James Dickson
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jamesdkiwi.bsky.social
James Dickson
@jamesdkiwi.bsky.social
970 followers 6.1K following 190 posts
Oxford, UK
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Reposted by James Dickson
harrywallop.co.uk
Great culture can save lives. Literally.

Amazing letter in today’s @thetimes.com about Tom Stoppard
December 2, 2025 at 8:48 AM
Reposted by James Dickson
tpgroberts.bsky.social
Important to remember that the British public is actively being misinformed on this issue.
sundersays.bsky.social Sunder Katwala (sundersays) @sundersays.bsky.social · 5d
New net migration figures at 930am.

Net migration fell half a million to 344,000 in 2024 from 848k in 2023

56% of people think it went up last year
17% think stayed the same
14% think it went down

2025 figure to be lower again
16% expect that
38% think it will be up
31% about the same
November 27, 2025 at 10:25 AM
Reposted by James Dickson
jdportes.bsky.social
Today's migration stats illustrate the migration doom loop in action...

(from my presentation at the IMF last week)
November 27, 2025 at 11:02 AM
Reposted by James Dickson
nisreenalwan.bsky.social
Good morning, while everyone is waiting for the budget to be announced it’s a good time to say that immigration is a source of prosperity for the UK and painting Britain as a hostile state is sabotaging the country. Thanks!
November 26, 2025 at 7:44 AM
Reposted by James Dickson
helenebismarck.bsky.social
This is so important. People who study international relations love to fight over whether interests or values define relationships. It is both. An interest is something you define. And your values come into the equation. It is not either or.
anandmenon.bsky.social Anand Menon @anandmenon.bsky.social · 7d
What Trump has made me realise is how much the post-Cold War relationship hinged on shared values rather than shared interests. Trump is illustrating how, whether on Ukraine and Gaza, our interests diverge and, absent those values, there's not much holding us together.
November 25, 2025 at 9:38 AM
Reposted by James Dickson
davidrvetter.bsky.social
Still reeling from the Stanford report on Brexit. Reduced GDP by up to 8% and investment by as much as 18%. The UK Treasury would have £40 billion more each year if Britain had remained in the EU. Devastating self-immolation.
The Economic Impact of Brexit
Other
siepr.stanford.edu
November 24, 2025 at 11:02 AM
Reposted by James Dickson
johnspringford.bsky.social
New essay out today by me and @acjsissons.bsky.social - ‘Getting Britain out of the hole: a plan for the economy’. You can read the whole thing here getting-out-of-the-hole.uk

A chart mega-thread follows 🧵
Getting Britain out of the hole
A plan for the UK economy
getting-out-of-the-hole.uk
November 17, 2025 at 8:00 AM
Reposted by James Dickson
tpgroberts.bsky.social
I do think it's worth addressing that the intellectual lodestar of this government is a gibbering idiot.
danielsohege.bsky.social Dan Sohege @danielsohege.bsky.social · 8d
There are some truly unhinged bits in the piece about Glasman, as to be expected when dealing with Glasman, but seriously what the actual? That's...one hell of a conflation of terminology.
Even the term “progressive” makes Lord Glasman shudder. His mother died of progressive supranuclear palsy. “Every word of that condition is terrible. She lost all her bodily functions, yet her brain remained intact, leaving her a mute witness to her own demise. It took six years to kill her, and to cure me of any fantasy that ‘progressive’ is desirable.”
November 23, 2025 at 4:30 PM
Reposted by James Dickson
aphclarkson.bsky.social
Starmer and Reeves wave white flags on tough decisions yet still oversee the collapse of the Labour vote as frustrated voters on the Left go to Greens, Centre to Plaid, LibDems or SNP and the Right to Reform that will lead their own MPs to replace them sooner rather than later

Futile cowardice
November 14, 2025 at 8:42 AM
Reposted by James Dickson
oldenoughtosay.com
I’m sorry I just found out that in 1379, as in, 650 years ago, a baby girl was born in Yorkshire and named Diot Coke

history is a fucking joke lmao
November 13, 2025 at 10:50 PM
Reposted by James Dickson
thomasnhale.bsky.social
The dominant narrative is that the world is rolling back climate policy. But what does the data say?

The latest Oxford Climate Policy Monitor Annual Review from the Oxford Climate Policy Hub tells three key stories.
bsg.ox.ac.uk/news/climate...
November 10, 2025 at 11:17 AM
Reposted by James Dickson
janrosenow.bsky.social
Good news: more than 50% of the world’s economies have seen carbon emissions from fossil fuel power generation peaking. And with the speed of change in the electricity sector many more will join this growing list in coming years.
November 11, 2025 at 7:18 AM
Reposted by James Dickson
templeofhate.com
Insightful article. Here's a gift link so that people can actually read it. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

A subscription to @theatlantic.com is a good thing.
What Climate Change Will Do to America by Mid-Century
Many places may become uninhabitable. Many people may be on their own.
www.theatlantic.com
November 10, 2025 at 9:09 PM
Reposted by James Dickson
davidheniguk.bsky.social
Headline from a serious and long working paper on the economic impact of Brexit. Possible that this has been feeding into OBR and HMT discussions?
November 10, 2025 at 9:33 AM
Reposted by James Dickson
aphclarkson.bsky.social
For me this flat caricature of whole segments of the populatuon that in reality are socially and ideologically heterogenous is infuriating.

A reproduction of class prejudice cloaked in claims of fighting it.
November 8, 2025 at 10:45 AM
Reposted by James Dickson
eaterofsun.bsky.social
🧵In @economist.com this week there's a "special report" on China, energy and climate. It seeks to make clear the world changing nature of China's ability to manufacture renewable-energy capacity. As the associated leader says:
www.economist.com/leaders/2025...
Text of clipping from Economist leader: In the context of the cold war, the distinctive measure of a “superpower” was the combination of a continental span and a world-threatening nuclear arsenal. The coming-together of China’s enormous manufacturing capacity and its ravenous appetite for copious, cheap, domestically produced electricity deserves to be seen in a similar world-changing light. They have made China a new type of superpower: one which deploys clean electricity on a planetary scale.
November 7, 2025 at 2:00 PM
Reposted by James Dickson
sandertordoir.bsky.social
A fun chart. AI as a general purpose tech. Is this time different or not? And if so will it lead to walhalla or human extinction? Take your pick.
November 7, 2025 at 12:05 PM
Reposted by James Dickson
okwonga.bsky.social
Still one of the bleakest quotes I have ever read, from one of George W Bush’s senior advisers.
The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'.
November 4, 2025 at 4:35 PM
Reposted by James Dickson
jreland.bsky.social
Yesterday Nigel Farage argued that the UK has failed to grasp Brexit opportunities to deregulate, which his 'pro-business' government would deliver.

I've got a piece in the Independent arguing why that is a misreading both of Brexit history and economics.

www.independent.co.uk/voices/brexi...
The political logic is clear: Farage is saying that the problem is not Brexit, but the politicians who have failed to properly implement it. If only the UK had pushed harder to rip up EU red tape, we would not be in the mess we’re in. But his economic and regulatory logic is fundamentally flawed. A close study of recent Brexit history (we happen to have produced one) shows that Conservative governments did, in fact, aspire to deregulate the UK economy. That they failed was due not to a lack of political will, but to reality – and the dawning realisation of the economic damage it would do. It is the very “business people” Farage claims to speak for who pushed hardest against the “Brexit opportunities” agenda. Farage promises to “reduce the size of the bloated state”, but the task of identifying legislation to reform, and then designing and implementing the new rules, would be a major administrative undertaking for Whitehall. The UK civil service has doubled in size since Brexit, and a key reason for this is that Whitehall has had to take on jobs that were previously left to EU regulators. The more the UK seeks to do things differently to the EU, the more British bureaucrats we will need to do the heavy lifting. If Mr Farage’s real priority is to cut the state to save cash, there is one obvious thing to do – join the EU single market.
November 4, 2025 at 9:38 AM
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nickkapur.bsky.social
Japan's "Mundane Halloween" costume contest is back!

Each year website DailyPortalZ holds a contest where people dress up as something super duper ordinary.

Here's a thread of some of my favorites from the 2025 contest!

#MundaneHalloween
November 2, 2025 at 9:15 AM
Reposted by James Dickson
annaclarke.bsky.social
And is something the current Government could do as a simple rebranding exercise, so that people understand what is being talked about.
September 22, 2025 at 3:12 PM
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chrisbrooke.bsky.social
Stephen Bush: "The Conservatives propose to deport about 5 per cent of the UK’s legal population..."
Tory deportation plan would upend Britain
Proposing such a radical bill with little public support is a gift to Nigel Farage
www.ft.com
October 23, 2025 at 10:01 AM
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davidheniguk.bsky.social
Yay. Priceless. The right column at the right time. And a gleefully English two fingers to the haters.
October 25, 2025 at 7:38 AM
Reposted by James Dickson
jsphctrl.ft.com
On the one hand this *is* a lot like Hungary or Turkey. On the other, it's also a lot like what it was like to cover South Africa in the throes of state capture around 2016, where many were very reluctant to call out Zuma on the record. Until suddenly they weren't. www.ft.com/content/1377...
What has changed is simple: people are scared of crossing Trump this time. In researching this piece, I interviewed dozens of figures, including lawmakers, private sector executives, retired senior military figures and intelligence chiefs, current and former Trump officials, Washington lawyers and foreign government officials. Such is the fear of jail, bankruptcy or professional reprisal, that most of these people insisted on anonymity. This was in spite of the fact that many of the same people also wanted to emphasise that Trump would only be restrained by powerful voices opposing him publicly. At times, it has felt like trying to report on politics in Turkey or Hungary.
October 24, 2025 at 12:20 PM
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sundersays.bsky.social
The draft legislation is crackers. It would fail immediately if we stayed in the ECHR but it disappears the human rights act. if passed after that it would involve mandatory loss of ILR for up to 400,000 people + refusal of 2-3 million others, though without no credible means to identify or remove
jdportes.bsky.social Jonathan Portes @jdportes.bsky.social · Oct 21
Here Lam explicitly sets out her proposal - which is official Conservative Party policy - to deport long-standing legal permanent residents who have *ever* claimed any benefit, including the state pension or child benefit (even if the child is British), or who earn less than £39K.
October 22, 2025 at 5:17 AM