Mark

High finance, low politics and rogue archaeology. British Gaullist. “This is a niche and disturbing take”

[Mark @Rubble2012]

@TheStalwart Yep. Everything is

[MagellanQuest 🇪🇺/acc @MagellanQuest]

One of Brexit’s strangest ironies:
In 2016, a lot of anger was directed at Eastern European workers.
Poles, Romanians, Lithuanians.
Too many Europeans, they said.
A decade later, many are realising that intra-European migration was probably the easiest kind of migration Britain could have had:
work-oriented, culturally closer, legally structured and often circular.
Europeans moved.
Britain chose to cut that channel.
And then discovered that geography and culture still matter.

[Mark @Rubble2012]

@gregbagwell Downloaded, thank you. I look forward to this

[Mark @Rubble2012]

@capt_grenville @wylfcen Fact check: correct

[Mark @Rubble2012]

@VintageMrHobbes In my old firm the boss actually had a guy deported for that

[Mark @Rubble2012]

@unusual_whales Hopefully not before the techbros have finished their bunkers

[Mark @Rubble2012]

@francesbarber13 @TimesRadio After a spell abroad a while back I found it too parochial

[Despotic Inroad @DespoticInroad]

Again, an awful lot of gaslighting re: "neoliberalism", denying the existence of a ~50yr policy/governance agenda on the basis of "the state spends a lot of money".

Public spending as %-of-GDP isn't high because we've had a period of Leftwing hegemony. (Outside of the arts, the academy & the social/cultural policy sphere, that's obvious nonsense). Rather, it's high because:
👉Demographic pressures have pushed up the 2 massive spending outlays, health & pensions – a problem common to the vast majority of Western democracies
👉UK growth/productivity has been stagnant for ~18yrs, since The City of London collapsed under the weight of its own poor investments, while spending pressures have continued to grow apace
👉We have a growing (& expensive) debt pile as a result of the taxpayer twice being forced to bail out the private sector to the tune of several hundred £BN – 1st during GFC, 2nd during Covid lockdown
👉We have huge revenue pressures from "sticking plaster" subsidies covering up the underlying issue of chronic low investment, e.g. housing benefits ballooning while municipal capex on housebuilding shrinks; or tax credits/UC top-ups disguising stagnant real wages; or increasing day-to-day NHS spending after years of squeezed capital budgets/social care sector collapse

Neoliberalism is defined by privatisation, the embrace of globalisation/free trade, monetarist central banking, the emasculation of the labour movement, & the transformation of the state from a prime actor in national production/investment into a post-hoc fiscal distributor. It has been consciously driven by market-liberal true believers (some even self-identifying as "neoliberals") – on the Right by Hayekian/Friedmanite think tanks, business groups & various Conservative ideologues, and on the Left by Third Way modernisers (see Blair) and their intellectual forebears in Marxism Today's revisionism, the Democratic Left etc. etc.

Pretending none of this happened (because 'muh the state still spends £££') is pure sophistry. They want us to believe they didn't sell off airlines, steelmakers, coal mines, energy generators, water companies, car manufacturers, banks, bus/train contracts & millions of council houses. That they didn't deregulate financial services to get their 'Big Bang'. That they didn't abolish rent controls, or capital/exchange controls, or wage boards, or price commissions. That they didn't outsource core services and state capacity to corporate providers. That they didn't impose some of the most draconian/restrictive trade union laws in the democratic West. That they didn't cede monetary policy to an independent central bank, or cede trade/migration policy to an unelected, supranational, continental bureaucracy. That they didn't squeeze public investment or prioritise tax cuts over infrastructure spending. That they didn't eschew industrial policy and take a lax approach to deindustrialisation because the future was services & the "knowledge economy".

This isn't simpy an accumulation of random policy titbits, but is the outcome of a coherent intellectual project that has consistently rebalanced the labour/capital relationship in the latter's favour. These people are conning you.

[Don Johnson @DonMiami3]

I used Claude for some due diligence on a deal I am looking and it lasted all of about 20 minutes on the pro plan before requiring me to buy another ~$65 in coins before continuing

If they think this is sustainable going forward... the whole scam is going to fall apart - in a few months it'll be cheaper to hire another analyst

[(((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges]

Like I’ve been saying for a few days now, something isn’t right inside Reform. Their basic internal discipline is collapsing. Fighting amongst themselves. Putting out stupidly transparent and inflammatory attack ads. Mucking up the Makerfield selection. There’s an issue there.

[Zoomer @ZoomerHistorian]

‘Police are getting bricks thrown at their heads!’

‘I don’t think they are mate’

[Mark @Rubble2012]

@gregbagwell Noooo! He could have started a collection

[Mark @Rubble2012]

@mocent0 @MysteriosoX We've got a kid working on automation. Not just automation, AI. He's an AI whizz.

So, he's a dev then.

[Mark @Rubble2012]

@TheStalwart This could catch on

[Mark @Rubble2012]

@unusual_whales

[Dr Tom Horne @HorneSupremacy]

💛 An extraordinary hoard of three possibly Bronze Age solid gold arm-rings has been found in Cumbria!

The rings - torcs - all of which have distinctive fluted or flared terminal ends, were found on farmland near Harker by Alan Daniels and Andy Crammond.

https://t.co/3mS0YnBQP0

[Mark @Rubble2012]

@FennellJW @thinkdefence They undermine everything

[Mark @Rubble2012]

@FTusa284 F-35, Patriot etc

[Mark @Rubble2012]

@FennellJW @thinkdefence It's not just the police. We even see this in schools. No idea how this can be addressed