Drawn 2
Lost 3
Goals scored 51
Goals conceded 17
Win rate: 77.3%

After 22 matches, Gareth Southgate’s England record was:

Played 22
Won 12
Drawn 7
Lost 3
Win rate: 54.5%

Anyone who wants to sack Tuchel is utterly clueless.

[𝕊𝕥𝕖𝕧𝕖 ℂ𝕠𝕠𝕡𝕖𝕣 @SteveACooper]

A multimillion £ "gift" is nobody's business, yet a pair of spectacles are "on the take" and are of national interest.
The king of hypocrisy "do as I say, not as I do"

[Ian Tabberer @iantabbs]

Irony is dead. The world’s largest social media company doesn’t like free speech.

[The News Agents @TheNewsAgents]

"They've silenced her.

"This is an attempt to punish someone who spoke the truth."

The "bizarre" moment @maitlis is forced to ask Facebook whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams to leave the studio.

[Matthew Stadlen @MatthewStadlen]

Al Carns, a former marine who seems to grasp the scale of the challenge facing Britain, calling for Andy Burnham to be properly scrutinised, and prepared to face him in a leadership contest. Good.

[Ian Tabberer @iantabbs]

@ContrarianCurse The risk for TSM is that if they went for 80% GM’s they would spur customers to seek substitutes particularly for old nodes. Look at what’s likely happening to the memory space - near-term looks great but it forces clients to look elsewhere with CXMT being the poster child here.

[Bob Elliott @BobEUnlimited]

A sure fire way to tell someone has never seriously run money is seeing them snipe at folks who get calls wrong.

Anyone who has been in this business for more than a minute knows as right as you are today, you will no doubt be equally wrong at some point in the future.

[Ian Tabberer @iantabbs]

@InFoTheLongTerm @Mr_Derivatives Have similar view. Reminds me of a monopolist pharmacy co. with a great drug but the market can see that Google et al are building a generic supply chain. Hence Mediatek, INTC and the ASIC/CP value chain doing so well. Less about the size of the pie, who eats it at what margins.

[Ian Tabberer @iantabbs]

@TomDuffinPhotos The Meadows

[Merryn Somerset Webb @MerrynSW]

My piece on LLMs today less of a minority opinion than you might think. Here's Joachim Klements on the same. "If these three results (the prevalence of hallucinations, the inability to remove the neurons that create them and free replication of basic models without the need to pay for more complex models) are true, then OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and others are in serious trouble. Large-scale LLMs will not be able to replace mission-critical software because of the inherent hallucination problem, which does not go away due to the very structure of the models. At the same time, for everyday use cases where they are good enough, there are free models that already can do what the large models do, and every business can simply use these without having to pay OpenAI or any other money. So, where is the business model for these genAI companies?"

[Miriam Cates @miriam_cates]

No one has ‘paid into’ the state pension. NI payments are spent by the government of the day, not put into a pot with your name on. Using these terms just perpetuates the myth that the state pension is a contributory scheme. It isn’t. It’s a non-means tested universal benefit paid for by current taxpayers.

[NikTek @NikTek]

>Jensen Huang says he thinks "We've achieved AGI"

>Sora shuts down next*

This AI bubble looks like is finally going to burst

[Beardo @BeardoTrader]

Maybe there’s a reason Buffett is in cash…

[Ian Tabberer @iantabbs]

@orrdavid Long EWZ

[Ian Tabberer @iantabbs]

@DarioCpx @RealJohnGaltFla Totally agree. Will be hard to convince Allies to join you when your current mine countermeasure vessels are in Singapore currently! Drones and the risk of a swarm have choked off the SoH.

[Gordon Fielden @GordonFielden]

Peston’s analysis follows a now familiar pattern when it comes to Keir Starmer. The framing is rarely neutral. It begins not with the principle at stake, but with an implied weakness. The reader is invited to see the Prime Minister as either naïve, overly legalistic, or politically cornered. That lens then shapes the rest of the commentary.

The central issue was whether the United Kingdom should permit the United States to use British bases, including Diego Garcia, at a moment when America was arguably the initiating force in a conflict with Iran. The reported advice of the Attorney General was that doing so before any Iranian retaliation would place Britain on questionable legal ground. That is not a minor technicality. It is the difference between participating in an unlawful act and acting in collective self defence.

To portray adherence to that advice as political timidity or diplomatic miscalculation is to invert the argument. If Britain claims to uphold international law, then it cannot suspend that commitment whenever a powerful ally demands expediency. Law is not an accessory to be worn in peacetime and discarded in crisis.

It is also misleading to suggest that this was some uniquely British hesitation. Germany and France adopted similarly cautious positions. Neither signalled blanket support for immediate participation in a conflict whose legal basis was contested. That places Britain within a broader European posture rooted in prudence and legality. This was not isolation. It was alignment with major allies who took the view that international law must frame action from the outset.

The suggestion that Starmer “alienated” Donald Trump also deserves scrutiny. Alliances between states are not personal friendships. They are institutional, strategic and enduring. A refusal to act outside legal parameters is not hostility. It is sovereignty. If the American administration were to respond by withdrawing tariff arrangements secured through negotiation, that would reflect a transactional approach in Washington rather than a failure of statecraft in London.

As for the apparent shift from refusal to later cooperation, the distinction is neither cosmetic nor contradictory. Once Iran retaliated against regional allies, the legal character of the conflict changed. Collective self defence carries a different basis in international law than participation in a first strike. Recognising that distinction is not inconsistency. It is constitutional discipline.

There is also a broader point that is underplayed. Public opinion in Britain remains cautious about further military entanglement in the Middle East. A Prime Minister who insists on lawful justification before committing national assets is not necessarily weak. He may simply be reflecting both the law and the electorate.

The easy narrative is that in moments of crisis leaders must privilege realpolitik over principle. The harder truth is that once principle is abandoned in favour of expediency, it becomes far more difficult to invoke it later. If international law is dismissed as inconvenient when allies breach it, then it loses moral force when adversaries do the same.

One may disagree with Starmer’s judgment. But to suggest that fidelity to legal advice is folly misunderstands the very order Britain claims to defend.