Seb Steele

This is the biggest reform to our Parliament in a generation. 🇬🇧 This morning, the 700-year-old system of hereditary membership in the House of Lords was abolished. Membership is now earned through public service and merit, not granted by an inheritance. ✅

Iran’s strike last night on the Ras Laffan facility in Qatar is a significant escalation. It risks a prolonged supply crunch on the global LNG market. Yet here at home, the Chancellor says all countries must play their part in boosting oil and gas production - while her own Energy Secretary bans new drilling in the North Sea. Ed Miliband’s position is untenable. Those desperate to shut down our own industry will say it takes too long to get our own wells up and running. They argue it won’t make a difference to the current crisis. This is bogus. By autumn, Jackdaw could be producing enough gas to heat 1.6 million homes. All of it will go into our pipes. The approval has been sat on Ed Miliband’s desk for months. If the conflict is not resolved, we will be in for difficult times. Turning our backs on the tax revenue and extra supply from the North Sea is inexcusable. However, so too is Ed Miliband’s other mistake. He has spent the last two years making electricity expensive, when he should have been making it cheaper. If you want people to use electricity to heat their homes or drive their cars, we need to address the biggest problem we have - our electricity is too expensive. Our Cheap Power plan could have been adopted by the Government by now to cut everyone’s electricity bills by 20%. Expensive electricity has stopped consumers from adopting technology which gives them options in energy price spikes. We also need to cherish our industrial power. The crippling Carbon Taxes - which have doubled because of Labour’s policies - mean we lost a third of our refineries last year alone. That makes us more reliant on imports at the worst moment. In the longer term, renewables tie us to gas as we always need flexible power that we can ramp up when the wind stops blowing. Yet Labour’s plan means that gas power gets four times more expensive. The Government must reinstate my plans for a third large-scale nuclear plant. That’s why our Energy Resilience Strategy is as follows: BACK THE NORTH SEA MAKE ELECTRICITY CHEAP STOP IMPOSING CRIPPLING CARBON TAXES ON INDUSTRY DOUBLE DOWN ON NUCLEAR

The National Audit Office has released a report into the Afghan resettlement scheme, the findings are grim. 37,950 Afghans have already been resettled in the UK and the Government expects a further 8,632 - 9,741 to be resettled by 2030, bringing the total to 46,582 - 47,691.

Even supporters of Angela Rayner spy a leadership strategy in her comments on migration Any contender would need support from key unions One union official said: "UNISON represents a lot of migrant social care workers. Rayner coming out publicly won’t go unnoticed"

Every once in a while I forget the role that envy played in bringing British Civilization to it's knees. Then people like this come to remind me that they'd rather the country be raped by foreigners and globalists than allow their own people to succeed.

Publicly traded companies in Britain must have, or “explain to the regulator” why they do not have: - A minimum of 40% women on their board of directors - A woman CEO, chairman of the board, CFO and/or Senior Independent Director - A board member who is an ethnic minority Why is anybody confused about why so few companies want to list here and so few promising startups scale up here? Would you agree to put people in charge of your company on the basis of their sex or race in order to meet a diversity quota? These rules were brought in by the Conservative Party in 2022, BTW.

THE GREAT BRITISH CRISIS by John Bew We are in the midst of the Fourth Great Disruption of the modern British state. Our politics, across every part of the political spectrum, is lagging perilously behind the realities we face. The fidelity of our political and official classes to the current order comes from an assumption, deeply ingrained in the generation who are coming close to retirement, that liberal or social-market economies were the only possible future and that the rest of the world was destined to become more like us. It is partly why austerity – like appeasement – had far more political support than we care to remember. It is why we spent 0.7 per cent of GDP on development assistance at the start of the last decade and barely 2 per cent on defence. It is why, after 1989, we added even more international and human rights law on top of the international legal order crafted out of 1945. It is why Brexit was such a psychological shock to this world-view. It is why we sometimes look like the last man at the bar at Davos, nursing a cocktail as the lights go off and facing a treacherous and icy route to an unclear destination. So as one world collapses around us, what is the shape of things to come? Here are some hard truths. The current social contract – particularly around welfare, health and pensions – is unsustainable on current levels of growth. A domestic and international legal system that does not allow us to control our borders has lost legitimacy at home. We have the highest energy prices in the Western world, just at the moment when energy is vital to our ability to take advantage of relative national strengths in technology. And there is currently no route to higher defence spending – which is inevitable unless the nation is content to continue on a path towards greater insecurity and irrelevance – without major cuts elsewhere in the public spending stack. At moments of relative political equilibrium these are problems of policy for specialists in each of those areas. At moments of great structural upheaval, these are grand strategic problems that can only be confronted as a coherent whole. Cover art by Alex Williamson

Modern governments "restrained" by the will of the people through democratic voting are some of the largest and most powerful states in the history of the world

Your inheritance shouldn’t determine if you sit in Parliament. The Hereditary Peers Bill, which was passed yesterday, will finally end the centuries-old hereditary principle in Parliament. Hereditary peers will no longer have the right to sit and vote in the House of Lords.

Rory Stewart: “As Britain becomes less ethnically British, should we embrace the fact that our foreign policy will be shaped by new migrants and their connections to their home countries?” He’s thinking about this now for the first time