Profile avatar
stephenkb.bsky.social
Associate editor and columnist @financialtimes.com. Post too often about culture, public policy, management, politics, nerd stuff, Arsenal, wosoc. Try my UK politics newsletter for free here: www.ft.com/tryinsidepolitics
42,245 posts 69,561 followers 4,023 following
Regular Contributor
Active Commenter
Posts 15 Comments 35

FT Weekend, the Saturday edition of the Financial Times, is now on Bluesky. Follow us for the best of our journalism, from Life & Arts, HTSI magazine and House & Home to FT Weekend Magazine, FT Money and FT Globetrotter's city guides bsky.app/profile/ftwe...

submitted 9 hours ago • 3 comments

The Swiss are *very serious* about #CrossChannelRail trains to London, and this is the latest evidence of it www.watson.ch/schweiz/inte... There is space in Basel SBB and Zürich HB for terminals, Genève is harder, and rolling stock should be ordered next year

submitted 12 hours ago • 15 comments

S&M Remainerism missing the point as per. UK won’t align with US on phytosanitary standards. Indeed in general UK won’t disalign with the EU, which actually deepens the cost of Brexit, like a divorce where you refuse to sign up to Tinder afterwards.

submitted 7 hours ago • 5 comments

Love having such a thoughtful, politically heterodox readership on my newsletter. Only downside is often by noon I think “actually maybe today’s note IS wrong”:

submitted 8 hours ago • 1 comment

Intermittently blows my mind that for the past eight years, the UK basically had a government whose revealed preference for services was “public provision: bad. Private provision and co-payment: also bad”.

submitted 8 hours ago • 4 comments

Relatedly, I am a massive truther on the “they did the tariffs by a dumb algorithm!” - just don’t think it’s true, think history teaches us much more likely that the dumb algorithm is working backwards from a handful of strange preferences from the leader.

submitted 9 hours ago • 6 comments

Neither of these posts are right. The government (rightly, it only raises £800mn, much more important to get relief for JLR) was willing to put the digital services tax up for grabs. They just didn’t need to (yet). Not a comms issue, not the Guardian “hating Labour”.

submitted 9 hours ago • 4 comments

👇 Deeply frustrating that this government and the last understood that the state should have a view on whether another state should buy the Telegraph but, eh, people getting pulled into insane bubbles online, not our department.

submitted 9 hours ago • 6 comments

Abstract Colour Harmony in Squares with Vermillion Accents https://www.wikiart.org/en/paul-klee/abstract-colour-harmony-in-squares-with-vermillion-accents-1924

submitted 11 hours ago • 0 comments

Early exit polls suggest the new pope did particularly well with male voters aged 45-79.

submitted 1 day ago • 217 comments

Just a sign of a complete charlatan to talk about the last few years’ figures as a new normal. We had a pandemic, then a former British colony was the target of brutal repression, then a European ally was invaded! Why would you think that was normal?

submitted 1 day ago • 8 comments

Young man, there's no need to feel down, I said Young man, pick yourself off the ground, I said Young man, 'cause you're in a new town There's no need to be unhappy It's fun to shout at the

submitted 1 day ago • 17 comments

A theory: Kemi Badenoch likes attacking Labour because it’s the one way she gets to feel like a relevant politician. Labour like attacking her because she’s the one party leader in the UK they can reliably beat. The most “anti-woke” politician has turned PMQs into a safe space.

submitted 1 day ago • 4 comments

Morbidly fascinated to learn which one of Spurs or United I hate more when one scores in the final.

submitted 1 day ago • 8 comments

He pulls an encyclical? You pull a papal bull. He sends one of yours to vespers? You send one of his to compline! That's the Chicago way

submitted 1 day ago • 15 comments