Matteo Massardi

[Clive Lewis MP @labourlewis]

Westminster may finally be about to have the argument it has spent 40 years avoiding.

If Andy Burnham returns to Parliament, the political class will know how to cover it. A leadership drama. Who is up, who is down, whether Keir Starmer can survive, whether Labour is once again turning inward. The familiar machinery of Westminster psychodrama will whirr into life.

That framing misses the larger point. Burnham’s possible return matters not because of what it says about Labour’s leadership, but because of what it reveals about the British state: what it can still do, what it has forgotten how to do, and what kind of country it must become if it is serious about resilience.

Britain is finally having a more serious conversation about national security. The Strategic Defence Review, the pivot back towards Europe, the recognition that hybrid warfare turns citizens, infrastructure and civic institutions into part of the front line: all of it marks a real shift in how the state thinks about its own survival.
But at the centre of that conversation lies a question that the defence establishment, and most of Westminster, still does not want to answer. What kind of society do you need to be before resilience is possible?

Finland is now the model everyone cites. Comprehensive security. Whole-of-society defence. Civilian preparedness woven into military planning. British strategists admire the Finnish system and ask how it might be copied. But the admiration stops short of the uncomfortable question: why does it work there?

The answer is not geography or history or some mysterious quality of Finnish national character. It is structural. Nearly 80% of Finns say they would defend their country if attacked. In Britain, the figure is closer to 33%. That gap is not an accident. It exists because Finland has spent decades building a society in which people have a genuine stake in what they are being asked to defend. Energy is affordable. Housing is available. Public services function. Institutions command trust. The Nordic welfare state is not a sentimental add-on to Finnish security policy. It is the foundation of it. You cannot ask people to defend a country that does not work for them.

Britain has spent 40 years building the opposite. The privatisation of essentials – energy, water, transport, housing – transferred wealth upwards from households to shareholders while making the basics of everyday life more expensive. The state, stripped of the tools to control costs at source, has been reduced to compensating after the fact.

Out of every pound the Government spends on housing, 88p goes to subsidising private rents. Just 12p goes to building homes. When energy prices spiked in 2022, the Government spent £40bn in a single winter cushioning the blow, not because it had a resilient energy system but because it lacked one. Debt interest now consumes more than £100bn a year. Britain has the highest debt servicing costs in the G7: the compounding price of financing failure rather than eliminating it at source.

This is what bond market dependency actually looks like. It is not an abstract fiscal condition. It is the consequence of a state that has been stripped of the supply-side tools that would let it cure the problems it now pays, indefinitely, to manage. And here is the paradox the Treasury refuses to confront. The countries that borrow most cheaply are often those that have retained the public investment model Britain abandoned. The spread between UK and Dutch borrowing costs has widened sharply not because markets fear public investment, but because they have lost confidence in a model that borrows to subsidise private failure while never addressing its causes.

This is the connection Britain’s defence debate is missing. The familiar framing, that social spending is what must be sacrificed to meet the NATO target, is not merely politically toxic. It is strategically illiterate. Cutting the foundations of social cohesion to fund the hardware of national defence is self-defeating. You end up with planes and no pilots, submarines and no crew, an army that cannot recruit because the society it is meant to protect has stopped believing in itself.

I think Burnham understands this. That is why his programme is more interesting than the leadership gossip suggests. What he has been building in Greater Manchester – public control of transport, expanded social housing, investment in the productive foundations of the city economy – is not a nostalgic rerun of postwar nationalisation. It is a proof of concept for a different kind of state.

The Bee Network is the most visible example, but the argument behind it travels. A state that can shape markets is not condemned to subsidise their failures. A state that produces affordable energy through public generation does not need to spend tens of billions cushioning every price shock. A state with a serious public housebuilding programme does not need housing benefit to rise endlessly in line with private rents. A state that builds institutions people can see, use and trust begins to restore the civic confidence on which resilience depends.

The real constraint on Britain is not money. It is capacity: the workers, institutions, supply chains and public purpose needed to turn national will into national renewal. Britain’s tragedy is not that it has run out of money. It is that after 40 years of hollowing out the state, it has made itself less able to act.

Burnham’s critics will reach for the familiar warning. Borrow more, spend more, spook the gilt markets, repeat the Truss disaster. But this misunderstands both the problem and the opportunity.

Bond markets do not have ideological preferences. They have functional ones. They prefer clarity, credible revenue streams, productive investment, and a state with a plan. What they punish is not public ambition but incoherence. A properly designed productive state programme would not be a leap into fiscal fantasy. It would be an attempt to end the much costlier fantasy that Britain can keep borrowing to compensate for broken markets while refusing to repair them.

The defence conversation and the economic conversation need to become the same conversation. Finland did not build national resilience by choosing between welfare and security. It built resilience by understanding that they are inseparable: that a country in which the basics work, where people trust one another and the institutions around them, is one that can face danger with something more than anxiety.

That is the deeper argument Burnham represents. Westminster will be tempted to treat him as a leadership story. It should resist the temptation. The question is not whether Burnham can return to parliament. It is whether Britain can return to the idea that the state should make life work. Because a country that cannot command the confidence of its people cannot truly defend itself.

[Matteo Massardi @massamatt]

@PeterStefanovi2 Never a minute too soon

[We Own It @We_OwnIt]

Water companies don't measure sewage spills in volume, only duration.

As the FT's Jonathan Guthrie puts it, 'Volume figures would be shockingly high. This would embarrass utilities, investors and politicians'

We know sewage is very, very, VERY bad. Yet it's probably even worse than we realise 🤮

Strange time for Ofwat to be considering letting Thames Water take a break from the rules... 🧐🧐🧐 https://t.co/frxezEGLTM

[Danny (Dennis) Citrinowicz ,داني سيترينوفيتش @citrinowicz]

Why Trump’s Approach to Iran Was Always Doomed to Fall Short?

No matter how one looks at it, the writing was on the wall.

The Iran issue represents precisely the kind of challenge President Donald Trump has historically struggled with: it requires patience, offers no immediate visuals of victory, and involves an adversary that is both resilient and unwilling to bend under pressure.

This raises a fundamental question: why pursue confrontation in the first place using a strategy that doesn't suited to the nature of the problem?

From the outset, there has been a deep mismatch between the Trump administration’s negotiation style and Iran’s strategic culture. Trump’s approach, rooted in pressure, public signaling, and rapid deal-making, assumes that adversaries will respond predictably to escalating costs. Iran does not operate that way.

For Tehran, time is not a constraint but it is a tool. Strategic patience is built into its decision-making. Threats, far from compelling compromise, often reinforce resistance. The familiar “carrot and stick” framework has limited influence when it collides with rigid ideological red lines and a regime that views endurance as a form of victory.

Just as importantly, Iran does not measure success in the same way Washington often does. There is no need for a dramatic breakthrough or a symbolic signing ceremony. From Tehran’s perspective, simply holding firm in the face of American pressure can itself be framed domestically and regionally as a win.

As pressure fails to produce results, the instinct in Washington is often to escalate rhetoric and tighten demands. Yet in Tehran, such escalation is interpreted not as strength, but as evidence that its strategy is working l, meaning that the United States is growing impatient, even off balance.

If there is a viable path forward, it begins with a shift in assumptions. Iran is not a conventional negotiating partner, and it will not respond to unconventional pressure in conventional ways. Effective diplomacy in this context is less about public brinkmanship and more about quiet, sustained engagement.

It also requires an understanding that any durable agreement must allow Iran to perceive itself as having achieved something of value. Negotiations framed as “take it or leave it” are unlikely to succeed when the other side is prepared to leave it indefinitely.

There is, in fact, a shared interest in avoiding escalation and reaching some form of understanding. But as long as the process is driven by mismatched expectations, conflicting timelines, and fundamentally different definitions of success, that interest alone will not be enough.

Without a recalibration of approach, the gap between Washington and Tehran will remain not just wide, but structurally difficult to close

#IranWar‌

[Andrew Haslam-Jones @andrewhj]

@RichardBentall @CeeMacBee And here’s what a real economist is telling us:

[Matteo Massardi @massamatt]

@beppe_grillo Time for you to come back. Your inheritance was squandered

[Make Votes Matter @MakeVotesMatter]

Because no one party can speak for the whole of Britain.

Because the value of our vote shouldn't depend on our postcode.

Because we want to be able to vote for what we truly believe in.

Because governments make better decisions when every voice is heard.

We need #PRnow

[David Andolfatto @dandolfa]

Three easy ways to reduce the deficit (via Paul Krugman):
1. Collect $600B in unpaid taxes;
2. Crack down on medical insurance companies gaming Medicare Advantage program ($1T-2T over next 10 yrs);
3. Discourage corporate tax avoidance ($70B);
4. Let 2017 tax cut expire.

[Will Hutton @williamnhutton]

50 years on from Mrs Thatcher becoming leader of the Tory party it is clear that the derided ‘wets’ - Gilmour, Heseltine, Prior and even Heath - were right and Thatcherites wrong. The post war settlement needed reform not evisceration. The UK would have been better without her.

[Make Votes Matter @MakeVotesMatter]

💥Support for Proportional Representation is growing.

Latest polling shows that 49% of the British public wants to switch to PR - including over half of Green, Lib Dem, Reform and Labour voters.

Just 26% of people would rather keep FPTP.

It's time for change. It's time for PR.

[Peter Davies @MastermanDavies]

@Independent The Brexit sold never existed.
UK already had "Brexit" inside the EU +outsize influence helped by the English language +UN Security Council, NATO etc:
no Euro & Schengen,
rebate, veto, sea border, Commonwealth ties, GB off-shore tax havens, City of London making its own rules...

[SophieSpring97 @SophieP25397]

Let's be honest #Brexit was just about the rich avoiding tax wasn't it? All this about taking back control, sunlit uplands, boom times and cheap food and cheap fuel was bullshit.

[Hugo Tagholm @HugoSAS]

There we have it. The customer is bailing out the privatised water industry for the work they failed to do with the money we gave them before.

@Feargal_Sharkey @GreenJennyJones @MattStaniek

[Electoral Reform Society @electoralreform]

This Thursday, MPs will be meeting in Parliament to debate proportional representation.

In preparation, we have been actively encouraging MPs to attend and speak out supportively in this welcomed debate on fair votes.
https://t.co/F6FjwpiNcW

[A C Grayling #FBPE #Reform #Rejoin #FBPR @acgrayling]

Labour almost completely alienating its base over EU and PR, over cuts, over pandering to non-doms & to Trump. It got in by not being Tories, and are now as Tory as Tories. Our system is an elective dictatorship (Hailsham) and Labour's playing a private game because it can.

[David__Osland @David__Osland]

Attendance at the House of Lords should be paid at the same rate as Universal Credit. I mean, it's enough to live on, isn't it?

[A C Grayling #FBPE #Reform #Rejoin #FBPR @acgrayling]

It's time to wake from the 'post-imperial sleepwalk' & take our full place as a leading European nation. And this before we've beggared & besmirched ourselves too much to make the recovery definitive.

[David__Osland @David__Osland]

Being a water company customer in Britain is like having your mobile phone nicked and then being asked to pay the mugger's fine

[BladeoftheSun @BladeoftheS]

The UK is spending £369m refurbishing Buckingham Palace for King Charles, who has £22bn and gets £500m more a year.

He can pay for his own renovations, £369m is more than England spends on building Social Housing in an entire year for the whole country.

[Prem Sikka @premnsikka]

Abuses will continue.

Thames Water to get green light to hike bills by 33% by 2030, bailout funded by customers. Fleeced again.

Company raising capital from customers who won't own anything.

Sewage dumping, dividends, exorbitant exec pay will continue.
https://t.co/aoRQfmGrl8