Guy Herbert

Me in 2008. Still right.

@baylissbaghdad Wait till we have 5-year plans. (Wait - we do! Net Zero by 2030)

We should be highly suspicious of the target for domestically produced steel to make up 50% of our total requirements. More than one way to skin a cat.

@peterrhague It would pay for state pensions for a rather shorter period. And if anything they are harder to reform than Our Holy NHS

The richest man in Britain, Gopi Hinduja, has a net worth of £35 billion. If you could ignore economic reality and turn that into a pile of cash, it would fund the NHS for a little over two months, then it would be gone. Learning maths is important before making policy.

The number of payrolled workers is down year-on-year. And within that, public sector workforce growth is flattering the figures, concealing much worse news in the private sector.

@MissLauraMarcus I fear it is more than the small minority suggested by "there are people".

There are people in Labour and generally on The Left who truly and genuinely believe they’re the good guys, therefore anyone who disagrees with anything they say is either by definition a bad person or has something wrong with them and needs to be helped to see the truth. This is why The Left is so dangerous. Under the guise of thinking they’re nice, they cannot see the humanity in anyone who disagrees. This is Stalinist! It’s totalitarian. And today’s Labour Party is fast resembling this mindset.

@SimonMagus I am certainly available to hypnotise women's breasts on an experimental basis only, if he's not doing that any more. Sounds potentially more interesting than the Green politics I have experienced.

I'm reminded again that some people have always been taken in by grifters and con artists.

@thesundaysport I continue to ask why government departments post political propaganda.

'Membership is now earned by having dirt on senior government members and being big pals with a massive nonce'

3% of the UK is about the amount of the UK that is covered with houses and gardens. No, really. But we're not allowed to use any more land for houses and gardens, are we? All must live in chicken cage hovels to preserve land. I despise these people, truly despise them.

I'd love to be the CIA guy in charge of dividing the left. Collect a hefty paycheck and report success every week without ever having to do any work!

Ofcom persist in pretending that 4chan are trading in the UK, rather than accepting that Britons are visiting a foreign website

Offering employers £3,000 to take on young people will achieve nothing ✍️Len Shackleton of @iealondon capx.co/the-government…

If you think this response is arsey, consider how, say, South West Rail would respond to a US quango fining it for failing to permit concealed carry on its trains.

Scotland is banning greyhound racing, just in case. #banallthethings

Ofcom declined to comment directly about the, err, hamster bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

On this week's @Reason Roundtable, @nickgillespie called One Battle After Another "morally stupid" and a two-word review never summed up a movie better.

@RupertMyers Any pretext to control people more closely.

What an insanely joyless, puritan, lanyardist, restrictive country we seem to risk becoming

@LukeTryl The people operating under the banner of "Assisted Dying" have been pretty effective in undermining their own cause. I'm much more broadly pro-suicide than they purport to be and they have me against them. Not sure it is a comparable cause.

Would say the two most successful 21st Century UK social issue campaigns: Pro gay marriage (big shift in attitudes in short space of time) Anti Assisted Dying (even against public in principle consensus, and shifting elites during process) What have I missed (am sure loads!)?

I don’t know about you, readers, but if someone’s looking at me a bit funny on the tube my natural reaction is to whip out my cameraphone and scream “FREE PALESTINE” at them.

Christopher Caldwell's more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger essay in the Spectator on the "end of Trumpism" assumes there is such a thing as Trumpism that could be said to have had a beginning, much less an end. A collection raw impulses and grievances cocooned in a personality cult was evidently an ethos. I suppose it's easy for MAGA intellectuals to blame the "deep state" or a hyperactive foreign country or even a certain domestic ethnic group for this war, but this war is exactly the kind of thing Trump enjoys and (in the case of Iran) has been openly talking about for decades. Here is Caldwell: "The attack on Iran is so wildly inconsistent with the wishes of his own base..." What turning? What base? What consistency? The base is whatever Trump says it is, as Trump himself has pointed out, with polling to back him up on this question. MAGA’s approval of this war as of two days ago: "CNN’s Chief Data Analyst Harry Enten shared recent polling on MAGA’s approval of military action in Iran on Tuesday. An average of 89 percent approve of the war, while just 9 percent disapprove." The rest is podcast noise. The irony of the MAGA intellectuals professing that their movement has been hornswoggled and now lies in pieces on the floor is they were never truly part of any movement to begin with. They projected and fantasized, hoping to see coherence where there was none. And they only served the same function of those conniving Beltway swamp creatures they claimed to detest and whose comeuppance at the hands of an insurgent populist they saw as the principal reason for backing Trump in the first place. They articulated ideas and policies and actually believed these had any meaning for the mad king who thinks he brought peace to Albania and Azerbaijan, who is now negotiating with hardline communists in the Western Hemisphere as viable alternatives to democratic dissidents, and who just told a journalist, regarding Ireland's female president, "he's lucky to have me." Caldwell, Vance and the rest were indeed duped, but not by Trump. By their own blinkered sense of self-importance. #selection-1871.105-1871.182" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">archive.ph/ghNS2#selectio…

@SimonMagus See also the Mayor of London and his voter-base.

Burnham and Rayner are interested in two things. Firstly the Labour membership who are more left wing and pro-immigration than normal human beings and secondly the votes of immigrants currently haemorrhaging to Pollers and the racist left. They will attack Jews next.

@julianHjessop It seems we have a political and official class that has learned very little since the 18th century.

So, the UK has learnt nothing from Trump's steel tariffs, which lost more jobs in the rest of manufacturing than they 'protected' in steel. (Also ignores the real problem, which is high energy prices...)