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Yeah, Chris, the French knew it was you, an entirely obscure shadow minister, and could hear what you were saying. This was so alarming to them, they felt compelled to risk a major international incident by essentially threatening to kill you. God, these pathetic people are so totally unserious.

Exactly. The flow into employment is small compared to the stock. There are millions of adults in and out of employment with very poor access to training and retraining opportunities, and the cuts in provision over the last decade have been very large

True, and I'd add that many economically struggling places are stuck in a bad equilibrium, where employers are content to staff their low productivity businesses with unskilled people, while people are (rationally) unwilling to invest in acquiring skills in the absence of good job opportunities...

If this had been policy in the 70s (as it partly was), towns would have produced lots of mining engineers & metallurgists just before pits & steelworks closed. As the yanks say, you should skate to where the puck's going, not to where it is. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Well at least the focus on vocational education will distract the talk radio shows from talking about immigrants for a few weeks. Let’s call that a win.

Exactly. The flow into employment is small compared to the stock. There are millions of adults in and out of employment with very poor access to training and retraining opportunities, and the cuts in provision over the last decade have been very large

It's a shame that Reform's Robert Jenrick was not questioned on exactly this point in today's BBC Today interview by Jonny Diamond (not that ZP's post-sharing is defensible).

"Free Lucy Connolly" and "jail Zack Polanski" are not remotely intellectually consistent as positions. Anyone who's said both – hi Zia! – can be dismissed as an insincere grifter. And that's even before you factor that Connolly's post was significantly worse *and* made during a time of riots.

50 years of "fundamental shakeups" (or calls for shakeups) of English technical and vocational education (AI generated, mind.)

The answer is: some. In truth, there’s always a trade off between youth unemployment & the social mobility of academic routes. It may be that labour market change wobbles the balance. It may be that we think youth unemployment is so bad it’s worth the trade off. But this IS the trade-off.

One of the things I find odd about UK skills and jobs policies over the last 10 years is the idea that - for young people - place is destiny. It's like we've taken the Brexit memo and double stamped it into meaning you need to stay put to be a success. The geographical footprint of the UK is *tiny*

This was (and is) a key equity and access issue with any qualification that requires sector-based work-experience or work-placements.

And good luck finding businesses to offer meaningful work experience to hundreds of thousands of 14 and 15 year olds. As ever a failure to acknowledge that our big challenge with vocational ed is our labour market.

Just watched the Burnham interview on Panorama. He handles it well, as you'd expect, & is good on welfare. But the problem is that Kuenssberg just isn't a very good interviewer. The questions are designed to trap, not to inform, so you don't really learn anything (except that he's better at this)

👏👏👏 I've come round to compulsory voting, if done on the basis Nick sets out here. Partly because it will help tackle democratic decay, but also because we need to push back at the idea that politics is basically shopping - where you just get to demand what you want. Citizenship involves duties.

Please support this www.change.org/p/save-jodre... because of this www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... Jodrell Bank has lost its finding and is facing closure. #savejodrellbank

the temu app will be studied for generations. i opened the app. here’s my unedited, nearly two-minute launch sequence. i was just searching for a bookshelf

The closure of the iconic Jodrell Bank Observatory would be a tragedy for UK science that undermines the mission to be a science superpower, says Prospect. Read more ⬇️ prospect.org.uk/news/closure...

Now is a good reminder that machine learning is a rebranding of statistical learning. Reinforcement learning is something I first came across in control theory. Many ML formulations are from information theory, a much more theoretically grounded discipline that's been around for decades.

A peerless and well-timed summary by @danneidle.bsky.social: taxpolicy.org.uk/2026/07/27/s...