I am on my way to Dublin and spending a day there before heading up to Belfast for three days. Any suggestions for Dublin solo-traveller-trips for someone who has been before, Bluesky? (Belfast evening suggestions also welcome!)

The problem is (unlike many areas where I actually would like to see a greater role for empowered local government) that without some mix of a) more central/regional compulsion and b) more scope for the market to decide, every council will decide the best new homes are those built elsewhere.

I always think much of this is down to how the British state won acceptance on quite different, often mutually incompatible, understandings of its nature. Part of our problem now is that different groups of Britons hear each other’s versions far more often and haven’t found ways to square them.

My most terrifying moment on Twitter was accidentally scooping the EU’s near-use of the Northern Ireland Protocol’s notionally last-ditch unilateral safeguard mechanism over vaccines. I assumed everyone of importance would be way ahead of me. In fact, my tweet kickstarted an international incident.

I always thought this was a particularly unhelpful conflation during Covid. Any broadly liberal person should have been a lockdown sceptic in the strict sense. Unfortunately, 'lockdown sceptic' generally came to mean 'implacably anti-lockdown in any and all circumstances'.

I think this is partly (by no means entirely) down to over-prioritising our constituency tradition. We place so much weight on MPs' roles as quasi-social workers and local champions that we actively make it difficult for them to carry out their legislative role as fully as I'd like.

10 years ago, I was filled with dread about what voters in Scotland might choose. The immediate fear is less today, but as a half-Scottish, half-English British citizen, I worry my side of the national question is equating reduced salience with reduced support and failing to fix the foundations.

Without making any comment on the contents of a book I haven’t read, someone really does need to just sit graphic designers down and clarify what the UK is and is not. I feel confident in assuming that Robert and Kishan’s recommendations do not include restoring the Union of 1801 across all Ireland.

I suspect one of the most important safeguards in liberal democracies is that the median elected representative is usually more conscious of the dangers of wielding state power too freely than the median voter - which says more about the voters than the elected representatives, but still matters.

Moderately optimistic take on matters EU-UK: it’s actually not such a bad thing that there are asks on both sides where the opposite numbers are less keen, because it means both sides have things they could get out of a negotiation, and fretting on this point is overblown. 1/

My partner and I have just crossed the border from Estonia into Latvia by coach. One bit of ex-border infrastructure still seems to have a café; another is gently mouldering. I know most Britons won’t agree, but I will never quite get over the idea that crossing a border freely is a wonderful thing.

Hello from Tallinn! Including beautiful buildings, modernist stained glass and a superb danse macabre.

As a general observation: today is the new government’s 50th day in office. That’s not very long, in stark contrast with their in-tray, and I do think they deserve more time and patience than a lot of social media is affording them.

This is one of those things which sounds bad, but really isn't. Because of the way Housing Benefit (uncapped, unlike for private rent) and councils' Housing Revenue Accounts interact, this mainly channels money from the Treasury to social landlords, which you need if you want more social housing.

I have never forgot the time, several years and several jobs ago, when a manager emailed me with the immortal ‘Don’t be such a pendant.’ (Of course I replied to correct said manager. You can’t reasonably be expected to neglect every inadvertent bait which comes your way.)

I think it’s a pity that quite a few people on the left have dunked on this. As a lifelong electoral reformer, I’m very well aware that a wider support base on the right would help the cause considerably in the long run. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/07...

It was never my view anyway, but this is a good example of why arguments about the ideological merits of a smaller state are essentially pointless. Demographic, geopolitical and electoral reality mean the state is likely to grow under governments of all types, and the question is what we prioritise.

Hello, all! I am giving this a try as a new platform. As on, erm, other platforms: I’m a liberal-minded social democrat with interests in UK and wider politics/policy, (reformist) constitutional geekery and history, among other things. That’ll do for a start.