Oh dear … here’s Precious Andy explaining in 2016 that the free movement of people has destroyed jobs in the UK… He’ll say anything for power. But you must know that by now. It’s just a race to the bottom hey Andy?

🚨 NEW: Rachel Reeves is rumoured to quit as an MP to "cash in" on her experience as Chancellor It comes after she "secretly met" two City companies in the last fortnight [@MillardClothier]

We can laugh at all the chips 'n' gravy I-love-Oasis-me professional northerner stuff, and the Gogglebox pandering, but there is obviously a constituency for it. Caring about relatively abstract stuff like the national debt & gilts & mortgage rates is unusual.

You said, we did. ✅ After residents highlighted overgrown hedges on Winrose Crescent/ Hill during our street surgery, we contacted BITMO and asked for action. We're pleased they've now been cut back. Thanks to everyone who raised the issue. 🌳👏 📸 Before & after pics attached.

I'm Japanese. Americans who visit my country tend to come home with the same question: how did Japan stay Japan? They watched trains leave on the exact second. They left a phone on a café table, came back an hour later, and found it still sitting there next to the cold coffee. Some of them read that in 2023 people in Tokyo turned in more than 4 billion yen in lost cash to the police, and assumed it was a typo. It wasn't. There are two halves to the answer. Most people who praise Japan online only know the first one. For America, the second one matters more. THE FIRST HALF: HOW WE KEPT OURSELVES It starts in July 1853, when Commodore Perry brought four black ships to the mouth of Edo Bay and pointed his guns at a country that had been closed for over two hundred years. Across the sea, China had just lost the Opium War and was being forced open by foreign powers. Japan's leaders could see exactly what happened to old civilizations that refused to change. So they changed faster than any nation ever had. But they did it under a rule: wakon yōsai. Japanese spirit, Western technique. Take the railways, the steel, the constitution, the navy. Leave the self-contempt at the dock. That rule survived everything that came after. War, defeat, two atomic bombs, nearly seven years of American occupation. We copied your factories and then beat you at cars. I was going to write that no Japanese classroom ever taught us our civilization was a crime. That's not quite true. After 1945 a lot of teachers taught a very guilty version of the war, and Japanese conservatives have been fighting over those textbooks for decades. But the guilt stayed inside the history lesson. It never became a theory of everything, the way it did in your universities. Nobody told us our language was oppressive, or that the family was a structure of domination, or that being good at math was a form of privilege. Foreign residents are still about 3 percent of the population. When outsiders called us closed, most people shrugged and went back to work. For a long time I thought that shrug was a weakness, a kind of stubborn provincialism. I've changed my mind. I think it's most of what a border actually is: a people quietly sure it has something worth keeping. So American conservatives are right about Japan. Confidence in your own culture works. We are the proof. THE SECOND HALF: HOW WE ARE DISAPPEARING In 1949, about 2.7 million babies were born in Japan. In 2024 it was 686,061. The first time I saw that number I assumed I was reading the wrong column. I wasn't. Our fertility rate is 1.15. The population peaked around 2008 and has shrunk every year since. There are mountain villages now where the only new things are the vending machines. And this didn't happen under the left. One conservative party, the LDP, has governed Japan for almost all of the last seventy years. No woke revolution, no open borders, no defund the police. The right won the culture war here before it started. The country is shrinking anyway. What went wrong is economic, and it's very old. On the last trading day of 1989 the Nikkei closed at 38,915. Then the bubble burst. The banks were sitting on mountains of bad loans, and instead of letting failed companies fail, they kept lending them fresh money so nobody had to admit the losses. Economists later called them zombie firms; Caballero, Hoshi and Kashyap documented the whole thing in 2008. The Nikkei didn't get back to its 1989 high until February 2024. Thirty-four years. The zombies were kept alive at someone's expense, and it was the young. To hold the old structure up, the system protected the people already inside: lifetime jobs for the men hired before the crash, pay by seniority, pensions no politician dared touch because old people vote. Whoever arrived after 1990 got what was left. Today close to four in ten workers are non-regular, on short contracts or part-time or sent in by agencies, and men in those jobs marry far less often than men with permanent ones. Nobody plans a family on a contract that ends in March. Real wages are still lower than in 1996. Government debt is well over 200 percent of GDP, the highest in the developed world. When the government finally admitted the birth crisis, it did what governments do and announced a program: about 3.6 trillion yen a year for children. Births kept falling. Have you ever seen a bonsai up close? You take a tree that wants to grow thirty meters tall, and every year you cut back its roots and wire its branches so it keeps exactly the same shape. Some live for centuries. They're beautiful. They never get any bigger. That's what conservatism becomes when it only preserves and never builds. We protected everything, including the things that should have been allowed to die. In 2022 Elon wrote that unless something changes, Japan will eventually cease to exist. A lot of people here called it rude. I was annoyed too, for about a day. Then I looked at the census again. WHAT AMERICA SHOULD TAKE FROM THIS Japan shows you can keep your culture without apologizing for it. Don't let anyone tell you that pride in your country is the problem. Japan also shows that a nation can get culture right and still lose, if it protects its old companies, its old voters and its old arrangements against its own young people. It dies politely, with clean streets and trains on time. You still have what we lost: a system that lets things fail and lets new things be born. Bankruptcy, startups, people who move across the country for a better job. Elon is a product of that system. Every bailout, every subsidy for a company that should have died, every rule that protects the insider against the newcomer moves you a little closer to us. If you know someone who says "America should just be more like Japan," send them this. Both halves. A nation isn't saved by preserving its past. It's saved by having someone to hand it to.

This is the scandal that just keeps giving. It has emerged that national security adviser Jonathan Powell, who sits at the centre of Britain’s most sensitive intelligence and diplomatic secrets, and who happens to be married to a Gaza fanatic who has defended Hamas, was not vetted by security before he was handed the job. The source is Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer’s former chief of staff, in evidence to Parliament about Peter Mandelson that came to light this week. “We made a political appointment for National Security Adviser, in Jonathan Powell,” he remarked, offhand. “As far as I remember, we appointed him and then we began the DV.” DV stands for developed vetting, the highest routine level of security clearance. Any clearance Powell held from his days as Tony Blair’s chief of staff would have lapsed long ago; the rules require a review after seven years, and he left Downing Street in 2007. In other words, the government put a man in charge of national security first and determined that he wasn’t a security risk afterwards, just as it did with Peter Mandelson (and look how that turned out). This is more than a procedural lapse. It is a window into how this government works: a combination of cronyism and complacency which, step by step, has allowed ideological zealotry to seep into the heart of our foreign policy. And when you look at what the vetting officers would have found had they been allowed to do their job first, it becomes clear why this matters so much... New post. Link in first reply

Read all of this. It is more important than you think. Wayne Dixon is a councillor in Leeds. He doesn't get involved in foreign policy issues. No standing with Ukraine or Palestine or Israel or wherever. He doesn't even get involved much in national issues. He just focusses, laser like, on doing small things that make the lives of his local constituents better. Cleaning up footpaths covered in wet leaves. Harassing the local authorities until they fix potholes. Cleaning up graffiti. Trimming hedges so they look neat and tidy. Liaising with the police to deal with antisocial behaviour. Ensuing that the local schools have enough places for every local who wants to send their kids there. Getting bus stops put in the right place when roads are re-laid or new roads are built. Making sure that green spaces where kids play football are not flogged off. Ensuring that important community groups and support networks are helped as much as they can be. It is hyper local politics. It is the work that only somebody with high energy and who knows the local area can do. If we had 20,000 Wayne Dixons, the cumulative transformation in the entire country would be shocking over ten years. Any sports fan knows that marginal gains have huge cumulative effects when achieved consistently over a period of time (see the Chicago Bulls and Team Sky). Same with countries. 150,000 little, easy, cheap things over 10 years and you have almost a new country. This is achievable right now, with no changes in legislation or 'new elite'. More politics should be about exactly this: putting right the 20 streets closest to where you live and making the lives of people who live there better. Remember: there are black and white pictures of a young Lee Kwan Yew sweeping the streets of Singapore. That's where he started his politics. Of course we need to get the big things right -- and Britain is facing at least three existential problems that only central government can address. Yet simultaneously, we also need this.

Wayne is one of the few local councillors I’ve ever seen take so much interest in taking care of his local community. The conservative left cares about local British communities and those who live within them.

🚨 NEW: Andy Burnham has announced changes to car parking fines - Drivers will have a 5-minute grace period to decide whether to park and 10 minutes to leave after a parking session ends - A £20 maximum charge on appeal for minor mistakes, such as entering the wrong number plate or not displaying a permit - Charges will also be cancelled on appeal for breakdowns, medical emergencies or broken ticket machines - The £100 cap on charges will remain - The rules will come into force as soon as possible and operators that break them will lose access to DVLA data

I wonder if one downstream effect of the October 17 unrest will be more Indian immigration on the continent. Poland and Hungary's EU-approved leaders have both cited France as a warning, but the pressure for cheap labour remains tvpworld.com/95996032/hungar…

Speed cameras have been put on notice. 😉

Vance to Microsoft: you laid off 6,000 Americans and took 6,300 H-1Bs. Your green card pipeline is suspended.

On the conference speeches of late Soviet Britain: unherd.com/2026/10/who-is-ke…