Simon Cox

Excellent 🧵. My view: European states have failed for decades to have effective migration policies. States can *influence* & *plan for* migration. But they do neither properly - or transparently. Democratic states cannot *dictate* migration. Because that is about individual humanity.

To use the hackneyed phrase, there is, literally "nothing Labour about" reducing the administrative burden on business. Most of that administrative burden comes from trade union victories of the last century. There is no way past this.

There is something about the Labour Party which makes them unable to understand that employment regulation is regulation, employment bureaucracy is bureaucracy, and outside a few regulated industries, "business" experience of "red tape" is almost entirely what they call "improving worker's rights"

The DOJ lawsuits on the election are giving me 2020 vibes, only this time they are being filed by the federal government, not by states and private parties.

It is beautiful to see how the best of the - almost exclusively female - WH journalists have responded to Trump with such fearless *persistence*

Trump is really allowing himself to be dragged here. (But his helipad helps him by meaning every WH lawn interview he does is now almost unlistenably noisy, even while it ruins his hair.)

The fetishisation of "debate" as some sort of grand public good that everyone should do is so thoughtless and jarring to me because the more you actually do it the more it becomes apparent that genuinely constructive debate is actually a pretty niche thing.

I keep seeing South Asian folks making grand gestures of disclaiming Ramaswamy, as with Haley or Jindal. The thing to understand is, NONE of these candidates have ever, in any race, won a majority of the South Asian vote in any jurisdiction where they were running. They are products of white voters.

If this death toll was the result of a terrorist attack, the world would be up in arms And remember, this is not the new normal From the perspective of 2100, or even 2050, the summer of 2026 will be one of the coolest www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Irish High Court limits written submissions to 5,000 words. Word count to be displayed. Ht @timoconnorbl.bsky.social

James Tallerico goes after Elon Musk on Twitter. 👌

It's annoying to be a reviewer, and suspect you are reading something an AI author has written, or to be an author and suspect you are reading what an AI reviewer has written. A system where humans volunteer time to engage with AI products is not going to last.

Great post by @davidakaye.bsky.social: "Accountability, to be clear, is not retribution. It is leveling the system so that we can genuinely say that no person is above the law."

Feels very obvious that Local Govt should control when highways can be dug up, to force utilities to timetable their works in interests of all highway users www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Brilliant Government counterpoint to looming renationalisation of Thames Water www.theguardian.com/business/202...

OK, it had to be done Heuro Train to run Amsterdam - Paris trains in 2030 Complete 🐂 💩 Bullshit meter with an explainer👇 jonworth.eu/bullshit-meter…

"Most billionaire wealth isn't yachts or jewellery, it's in [ownership of the means of production]!" Yeah and that's much *more* important to take back from them than just a bunch of jewels would be!

immigration drives economic growth.

Do politicians really care about families and children? Because the way they allow family life to be effectively destroyed just for some general idea about migration suggests not.

One root of this problem is that the rights of EU citizen minor children to have their parents live with & care for them is based only on very narrow rulings of EU Court of Justice (Zambrano etc) and not clear EU regulations www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

New: Using the Public Sector Equality Duty in immigration cases — by Rebecca Hacker

1/ Pro-Russian volunteers who fought with the Donetsk and Luhansk 'People's Militias' prior to 2022 are being erroneously listed as deserters, rounded up, and sent to their likely deaths in assault squads due to a bureaucratic error by the Russian Ministry of Defence. ⬇️

As far as I'm aware the Supreme Court hasn't granted immunity from prosecution for President's son-in-laws. As yet. Extraordinary story if it's correct. Iran-Contra +++ and maybe more besides. www.vanityfair.com/story/jared-...

act local www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Steel quotas were already probably against TCA, and Made in Europe likely the same

Bigger picture across Europe is that failing to find ways to talk about immigration, ageing, and changing economies is providing an open door for populist parties to at least be accurate when they say centrist governments aren't getting a grip on the issues.

Good to see King’s College London students defending our freedoms - but did college officials allow Turning Point to have a stand?

Jack Ross, CEO of Turning Point introduces an undercover reporter from Al Jazeera to a former UVF man who offers to do a contract killing for the right price. Ross talks about violence but says, once sting revealed, he was joking www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottis...

They are both correct. I've been working on this issue professionally (not at DRCC) since around 2018 and the job is tough but simple: you have to communicate the facts as evidenced by mountains of studies and bitter experience. Your job is not to reflect government policy.

In parts of Merseyside, migrant care workers are being routinely racially abused and attacked by primary school-aged children Sickening in so many ways

If you would like to know how I know this works if we all do the same and spread the idea of doing it, here’s the story of how 4,000 of us forced the Govt to U-Turn on defending the Papal Nuncio after the Murphy Report into child abuse was published. www.tuppenceworth.ie/blog/2011/05...

And then I’m going to ring the office of my local FG TD and read him Jennifer Carroll McNeill’s comments from the Dáil yesterday and I’m going to ask him if agrees that the idea of making a film promoting consent as the basis for touching children “doesn't represent the views of Government”.

Unfortunately, that's what "Israel is a Jewish State" means in 2026. It's a state in which even the NYT does not consider Palestinian citizens - 20% of Israel's citizenry - as equal citizens whose vote should be counted.

On the NYT the daily podcast, it was said yesterday that in Israeli polls, the government and the opposition "have roughly half the country". This is patently false. It only works if you exclude Arab voters and the two Arab parties. In the polls, the government has about 42% The opposition is 58%

At the risk of sounding like a stuck record, in what world is it *not* front page news on the national broadcaster’s website that one of our main political parties is trying to have journalists arrested for investigating them?

A consistent feature of Times Radio and Times podcasts for about ten years has been guests suddenly discovering that migration crackdowns and disastrous mismanagement of the public realm are bad, because it is negatively affecting their elderly parents. But usually only in that one, isolated manner.

The European Parliament has awarded its 2026 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought to the International Criminal Court and its officials, recognising the Court's work in upholding international law and justice. www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/pres...

The immigration doom loop, summed up here by @gabyhinsliff.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...