Alex Andreou

WHAT A LINE UP! Quiet Riot, Lincoln Project, and Byline Times! I'm sort of annoyed not to be able just to watch. BOOK!

NOTHING will prepare you for this 45-second story arc. From "I'm just doing this because I love the flag, it's totally grassroots, and I'm not part of anything political"... to who actually gave him the flags the night before. Anyone who believes it is an innocent movement needs to see this.

Sky News says police are "overwhelmed by the numbers". Met coped perfectly well with 2x as many at the pro-Gaza rally, 5x as many at the anti-Brexit march, and 15x as many at London Pride. They're not overwhelmed by the numbers. They're overwhelmed by the ratio of violent thugs in those numbers.

Sarah Vine says she would welcome a fight for the Labour premiership and would not condemn it as chaos (I think she absolutely would), because leadership contests "flush out people who are not very good". 🧐 The last such contest yielded Liz Truss.

Am I alone in finding it super weird that there is literally not a single sentence about which party he was elected with only two years ago? In this or in the two previous articles on this? www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I reckon we are less than a week away from being told to vote Farage "in Ann’s memory".

Scenes

Nipped over to the other place to get a flavour.

“We need to talk about how ludicrous it is to speak of defence in terms of % of GDP. If the UK economy were to massively expand, you wouldn’t suddenly need billions more to protect it. And if it shrank, you couldn’t defend it for less. The expression of a budget as a % of GDP is utterly arbitrary.”

Am I being too bleak? I hope so.

“Growth is, of course, important, but you get a single number summarising the whole country. The economy might be growing at 3%, with one place growing at 10% and another at 0.5%. So the question must be: is every place and every person sharing in the proceeds of growth?” @jeevunsandher.bsky.social

The danger of using voxpops in place of real analysis. Cameras are a magnet for motivated activists. These two made it into four different reels + a dozen print pieces. The illusion is that we're getting an insight into "Clacton voters". In truth, we just know what Farage Megastans Jim & June think.

I did an episode of @alexpodyssey.bsky.social on the myth of Midas which is, in part, about the folly of greed. But in terms of deities it's actually Hades, ruler of the Underworld, who is also god of wealth (nicknamed "Plouton": the rich one). This is for two related - and delicious - reasons. 1/3